Even listeners who rightly treasured their LPs of Tippett's first three symphonies by Colin Davis and the London Symphony had to be grateful when Richard Hickox and the Bournemouth Symphony recorded all four of Tippett's symphonies for CD. After all, not only are Tippett's symphonies arguably in the same class as Elgar and Vaughan Williams', but, incredibly, they had rarely been recorded by anyone after Davis. So even if listeners who found Davis' recordings virtually definitive, they were still curious to know what the ...
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Even listeners who rightly treasured their LPs of Tippett's first three symphonies by Colin Davis and the London Symphony had to be grateful when Richard Hickox and the Bournemouth Symphony recorded all four of Tippett's symphonies for CD. After all, not only are Tippett's symphonies arguably in the same class as Elgar and Vaughan Williams', but, incredibly, they had rarely been recorded by anyone after Davis. So even if listeners who found Davis' recordings virtually definitive, they were still curious to know what the works would sound like under a different conductor.As it turns out, under Hickox it sounds bigger, brawnier, and more symphonic. Where Davis was all about linear energy, Hickox is all about orchestral weight. So while his First and Second don't have the same tensile lyricism as Davis', they do have more weight and muscle, and while his Third doesn't have the same ecstatic radiance of Davis', it does have more contrast and drama. Since Davis and the LSO didn't record the Fourth, no...
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