Word: concertgebouw
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...jazz compositions attempted by Igor Stravinsky at the same time--his were far more exploratory in chord structure and overall form. Shostakovich's jazz embodies a kind of ethereal chintz that might call to mind, on first listening, the London compact disc, Riccardo Chailly and the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra of Amsterdam attempt to bring forth that light naivete in all of its utter inocuousness...
Chailly and the Concertgebouw bring the strictness to life, but not without a little flair. It's quite a change from the calm, reserved playing the orchestra usually produces in performances of the standard Teutonic masterworks. However, one can almost see a bunch of musicians in Moscow, completely ignorant of stylists such as Jelly Roll Morton and Duke Ellington, taking some joy in the fluffy flourishes of Shostakovich's work. These musicians had perhaps heard of Scott Joplin, and in fact Joplin seems the closest to Shostakovich in form...
...nine year-old boy, spellbound by his first musical experience at the Concertgebouw, rises to become the orchestra's principal conductor at just 35 years of age. A little more than 25 years later, the dream comes to an end when Bernard Haitink decided to end his celebrated tenure with the Concertgebouw. Now, six years later, the classical label Philips documents Haitink's discographic achievements by compiling and re-releasing six of his symphonic cycles, namely Brahms, Beethoven, Bruckner, Mahler, Tchaikovsky, and Schumann...
...four Brahms symphonies on three discs, and the two serenades on a fourth disc), it is some criticism for the sound engineering. Quite typically from Philips, the sound sparkles with digital clarity and is graced by a glossy sheen, but the engineers have failed to compensate for the Concertgebouw Hall's famed reverberation. Even though orchestral entrances are almost always well-synchronized, the subsequent lag time in the hall results in an acoustic clouding that renders the sound more two-dimensional than one might expect. Very exposed passages (e.g. the wind soli at the beginning of the second symphony...
...gifts in full flower. The Third (1985) harks back to Bach in a tour de force of stylistic synthesis, while the 1988 Fourth (which, confusingly, the composer also calls his Symphony No. 5) takes an unfinished work by Mahler as its launching pad. Riccardo Chailly and the Amsterdam Concertgebouw achieve lift-off and soar in both...