Reissue in Harmonia Mundi’s “Gold” series does nothing to change this program’s mostly uninspiring music making. The sole exception to the dully antiseptic impression that these performances leave resides in the Four Pieces for Orchestra, a cerebral work in which David Robertson proves himself particularly sympathetic to the spacey first and third movements. He also offers a nicely biting scherzo and doesn’t drag the final funeral march. However, this glimmer of light doesn’t redeem the want of character elsewhere. The Dance Suite completely lacks the requisite earthiness in its second, third, and final sections (where are those carefully notated trombone glissandos?), and the sonics, with their rather murky bass and dearth of upper range brilliance, hardly serve the music to best effect.
Robertson purports to use the “original version” of The Miraculous Mandarin, with a total of 30 bars restored among various spots, and dynamics corrected by the composer’s son. Big deal. The opening reveals an orchestra terminally weak in the lower brass and anemic in general sonority. The solo clarinet “decoy games” offer about as much sex appeal as an issue of National Geographic, while the famous chase fugue suffers from blurred articulation in the strings and a general lack of dynamic range (note the passage’s tepid crescendo and absence of low-end detail). In short, unless you absolutely have to collect every single recording of the Four Pieces for Orchestra, you will find this an easy release to ignore.
