GRAMOPHONE AWARDS SHORTLIST 2021

indeed. Fabrice Fitch (February 2021) Missa Pange lingua – selected comparison: Tallis Scholars, Phillips (3/87) (GIME) CDGIM009

Renaissance polyphony cries out for a great acoustic and though with modern technology a mediocre acoustic can be made to sound like the Sistine Chapel, few engineers would want to do that. Here a lovely acoustic works naturally and has been beautifully captured. It really puts you in the building (All Hallows, Gospel Oak, London) and the silence before the music starts and the die-away are so evocative. The acoustic here is relatively selfeffacing because so well handled, and one listens less to the space around the voices but rather to the voices themselves. In a quite delicate and elegant way, and without gimmicks, it opens out four, five or sometimes six voices, complementing Stile Antico’s own performance style. There’s no sense of something imposed on what Stile Antico would normally do, so you have the sense of them singing in the round without feeling artificially placed in the middle. If anything, you’re slightly above them and can hear them in a pleasingly democratic way.

Rachmaninov Symphony No 1, Op 13a. Symphonic Dances, Op 45b The Philadelphia Orchestra / Yannick Nézet-Séguin DG F 483 9839 (81’ • DDD) Recorded live at the Kimmel Center for the Performing Arts, Verizon Hall, Philadelphia, b September 2018; aJune 2019

There can be no underestimating the extraordinary legacy surrounding

Rachmaninov and Philadelphia. That he composed the Third Symphony and Symphonic Dances with the city’s great orchestra in mind is testament to how their sound intoxicated him. The string sound in particular played into not just the precision and opulence of his writing but more importantly its obsessiveness and inherent darkness. Among Rachmaninov cognoscenti and collectors alike, the Eugene Ormandy recordings of the two pieces featured here – the beginning and end of his fabled journey – have remained pretty unassailable.

But there’s a new kid (relatively speaking) in the driving seat of this orchestra and his ability to dig into that legacy while renewing its startling innovation makes for an exciting newness. Indeed, Yannick Nézet-

Séguin’s account of the troubled First Symphony is as surprising and as thrilling as any I have heard since that much-lauded Ormandy account. One starts to realise why Glazunov’s reputedly miserable first performance denied it any hope of early success. In the wrong hands the piece can sound fitful, its lyric musings in particular halting and half-formed. I am thinking especially of the second subject group in the first movement, which under NézetSéguin truly sounds like a creation of the moment – a bar-by-bar extemporisation born of great sadness. It’s a very particular kind of melancholy that Rachmaninov projects and in the flickering, sepia-tinted uncertainty of the slow movement – exquisitely realised here, with every solo woodwind telling a story of its own – you start to realise how radical this piece is striving to be.

The all-pervasive four-note motif prefacing every movement like a portent of tragedy stands out in sharp relief here and the rhythmic imperative of the performance (and fabulous incisiveness of the string-playing, often viola-led) papers over Rachmaninov’s obsessive dependency on fugal writing to move the narrative forwards. There’s a brighter triumphalism beckoning in the familiar fanfares that kick off the finale but always this weighty undertow dragging things down. Just listen to the impetuous sweep of the second subject, the shine on the violins belying the saturating darkness beneath.

The culmination of the First Symphony’s anxiety – immediately following that defining crash of the tamtam – comes with the huge climactic bridge into the coda where Nézet-Séguin really piles on a welter of brassy dissonance. Absolutely thrilling. All that remains is the obsessive repetition of the four-note motif and two horribly emphatic final chords that stop it in its tracks.

Rachmaninov’s final orchestral work – Symphonic Dances – looks and sounds so different on and off the page, and the operative word in Nézet-Séguin’s reading is ‘Dances’. The sprung rhythms, the impetus are again key – but beneath the surface sparkle and rhythmic buoyancy is a substratum of regret and despair. What lies beneath is a barely concealed chronicle of the composer’s trials and tribulations. The alto sax at the heart of the first dance – the 20th century’s instrument of choice for ‘the blues’ – reeks of homesickness but it’s the quotation from the First

58 GRAMOPHONE 58 GRAMOPHONE SHORTLIST 2021

Symphony in the coda, transfigured now to become something of a warm embrace, that really hits home: a wistful last laugh catching in the throat but luminous nonetheless.

Needless to say, the spectral enchantment of the central Waltz is ‘Philadelphia Central’ – where the orchestra lives and breathes. Somehow or other all the qualities of the Rachmaninov/Ormandy era have spirited their way back to create a kind of faded opulence. I absolutely love the way that in the final return of the waltz theme – beautifully managed in magical pianissimo by Nézet-Séguin and the orchestra – it can barely drag itself off the floor, so heavy is its burden.

Pursued by his demons in the finale, this rush to judgement, ride to the abyss, is predictably virtuoso. But it is the keening anxieties of the middle section that one remembers. That passage where bass clarinet draws us shyly into its confidence is especially bleak, like a glimpse into Rachmaninov’s very soul.

Nézet-Séguin opts for the prolonged resonance of the tam-tam at the very close – a direct parallel with that precoda moment in the First Symphony. Of course, you can do this effectively without an audience present – very hard otherwise to stifle the inevitable applause. But I still have my doubts that this is what Rachmaninov really wanted. For sure the notated value of the tamtam stroke overhangs the rest of the orchestra by a whisker – but pointedly he does not write laissez vibrer over the final tam-tam stroke as he does a couple of bars earlier. I have to say I prefer the brutality of an abrupt cut-off. Even so, an altogether stunning album. Edward Seckerson (February 2021)

A Spatial Audio release that doesn’t try too hard to show off the technology and offers some terrifically exciting insights into the works’ glorious orchestration. There’s a feeling that we’re getting just a slightly more ample sense of the acoustic of Verizon Hall, the orchestra’s home. In the Symphonic Dances, the timpani are distinct but slightly distant, without the crisp attack you often encounter, and perhaps that is part of the Philadelphia sound. The definition of the orchestra piano is pleasingly clean, and the roundedness of the saxophone solo is very well handled. A fairly exemplary demonstration of how Spatial Audio can open out the stereo picture, how it can give you a concert-hall perspective without making you feel you’ve been air-lifted into the middle of the orchestra.

gramophone.co.uk