A great installment to cap Boulez's Bartok cycle
Santa Fe Listener | Santa Fe, NM USA | 11/21/2008
(5 out of 5 stars)
"These are such sterling performances, full of vitality and inspiration, that Boulez's Brtok cycle could hzrdly come to a better conclusion. In all honesty, the three works gathered here are also-rans. I wouldn't have bothered under ordinry circumstances to own more than one recording of each. But when you have Gidon Kremer in the early Violin Cto. #1 and Yuri Bahsmet in the very late Viola Cto., bookending the composer's career, it's hard to resist. Both soloist perform up to their world-class reputation, and in the rather uninspiring violin work, Kremer's gorgeous legato playing saves the listener from boredom.
The Two-Piano Cto. could be called a masterpiece, in that it's an arrangement of one, but when Bartok took his Sonata for Two Pianos and Percussion and added orchestral parts, the additions were half-hearted. You keep wanting to hear the original without window dressing. In any event, the expanded version failed to be any more popular than the chamber one, and few conductors have picked it up even now. Boulez wisely keeps the piano and percussion parts so prominent that most of the time you could be hearing the original sonata.
The London Symphony's lead percussionists, backing up pianists Pierre-Laurent Aimard and Tamara Stefanovich, sound quite brilliant, and DG's engineers have caught them in knockout sound. This performance alone justifies the whole CD. The Berlin Phil. has less to do in the two string concrtos but is, as expected, impeccable."
Track Listings (8) - Disc #1