This first release on the Boston Symphony’s own label, featuring the orchestra’s new music director Andris Nelsons, sounds very promising, especially given the fact that the program contains two warhorses that hardly needed another recording. Nelsons plays the Tannhäuser Overture with plenty of heft and energy. The blend of winds and brass at the opening is gorgeous, at a tempo that never drags or permits the loud music to degenerate into vulgar trash. If nothing will prevent the “big tune” in the central quick section from reminding us of “Do, A Deer” in The Sound of Music, well, the fault is Wagner’s. It’s a great program opener.
The main item, in any case, is the Sibelius Second Symphony, a piece played to death but tricky to bring off successfully. This is an excellent performance. Tempos are invariably well judged–Nelsons handles the accelerandos in the turbulent second movement with real skill. The whirlwind scherzo, which seems to fly by even faster on its return after the trio section, is played with remarkable brilliance and accuracy by the Boston strings, while the finale is certainly one of the best on disc. Nelsons is one of the few conductors who isn’t afraid of the ostinato rhythms in timpani and trombones that make the main theme surge forward, and in the repetitious second subject he finds little details, such as the timpani sforzandos just before the coda, that really sustain the music’s intensity.
Indeed, Nelsons lavishes a lot of attention on balances generally, particularly on clarifying bass lines in the first movement’s development section and in the “battle music” in the second movement, and this pays big dividends in making the piece sound consistently active and fresh. My only quibble with the performance is that, like many conductors of the “controlling” kind, Nelsons seems a bit unwilling to really let himself go at the climaxes. The symphony’s coda, for example, for all the finely judged gradations with which it builds, seldom sustains the triple-forte that Sibelius repeatedly demands. In other words, you get to the summit, but aren’t given much time to enjoy the view. Otherwise, it would be difficult to call the playing, conducting, or live sonics anything less than magnificent.
