Messages

No 4 is "Cavalleria Rusticana" medley
No 8 is "The Pirates of Penzance" medley

Thanks, Alan.

Great news. Are they downloads only, though?

Excerpts available here. The finale oF Bronsart's concerto is taken at quite a lick. The orchestra sounds lean but perhaps more on its toes than a full symphony orchestra might be.

https://www.prestomusic.com/classical/products/9615307--henselt-bronsart-piano-concerto

Well done for promoting what is my favourite and, I think, Glazunov's best symphony. I'm not surprised it brought the audience to its feet. I hope they went out and got hold of a recording of it. That's how unsung music begins to get sung.

Thanks for doing this. I know that many of us retain an affection for this disc and still regard it as the definitive performance in spite of that over enthusiastic timpanist! My copy is badly bronzed but still plays perfectly.

It was the 200th anniversary of Franck's birth last year so the symphony did get a performance at the Proms. Previous to that it had been performed six times since 1980 but it was not performed in the 1960s and 70s. Perhaps there is a suggestion of a trend in the right direction then.

There has been a certain amount of snobbery over this symphony, perhaps because it's too tuneful for a "serious" symphony. I used to have an old book of record reviews which ignored it because the author did not wish to promote music he "personally disliked". R-K's Scheherazade suffered the same fate.

I live near Exeter and the Exeter Symphony Orchestra ( amateurs, of course ) performed it a couple of days ago.

I started a thread on this subject a while ago. Your thread has exactly the same heading as mine and your post duplicates mine word for word. Why? If you're interested in this topic, please refer to the earlier thread. Any comments, moderators?

Yes. The Orchestra Sinfonica di Roma was disbanded in 2014.

This link shows the back of the box which lists the contents:

https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B0BKQZ6R9Y/?tag=emimusic-21

There's still a lot of unrecorded Pierne. "La Croisade des Enfants" urgently needs a new recording.

I live in the South West and I have fond memories of many concerts he gave in Exeter with the Bournemouth Sinfonietta during the 1970s. Not a lot of "unsung" music perhaps but that would have kept the people away, I'm afraid.

"Henri VIII" is much more of a music drama than an opera. It is far less "commercial" than "Samson et Dalila" and lacks that opera's fabulous melodies. It needs a few hearings, then. It is enormously rich musically and dramatically, though, and should be ranked alongside "S and D" rather than behind it.
These two works are, I believe, streets ahead of Saint-Saens's other operas.

There's only one recording of the sixth. Bartholomee's on Auvidis. That was made in 1995 and represented its first performance. It seems as though two cycles of symphonies were planned ( the other one on Marco Polo ) but neither was completed. By chance, however, all the symphonies were recorded at least once.

Yes. It's nothing like Mahler stylistically. I'm totally convinced by it and wrote an extremely enthusiastic review for Amazon.co.uk a few years ago. The choir may sound recessed but that is appropriate for this work.

With respect to you all, do you not know the sixth symphony? It is an astounding masterpiece. Its style  may put it outside our remit but it must be heard. The final pages are quite overwhelming. Only the conclusion of Scriabin's "Poem of Ecstasy" or the "Symphony of a Thousand" come close.