Robert Schumann's four symphonies, so far divorced from the intimate worlds of his songs and piano pieces, were never terribly common items during the LP golden age. It was John Eliot Gardiner and his historical-instrument Orchestre Révolutionnaire et Romantique who opened these works up by slimming them down, so to speak, revealing inner parts with telling motivic details and offering a convincing 19th-century chamber orchestral approach. None of that for Christian Thielemann and the Staatskapelle Dresden, recorded live in ...
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Robert Schumann's four symphonies, so far divorced from the intimate worlds of his songs and piano pieces, were never terribly common items during the LP golden age. It was John Eliot Gardiner and his historical-instrument Orchestre Révolutionnaire et Romantique who opened these works up by slimming them down, so to speak, revealing inner parts with telling motivic details and offering a convincing 19th-century chamber orchestral approach. None of that for Christian Thielemann and the Staatskapelle Dresden, recorded live in Tokyo's Suntory Hall. The good news is that these are superior representations of the old approach. The Staatskapelle Dresden has one of Europe's undisputed top brass sections, and Thielemann puts them front and center here. Sample the first movement of the Symphony No. 1 in B flat major, Op. 38 ("Spring"), where the relaxed brass set a festive tone for the whole cycle. Suntory Hall was famously described by Herbert von Karajan as a jewel box of sound, and indeed it turns out...
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