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Review by Scytales February 27, 2013 (5 of 6 found this review helpful)
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To my delight, this disk has been the most pleasant surprise I had for a long time.
While certainly not as genius as others like Karajan or Reiner's, Albrecht's performance of each of the principal symphonic poems does have merits of its own. I had the feeling that the conductor stays away from the programmatic content of the materials to focus on the aesthetic. The end result is a mood of grace and delicacy throughout the entire disc. I used to regularly go to the concerts of the Orchestre Philharmonique de Strasbourg when I lived in the European capital and I must say I had never heard this orchestra at such a high level of technical achievement, especially in the overall discipline of the ensemble. The phrasing and articulation of the sections of woodwinds and strings deserved to be mentioned, as their poetic vibrato. The work Träumerei am Kamin make a fine addition to lead titles, as the aforementioned qualities of both the performance and the musicians perfectly fit the elegiac tone of this oeuvre.
Sonic-wise perfect.
I feel myself familiar with the overall balance I remember of the Auditorium Erasme of the Palais de la Musique et de Congrès, mainly intended for philharmonic music when it was built in 1974 under the direction of famed Lothar Cremer, who also designed the acoustic of the main auditorium of the Berlin Philharmonic among other important works. While some previous reviewers may dislike the result, the sound as captured by the Pentatone engineers is as vivid and lifelike as you would heard it from the best places in the Erasme hall. The acoustic environment in the hall stresses a precisely controlled reverberation which gives a sort of global, melted sound (the sort of thing appraised under the word sfumato when it comes to the Karajan sound, for example ; not to say this disk has a Karajan sound, but I wrote that in order to help you get the idea). So, who cares the air-conditioning ? This is live music captured with very high accuracy without improper editing, exactly what SA-CD is intended for, isn't it ?
A disc which do justice to the music, the orchestra and the venue where they performed.
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