For almost two years orchestras round the world have found ways to carry on making outstanding music despite the formidable ongoing challenges of #COVID19. This countdown of my twelve favourite symphony and orchestral records of the year salutes them all.
Follow my playlist for fresh takes on old favourites and a wealth of wonderful music I'd never heard before 2021. My survey continues until #NewYearsDay 2022 when I reveal my Record of the Year.
I'll let my mother, a Brahms symphony stan for 70 years, review this for me: "Wonderful! Exciting, plenty of oomph and the instruments are all so clear."
A landmark in the long-overdue Price revival sees her symphonies finally get the recording they deserve. My mother came in as I was playing it today and straight away asked "What's this? It's beautiful!"
The skyscraping summit of this cycle so far. Deryck Cooke's realization has made what was once unperformable miraculously whole, and Vänskä's vision focuses Mahler's modernity with breathtaking clarity.
A love scene pulsing with operatic passion, and when the hero retires from the world I want to weep and to join in the song all at once. The Burleske is a scintillating bonus.
A symphony that's also a countertenor song cycle? Just one of the gleefully eclectic, expressive and beautiful works on this debut disc of a composer who's my #DiscoveryOfTheYear.
This remarkable trilogy of musical rituals is a spellbinding birthday tribute to a modern great whose inspiring light shows no sign of dimming after 90 years.
A revelation. The ballet blends Dukas, Ravel and Bartók into a sexy, shimmering, intoxicating soundworld matched by exquisite @krhes arrangements of three chamber works. Stunning playing and sound.
The sun sets on the baroque and rises on a brave new world in Haydn's landmark symphonies. This series is an ever more essential oasis of wisdom and joy in today's worrying world.
Their national epic inspires magical music from four of Finland's sons. @lahtisymphony@DeltaSierra_1 are heroic storytellers in spellbinding sound. The beguiling beauty of Uuno Klami's Kalevala Suite outshines even Sibelius.
Vasily Petrenko's last record as @liverpoolphil Chief Conductor marks #Zemlinsky150 in sumptuous style. Their gripping performance restores the music Zemlinsky cut for the premiere, and the sparkling Schreker coupling is inspired.
My two "Wow! Where has this music been all my life?" moments of 2021 were the extraordinarily eclectic Cowell and the resplendently Romantic Loeffler with its ethereal Viola d'Amore. A magnificent record.
From #4's ferocious opening to the frozen wastes of #6's finale my #RecordOfTheYear unleashes the terrifying majesty of the composer's dark side in live performances of phenomenal power.
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1/ On Wednesday I went to a wonderful concert by @EnglishSymphony and @kennethwoods. What a thrill to hear real symphonies played live in a real hall with a real audience for the first time since March 2020. I spent the whole afternoon grinning from ear to ear behind my mask!
2/ We began with music by @emily_doolittle, a composer new to me. Woodwings is based on birdsong from Canada, the country of her birth. Cool, fresh and well-ordered in the first of its five short movements, it evolved into wild and free twilit fantasy by the last. Most effective.
3/ Originally for Wind Quintet, this was the first performance of Doolittle's own arrangement for 10 winds and bass made especially for @EnglishSymphony. An excellent curtain-raiser, the northern saw whet owl and friends certainly whetted my appetite. emilydoolittle.com
First things first: If you care about symphonies AT ALL and don't know Simpson 9 then stop what you're doing and buy this record RIGHT NOW. It will repay you many times over.
2/ "BUY?" I hear you cry, "But Symphs, can't you just post a Youtube link or something?"
No. The single 10-minute extract available online is in poor sound and doesn't begin to convey the cumulative experience this symphony's unbroken 50-minute span can deliver. Don't go there.
3/ You just googled it didn't you? Disappointing wasn't it?
1/ Why not recreate the legendary Akademie concert held #OnThisDay in 1808, by turning off your heating and listening to 4 hours of badly-played Beethoven in the freezing cold?
Here's (nearly) all the music heard that night.
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2/ The evening began with the premiere of the symphony that we now know as No. 6.
Mars, the Bringer of War
Venus, the Bringer of Peace
Mercury, the Winged Messenger
Jupiter, the Bringer of Jollity
Saturn, the Bringer of Old Age
Uranus, the Magician
Neptune, the Mystic
1/ "They seem to me to stand ... on the extreme boundary of all that has hitherto been attained by human art and imagination." - Robert Schumann on the quartets Opp. 127 & 130
2/ Beethoven's late quartets are now revered as five (or six) of the supreme masterpieces in all music. Some of the praise is heaped on them in purple prose that I'm too tactful to quote, but which I often find as hard to digest as early audiences found the music to hear.
3/ Many of #BeethovensContemporaries were puzzled or actively hostile. Louis Spohr called them "indecipherable, uncorrected horrors". Yet the quartets, and particularly Op. 127, sprang from the same musical soil that nurtured his greatest public triumph.
Sonata for Piano & Violin in G major, Op. 96 (1812)
1/ The last of Beethoven's 10 violin sonatas is usually considered to be the last work of his middle period.
2/ His last two sonatas, composed almost a decade apart, bookend Beethoven's Heroic Style. You can almost hear that style germinating in the Kreutzer's virtuosic display. The G major dissolves it away in a cloud of serene, ethereal lyricism.
3/ It took Beethoven several years to find his way fully onto the "New Path" that became his late style, but there are signposts towards it in the almost impressionistic inwardness of the earlier movements, and the spacious yet spirited variations that form the finale.