The opening of Borodin’s Second Symphony practically lunges at you in this performance. The Vancouver strings dig in deep but with impressively clean articulation, and conductor Bramwell Tovey hones the music to a sharp edge with his brisk, tight phrasing. Throw in brightly toned winds and some cocksure brass playing, and you’ve got a performance brimming with a visceral potency rarely heard since Tjeknavorian’s commanding 1970s reading with the National Philharmonic. Tovey lavishes the same treatment on Balakirev’s Islamey, rendered here with such color and sparkle that you easily could forget about the piano original.
Shostakovich’s Ballet Suite No. 1 also shows plenty of color, but just misses the brash splendor and raucous intensity Neeme Järvi regularly brings to the composer’s ballet music. The disc ends with Khachaturian’s Gayane Suite No. 3, featuring the ever-popular Sabre Dance, where Tovey’s team sounds a little tepid next to the composer’s own blazing performance with an excited Vienna Philharmonic. Still, in the context of the overall program, Tovey’s performance does the job. CBC’s recording is a bit stingy in the high frequencies, but it has natural balances and good dynamic range.
