Very good Beethoven, exciting Scheherazade
Recorded live one day after C Minor's disk of Andris Nelsons conducting the Concertgebouw Orchestra in Shostakovich's Eighth Symphony (see my review) on 5 September 2011 at the Lucerne Festival, this production is another winner. Audio and video are flawless, the camera work is quite excellent, as we have come to expect from this label.
Andris Nelsons is a highly impressive young conductor, and the Concertgebouw musicians respond brilliantly and with enthusiasm to his (mostly smiling) directions. The generous program consists of the rarely heard Ruins of Athens overture, an intriguing late Beethoven piece, the "Emperor" piano concerto with Yefim Bronfman as a powerful and energetic soloist who also provides an encore, Chopin's Etude in F Major, Rimsky-Korsakov's tone poem Scheherazade and, finally, Dvorak's Slavonic Dance in A Major as an encore. Everything is superbly played. Bronfman's conception of the Fifth Piano Concerto is robust but not without subtlety: a joy to...
Exquisite Scheherazade, barnstorming "Emperor"!
We're almost half way through 2012, and this is my pick so far for "Disc of the Year". We have Andris Nelsons and the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra (RCO) at the top of their considerable form, an exquisite Rimsky-Korsakov's Scheherazade, a crackerjack Beethoven Emperor from Yefim Bronfman, and three good fillers, all recorded and directed in fabulous sound and video.
Scheherazade demands an orchestra of soloists, and the RCO is just the ticket. Listen to how the woodwind principals caress and cajole the themes out of their instruments in the second movement! Absolute magic! This is not to dismiss the efforts of the principal string and brass players, all of whom had me shaking my head and smiling.
This Scheherazade is taken a bit slower than average, but this allows Nelsons to coax the whole spectra of phrasing and sonority out of this great orchestra - surely one of the top three in the world. His enthusiasm is contagious, and the RCO obviously has tremendous...
WOW - Another Showpiece
I was very pleasantly surprised by the audio quality of this disc. I wanted to get up and cheer after Scheherazade and the Dvorak; the Beethoven 5th, not so much. I play this disc late at night (after the wife is asleep) so I can crank up the volume making my sizeable investment in playback equipment very worthwhile.
I believe this may be a 7.1 DTS-HD MA recording. At least the 7.1 indicator logo lit up on both of my Blu ray players.
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