Youthful conductor Gustavo Dudamel has created a sensation with his critically acclaimed recordings of standard repertoire by Beethoven, Berlioz, and Mahler, and with his Simón Bolívar Youth Orchestra of Venezuela, he takes on one more warhorse, the Symphony No. 5 in E minor by Pyotr Il'yich Tchaikovsky, with impressive results. Not that there's ordinarily much justification for producing yet another recording of this overly recorded work, especially when so many legendary performances have been reissued and new ones seem ...
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Youthful conductor Gustavo Dudamel has created a sensation with his critically acclaimed recordings of standard repertoire by Beethoven, Berlioz, and Mahler, and with his Simón Bolívar Youth Orchestra of Venezuela, he takes on one more warhorse, the Symphony No. 5 in E minor by Pyotr Il'yich Tchaikovsky, with impressive results. Not that there's ordinarily much justification for producing yet another recording of this overly recorded work, especially when so many legendary performances have been reissued and new ones seem to appear on a monthly basis. Yet an exception to this complaint can be made in Dudamel's case because he obviously has something important to say in this 2008 performance that adds to our understanding of the symphony and doesn't just provide a novel twist to extremely familiar music. From the outset, Dudamel treats the score as if it were brand new and not covered in accretions of past performances: the rhythmic details and full orchestration of the Allegro stand out in high relief;...
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