If in doubt, make a list. I realize that this often arbitrary parlour game is no substitute for cogently constructed critique but it is easier.
The BBC Music magazine has invited 151 conductors to nominate their three favourite symphonies and produced a Top 20 on the basis of the opinions offered. Beethoven's Eroica comes top and is thus the subject of the magazine's free disc.
Quite rightly, Beethoven shows up the most but Sibelius surprisingly less than one might have thought and when he does, it's no. 7 that gets the most mentions.
While Vladimir Ashkenazy picks two of the three that I would have chosen, if asked, because no sooner does one see such a feature than one has to have a go oneself, our local hero, Kirill Karabits, selected Lyatoshynsky 3, Prokofiev 5 and Terterian 3, not all of which I'm on leitmotif-whistling terms with.
If you want to find the complete list then I must direct you to the magazine but what you won't find there are my choices- Beethoven Pastoral, Schubert Unfinished and Sibelius 5. With honourable commendations to Mozart 40, Berlioz Fantastique, Beethoven 5, Sibelius 2, Gorecki Sorrowful Songs and Mendelssohn 4.
But, as ever, beware of the BBC magazine with its lightweight reviewing and facile phrase-making. In a review of some solo Bach violin, it says the performance makes,
even the A minor fugue sound like musical droplets falling onto a warm bed of contrapuntal moss
I mean, really.
David Green
- David Green (Books) is the imprint under which I published booklets of my own poems. The original allocation of ISBN numbers is used up now, though. The 'Collected Poems' are now available as a pdf. The website is now what it has become, often more about music than books and not so often about poems. It will be about whatever suggests itself.
