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I agree that the piano concerto is a fine piece and this is a splendid recording of it. The 'cello concerto, though, surely benefits from the faster speeds that Alban Gerhardt adopts on the Hyperion disc. I'm not sure that I would describe it as a "taut" work but Gerhardt's performance makes it sound so and is more compelling.

Plasson and Gergiev are excellent. Viotti has tightened up the drama by reorganising the arias. His is an Italianate performance which works well on its own terms. Lloyd-Jones is also excellent. Over 30 minutes' worth of music has been excised, though, and there is one disastrous cut.

Massenet's star has probably risen more rapidly than any other composer's in recent years. Naxos has just released a new recording of "Herodiade" from Deutsche Oper. It will almost certainly be not entirely complete, though, as it's on just two discs. Should be worth investigating, though.

Introduction:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HXovC3tSPE8

and a sung extract ( from 5' 12" ) here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1HlH3hib-WM&t=312s

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.