Andris Nelsons has recorded some of this repertoire quite successfully for Orfeo with the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra. This set, despite featuring two top-class orchestras in the form of the Boston Symphony and Leipzig Gewandhaus, is nowhere near as good. It seems that over these intervening decade Nelsons has lost much of that vigor and inspiration informing his earlier work: here what we have is for the most part a tired conductor dragging his two hapless orchestras over the finish line. Continue readingAndris Nelsons’ Crashingly Disappointing Strauss
Tag: Richard Strauss
The Austrian conductor Otmar Suitner (1922-2011) turned 100 this week, which gave me the perfect opportunity to look back at his very prolific legacy, much of which has languished into oblivion. A conductor who spent most of his career behind the Iron Curtain, those who knew of him remembered him for his lengthy, but artistically not particularly groundbreaking, tenure with the Staatskapelle Berlin between 1964 and 1990, during which he churned out mostly mediocre recordings of the German classics, and which gave him a reputation of being yet another stodgy Kapellmeister. Continue readingSuitner@100: The (Truly) Legendary Recordings