Good food day today, with two excellent plaice for lunch and, for dinner, a plate of smoked salmon followed by (slightly too many) langoustines, perfectly cooked by me. To complete the gastronomy, I felt like a rich, orchestral diet and gravitated towards one of my favourite orchestral works:
Rachmaninov's second symphony. I have many versions of this work but always end up with:
Mikhail Pletnev conducting the Russian National Orchestral. It sounds: so
Russian, in this recording and I have always loved it, and the music. This is music in which one can wallow.
4 comments:
I love this piece too but somehow I don't think too much of Pletnev as a musician. A bit too straight for me.
Too little emotion for me. I have his old Tchaikovsky Sym 6 on Virgin - the March is way way too fast.
Two schools of thought on this, Lee. One -- to which I subscribe -- says there is so much emotion in a lot of the music by composers such as Tchaikovsky, Rachmaninov, Mahler, Elgar, etc that it is unnecessary and usually undesirable to over-load the cake with whipped-up cream. One can hear this in recordings of Rachmaninov or Elgar in their own music; the neuroses, stresses and emotions are there already in the music, and the performer should not try to add to them.
Harry, you really should try to find Golovanov doing this. The sound is atrocious, the liberties extreme -- but the sense of being ravished by every one of Rachmaninoff's hothouse slavic indulgences rings true.
Thanks for the recommendation, Don. I am always alert for superior performances of the Rachmaninov second symphony. The Golovanov is not currently in stock here, but I've put one on order.
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