Dvorak: Overtures

Album review

Honestly, the BBC Philharmonic makes some of the most lovely records. And why shouldn't it? It has been recording music for a long, long time and has gotten very good at it. And with producer Brian Pidgeon in control, it has gotten very, very good at it. Whether Pidgeon and the BBC Philharmonic are recording Glière with Vassily Sinaisky or Dvorák with Stephen Gunzenhauser, together they make the most amazingly warm and powerful recordings, with the orchestra on-stage 50 feet in front of the listener in a lushly reverberant hall. In this 1992 recording of selected Dvorák opera and concert overtures led by Gunzenhauser, the sound is as rich as ever and the performances are nearly all convincing. Gunzenhauser and the BBC's performances of the three overtures -- In Nature's Realm, Op. 91; Carnival, Op. 92; and Othello, Op. 93 -- bring out the dramatic intensity and thematic unity of the works. Their performance of the My Home, Op. 62, is strong, direct, and colorful. Their performance of the overture to the opera Vanda, Op. 25, is as good as it could be, but the overture is still as bad a piece of music as has ever been written, and no amount of lovely and lushly recorded sound is going to be much of a compensation. Of course, there are classic recordings of most of these works by Vaclav Talich and Rafael Kubelik and digital recordings of some of the works by Claudio Abbado and Jirí Belohlávek that are far more idiomatic, individualistic, and intense than Gunzenhauser. But as modern digital recordings of this particular set overtures go, this is a fine recording.
© TiVo