Brahms Serenade #2, Academic Festival Overture, Slatkin, con
Hobart A. Brown | Santa Cruz, CA | 01/01/2009
(5 out of 5 stars)
"Classical music reviews are necessarily subjective. I heard this recording
played on KBOQ recently and,liking it, went looking for it. I've been very appreciative of Brahms works for many decades. Since I've been influenced by Toscanini, I appreciate clarity, energy, and intelligent interpretation. Also, having been interested and involved in acoustics and sound reproduction for many years, I'm acutely sensitive to the effects acoustics can have on a recording's aesthetic values. But there, too, the evaluation of such parameters is subject to the listener's personal preferences. I like the sound of the St.Louis Symphony recordings. Typically, the "miking" is closer than with most and the hall is free from spurious and annoying resonances. Fortunately, for my taste, there is a minimal amount of reverberative clouding of the music. As is typical of Leonard Slatkin, he is aware of the value of each phrase as well as thematic continuities within the context of the music. He doesn't hesitate to make use of the rich content of the melodies, polyphonies, counterpoint, structure, and orchestral sonorities that Brahms so masterfully exploited. Slatkin isn't afraid to use subtle changes in tempi and use a judicious amount of portamento in his strings when the musical content makes it appropriate. Unfortunately, these instruments of expression have fallen into disuse in times of increasing cynicism. All this results in a recording that is, musically and technically, an exceptional one in which old "war horses" are heard anew. The microphones have been very strategically placed in accordance with what will best reveal the musical content. That means, for example, that a passage needing closeness to various instruments has it provided by microphonic and electrical balancing, whereas other passages in other movements, more declamatory, have different balances and perhaps more distant pickup. These are, of course, the result of decisions arrived at by the conductor and producer. This recording which was from BMG classics,and is now out of print, has been reissued by Arkiv Music. Having compared the two, I can say the new issue looks and sounds the same as the original. The CD has been professionally recorded and not on some ephemeral dye type of disc. Bart Brown... [...]"
Track Listings (16) - Disc #1