Tchaikovsky: Symphony No. 4 & Francesca da Rimini

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Nelsons inspires great enthusiasm in his audience. However, his cool and disciplined style of music-making rather mutes the works on this disc which run the emotional gamut from despair to exhilaration...the... — BBC Music Magazine, April 2012, 3 out of 5 stars More…

Release Date: 3rd Oct 2011
Catalogue No: C860111
Label: Orfeo
Length: 63 minutes

Usually despatched in 3 - 4 working days

Tchaikovsky: Francesca da Rimini, Op. 32

Work length22:04

Album only

City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra
Andris Nelsons

Tchaikovsky: Symphony No. 4 in F minor, Op. 36

Work length41:25

$9.00

$11.65

City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra
Andris Nelsons

I. Andante sostenuto - Moderato con anima (Live)

Track length17:26

$4.00

$5.15

II. Andantino in modo di canzona

Track length9:06

$2.00

$2.60

III. Scherzo. Pizzicato ostinato (Live)

Track length5:26

$1.00

$1.30

IV. Finale. Allegro con fuoco (Live)

Track length9:27

$2.00

$2.60

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“Andris Nelsons, the CBSO and Tchaikovsky have become synonymous, not least on disc, and the latest in their series of recordings will be eagerly awaited after this week’s performances set down for the Orfeo label.

The tone-poem Francesca da Rimini, sometimes seen as a poor relation to the more obvious story-line of Romeo and Juliet, was delivered with searing engagement under Nelsons. He unleashed a whirlwind circle of Dante’s hell, reassembling it at the end, but not before the Francesca’s wonderful narrative (Joanna Patton rising triumphantly to the solo clarinet’s challenges), crowned by fluttering flutes decorating the cellos’ final declaration of doomed, forbidden love. This was an urgent, gripping reading, and so was Nelsons’ account of Tchaikovsky’s tremendous Fourth Symphony, brilliantly responsive to its structure, ebbing and flowing in emotional intensity, and a tribute all the time to the immense trust and love between conductor and orchestra. So many instrumental delights (hopefully some, such as skirling woodwind scarcely heard at the heart of the first movement will undoubtedly be picked up the recording): apocalyptic brass, bassoon and oboe solos to get under the skin, and a massed string pizzicato sounding like one giant balalaika.” Christopher Morley, Birmingham Post 4th June 2011

Reviews

April 2012

Nelsons inspires great enthusiasm in his audience. However, his cool and disciplined style of music-making rather mutes the works on this disc which run the emotional gamut from despair to exhilaration...the quality of the playing is superlative...Live, the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra plays under Nelsons's direction with precision and polish.

March 2012

It's really hard to fault any of Nelsons's choices here. Like Tchaikovsky, he is a classicist at heart: nothing is overcooked, nothing distorted; positively no histrionics. There is an integrity and inevitability about the phrasing and expressivity is always at the behest of good taste..The big moments are exciting but still a notch short of thrilling

January 2012

a reading [of the Symphony] which exhibits all of the re-creative freshness and the urgency that has marked out his music-making with [the CBSO] thus far...[Francesca] ranks with Leopold Stokowski's and Charles Munch's as among the most revealing accounts of what is arguably the finest of Tchaikovsky's non-symphonic orchestral works.

18th December 2013

[Francesca is] splendidly done here. In the opening pages...Nelsons and his orchestra whip up a graphically intense tempest...This is a thrilling performance. The symphony receives a pretty impressive reading also...anyone wanting a good modern version of any of these scores can invest with confidence.

13th November 2011

These thrillingly temperamental accounts of much-recorded music gain from the frisson of live performance. In Francesca, the young conductor revels in the Wagnerian chromaticism, evidently inspired by Tristan und Isolde; and in the symphony, the orchestra join him in an emotional rollercoaster ride, with fabulous work from the solo clarinet in the opening movement and a haunting bassoon in the andantino.

9th February 2012

Rather than unleashing pure frenzy from the outset, he builds gradually into the depiction of Dante's Inferno, and the tension he achieves by the end is little short of staggering. His performance of the Fourth, however, is altogether more reflective. This is not so much a battle with fate, as an expression of nostalgia on the part of one already crushed by it

18th November 2011

Nelson avoids [hysteria] while paying full tribute to the music’s lush Romanticism. At the other end of the scale, the pizzicato third movement of the symphony is played with a sweet simplicity.

3rd December 2011

Stunningly well played and conducted with manic fervour, this performance of Tchaikovsky’s symphonic fantasy Francesca da Rimini confirms that the alliance between Andris Nelsons and the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra is made in heaven...By contrast, Tchaikovsky’s Fourth Symphony is emotionally a little bland, though the performance is never less than clean and cogent.

The Independent on Sunday 27th November 2011

Under Andris Nelsons, the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra gives a live performance of tremendous vitality and discipline, the colours deep and lucid, the music intensely felt, the tempi bold. Anguish continues in the Fourth Symphony. Superlative playing under a superlative conductor.

Tchaikovsky: Symphony No. 4 & Francesca da Rimini

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