Pelléas et Melisande

"Over the years, the play inspired several composers ... The two works here are hugely different. Gabriel Fauré first wrote his incidental music for a London performance of the play in 1898. Arnold Schoenberg penned a tone poem in a full-blown late-Romantic style ... The playing by the Frankfurt Radio Symphony Orchestra under Paavo Järvi is faultless, the recording is ideal ... The disc presents two wonderfully contrasting explorations of Maurice Maeterlinck's Pelléas et Mélisande. Both are a pleasure to listen to".

Læs anmeldelse

"Markus Stentz and the Oehms team have done a lot of work picking out leading voices and balancing the riotously profuse counterpoint. The result has a compelling narrative cohesion ... At times everything seems magnificently, grippingly in focus".

Vurdering (Pelleas): 4/5.

Vurdering (Violin Concerto): 3/5.

"Like Hilary Hahn, Kolja Blacher has clearly absorbed lessons from the work's early interpreters ... In not allowing the solo part to be tied up in soliloquising knots of contrapuntal introspection ... His relationship with the orchestra is strong ... and he makes a muscular but never ugly case for the finale in the virtuoso tradition".

"Editor's choice: Smart coupling. Two more contrasting takes on Maeterlinck's symbolist drama would be hard to imagine: the Schoenberg heated and densely woven, the Fauré cool and gently poetic ... All credit to Järvi's Frankfurt orchestra for their total immersion into two such stylistically different sound worlds - a reminder, if such were needed, of music's ability to move us in mysterious ways with the same story from different storytellers".

"Boulez brings out the best aspects of its formal flexibility and textural richness. In the final stages he even allows himself to broaden the tempo at a place not asked for by the composer without sounding contrived".