COMPOSERS: Schoenberg/Strauss
LABELS: ASV Quicksilva
WORKS: Verklärte Nacht; Metamorphosen
PERFORMER: London Festival Orchestra/ Ross Pople
CATALOGUE NO: CD QS 6195 1990
This curiously contained performance of Transfigured Night (Pople’s orchestration is credited, though it’s close to the composer’s own) misses the sheer nervous excitement of Schoenberg’s febrile expressivity. The string tone is at best sinewy, at worst rough, and the recording highlights its lack of finesse. Strauss’s threnody for the destruction of German culture, too, sounds emotionally muted, though Pople proves more successful in charting the rises and falls in the work’s intensity. George Hall
Schoenberg/Strauss
This curiously contained performance of Transfigured Night (Pople’s orchestration is credited, though it’s close to the composer’s own) misses the sheer nervous excitement of Schoenberg’s febrile expressivity. The string tone is at best sinewy, at worst rough, and the recording highlights its lack of finesse. Strauss’s threnody for the destruction of German culture, too, sounds emotionally muted, though Pople proves more successful in charting the rises and falls in the work’s intensity. George Hall
Our rating
2
Published: January 20, 2012 at 2:37 pm