On April 28, 2006, the Los Angeles Philharmonic under Esa-Pekka Salonen played a concert, and on May 9 this recording of it was available for sale as an Apple iTunes Store download; there is no CD. Using iTunes (Macintosh or Windows version) you download the concert as m4p music files and burn them as a standard CD. (But before you burn, make sure the track numbers in your playlist are in the right order; iTunes often reverses the order of movements!) Apple might be offering tracks and/or individual works separately.
Salonen has recorded Lutoslawski’s Fourth Symphony before, with notable success. This orchestra premiered the work in 1983 under the composer’s direction and it certainly plays the piece with commitment. Salonen’s Sony recording and Antoni Wit’s release on Naxos are outstanding, but this performance displays the deepest understanding, making it really sound like a mainstream masterpiece.
In the Beethoven works Salonen reveals himself to be a master of orchestral balance rivaling Pierre Boulez while also showing more impetuosity and warmth. The overture is the better of the two performances, crackling with energy and drama. Salonen’s clarification of Beethoven’s part-writing comes at some price in the Fifth Symphony, which here sounds neither monumental nor sufficiently dramatic. The sound is very good: basically clear and natural, with a strong, warm bass register. There is a slight lack of transparency, but it’s hard to say whether this comes from the hall, the live concert microphone set-up, or the m4p compression.
