The First Symphony makes a beguiling start with magical restraint, the wind phase properly articulated and the second theme allowed to billow in a way that suggests a fine-tuned Tchaikovsky interpreter … Heras-Casado makes you wonder at the incredible refinement of Tchaikovsky’s most daring symphonic fantasia before Manfred, from the 13 part strings and eerie modulations of Prospero’s seascape to the beauty of the love music

The work he does has its place and time...There is throughout the symphony a continence of rhetoric that may appeal to anyone not unshakably attached to Golovanov, Svetlanov and their kin...Heras-Casado has me wondering about a new wave of Tchaikovsky performance: shunning hysteria and crocodile tears, painting pictures, telling stories.

[there is]...tangible chemistry between the Spaniard and his New York-based Orchestra of St Luke’s. They explore two very different sides to Tchaikovsky on one disc: a lean, lithe performance of the First Symphony, Winter Dreams, and an excitingly baleful take on the not-very Shakespearean tone poem The Tempest

You can hear the New York ensemble’s roots as a chamber orchestra, lithe and responsive, the chill of those glittering strings warmed by the wind choir, and Heras Casado’s pacing is spot on for me, never trying to make too much of this wintry symphony. The land of desolation and mists’, the slow movement, is especially successful