Here are some of the most recent recordings by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra:
Verdi: Requiem. Alessandra Marc, Waltraud Meier, Placido Domingo, Ferruccio Furlanetto, soloists; Chicago Symphony Chorus; Daniel Barenboim, conductor. Erato 96357, 2 CDs.
Barenboim’s devotional traversal represents a valid alternative view of Verdi’s great ecclesiastical opera. It is beautifully sustained by splendid choral and orchestral work and engineering that yields the most successful sound Erato has yet captured at Orchestra Hall. Apart from Domingo’s contributions, however, the vocal quartet is undistinguished. Marc slides and scoops and is distressingly flat in her “Libera me,” Meier doesn’t sound Italianate no matter how hard she tries, and Furlanetto’s foggy bass fails to invest his music with real dramatic character.
Brahms: Symphonies Nos. 1 to 4, Tragic and Academic Festival overtures, Variations on a Theme by Haydn. Barenboim, conductor. Erato 94817, 4 CDs, also available separately.
Although Barenboim played a Brahms cycle in Chicago before taking over as music director, he waited until the CSO was sufficiently steeped in his interpretations before committing the cycle to disc last year. In the main, his efforts to search out Brahms’ passionate romanticism within the classical rigor of his symphonic structures pay off. The playing of the CSO fairly glows with dark intensity, the music building tension over spacious, unhurried tempos. There is a slight want of precision compared to Georg Solti’s CSO/Brahms symphony cycle (London), which also has better sound, despite being an analogue recording. One further caveat: The Third Symphony disc contains a manufacturing flaw, a one-second dropout in the third movement. Erato has recalled most defective copies and will replace any that remain.
Cage: Atlas Eclipticalis; Carter: Variations for Orchestra; Schuller: Spectra for Orchestra; Babbitt: Correspondences for string orchestra and synthesized tape. James Levine, conductor. DG 431 698.
This program of post-war, post-Schoenbergian works by four senior American modernists (all living composers save for John Cage) makes for tough but rewarding listening for the open-minded. The Carter, rather more linear and rhetorical than his most recent orchestral scores, is the one masterpiece on the disc and receives its cleanest, most virtuosic recording to date. The wispy, even gentle sounds and silences of Cage’s aleatoric essay come across as an aural balm after the prickly academic densities of Babbitt and Schuller.
Stravinsky: Oedipus Rex. Philip Langridge, Florence Quivar, James Morris, soloists; Chicago Symphony Chorus; Levine, conductor. DG 435 872.
In the catalog absence of Stravinsky’s own early-1950s account of his neoclassical opera-oratorio, this one will do nicely. Levine has a firm sense of “Oedipus”-as-theater and he is blessed with a superb Oedipus in Philip Langridge.
