This ghastly set can be summed up very easily: fast and crude. Tempos are frantic, precluding anything resembling stylish or expressive phrasing. The Polonaise from the First concerto sounds particularly ridiculous, but the strings-only Third and Sixth concertos are also, to put it kindly, a “hot mess”. Solo instruments surface intermittently for a blaring note or two at the climax of a phrase like trained seals leaping for a fish, only to return once again to the blurry depths–consider the horns in the First concerto, or the trumpet in the Second. There’s no need to go any further; competition in this music is far too fierce for there to be any need to give this release a moment’s consideration.
