Vienna Philharmonic
igor.toronyilalic
Just as the most impeccably aristocratic families have the shabbiest homes, so the oldest and most prestigious orchestras frequently deliver the most scrappy performances. Trying too hard is so arriviste. King of this insouciant shabby chic are the Vienna Philharmonic. It's almost as if at some point the orchestra got bored of playing well. One hundred and sixty years at the top delivering the world's warmest, plushest, most sophisticated sound must get repetitive. That's not to say that we didn't get some glorious Viennese cream. We did. But we also got a deliberate untidiness that Read more ...
graham.rickson
Beethoven: The Nine Symphonies Vienna Philharmonic/Christian Thielemann (Sony)Another Beethoven symphony cycle, released hot on the heels of Chailly’s Leipzig set. That Decca box earned rapturous praise. I’m not sure that Christian Thielemann’s will be quite so warmly received; there’s a lot here which will infuriate fans of historically informed performance. Thielemann’s approach is defiantly old-school – tempi are expansive and disarmingly flexible, orchestral sonorities are huge, rich and fruity. Once your ears have adjusted, there’s an awful lot of music-making here which sounds Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
Shuffling about the podium like a cha-cha-chaing Jack Lemmon, slam-dunking his first beats, kicking out his heels for second beats, épéeing the trombone entries like a toy toreador, it wasn't hard to see why Lorin Maazel gets such a regular critical roasting. During The Rite of Spring he was almost playing up the vulgarian tag. "You want vulgar? I'll give you vulgar. Take that ridiculously elongated glissando! And that totally out-of-place ritardando! And that gob-smackingly inappropriate sforzando!" That Maazel is a showman has never been in question. What is more problematic is discerning Read more ...
edward.seckerson
One sure (but expensive) way of luring Zubin Mehta to London is to hire the Vienna Philharmonic, too. He and the orchestra go way back to a time when the Indian-born superstar’s smouldering good looks might have suggested Bollywood as a more likely destination than the Vienna Conservatoire. But only the most precociously gifted 20-something conductor offers up Bruckner’s 9th Symphony for his first recording with the illustrious Philharmonic. And quite a fist of it he made, too. I still return to it from time to time.Forty-something years on there’s an air of luxurious well-being about Mehta Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
The Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra like to do things their way. They still show little compunction about discriminating on sexual and ethnic grounds and for over 70 years have maintained the idiosyncratic position of having no fixed principal conductor. Instead, like the prettiest girl in the school year, they carefully bestow grace and favour on a special chosen few. One of their longest running relationships has been with Nikolaus Harnoncourt, a partnership whose early results – trail-blazingly authentic - regularly raised Viennese hackles. So it was a great disappointment to learn that Read more ...