Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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23 of 24 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A superb recording, but with small niggles, 30 Aug 2002
This is definitely a must buy for the Sinfonietta, which was written at the end of the 2nd world war and shows a charming degree of optimism. Perhaps here we have the best recording so far of this wonderful and taut work. The orchestral balance is excellent and the playing faultless. Lloyd-Jones seems to have a natural affinity with the work and his pacing is superb.The Symphony, whilst ranking alongside the majority of previous recordings, fails to top the list due to a glaring mistake 43 bars in by the brass, and an overall tonal imbalance which favours brass and percussion over the rest of the orchestra. Whilst this makes for great excitement there are times when the brass simply overwhelms, and sections where a larger string section would have been preferable. That aside the pacing and playing is excellent and overall is highly recommended. Alas the booklet contains errors too, the most notable being the printing of the wrong date on the back cover, leading some to believe the Sinfonietta was a product of the early war years rather than the tail end. How different an analysis this then leads to. Inside the sleevenotes by Lewis Foreman get the date correct (1944) but they too contain biographical mistakes. Naxos put this recording together at the last minute after a cancelled Beethoven recording, but even so there are no excuses for this sloppiness in presentation when all the facts could have been checked via the excellent Moeran website. Naxos chose to quote directly from the site on their back cover, but not to acknowledge this. Had they done so some red faces might have been avoided!
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9 of 28 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
O.K. AT THE PRICE, 1 Dec 2002
-- especially if you take music of this particular school more seriously than I do. The disc is almost worth getting for the liner notes, which could have been written by Miss Jean Brodie herself. I learn from them that Moeran suffered a head injury in the war 'an injury that, until his death, had the unfortunate effect of making him appear drunk after even very small quantities of alcohol'. Deeply unfortunate, that. He may have decided that he might as well be hung for a sheep as a lamb, because he fell in with Peter Warlock and his boozy crew ('at Eynsham in Kent, then more rural than now'). All until his death, of course. After it the issue presumably ceased to bother anyone. Another insight is that 'the Cambridge composer Patrick Hadley...like Moeran, a railway enthusiast...claimed to hear...sounds of the Great Eastern expresses....Other commentators, however, have, equally persuasively, heard this as sea music.' They could probably have heard the passage in question as an impressive start at Brand's Hatch or as the crowds milling into Oxford Street for the start of the sales or a thousand other possibilities -- the problem is inherent in music that is vaguely representational: you can usually hear it more or less how you like. The purely musical side is surely more significant, and the symphony is (sadly to my ears) rather dependent on folk music, mainly English but also featuring in the finale The Irish Tune (is there more than one?). My heart missed a beat when I read the name Housman on the back of the record box, but happily this is only name-dropping -- it seems that Moeran was 'also' inspired by Shropshire. To the best of my knowledge he was guiltless of inflicting weak-tea musical settings on that marvellous poet unlike some I will not name, largely because I cannot remember a single note of their settings. The sinfonietta interests me more because of what I hear as a distinct change in the composer's idiom. I think I detect the healthy influence of Walton who, as Constant Lambert said, got away from the cowpat school of English music. That was really played-out it seems to me (it was a bit of a bore at the best of times) and perhaps Moeran thought so too. This disc might have rated 4 stars but for some iffy orchestral playing in the first movement of the symphony that would have been worth retaking. One can't live on a symphonic diet of Beethoven Brahms Mahler Sibelius etc all the time, and these works are agreeable examples of a minor genre. The liner notes also say of the sinfonietta that 'no deep philosophical issues are addressed'. For that relief much thanks say I. The more music stays true and exclusive to itself and the more it steers clear of all that nonsense the better I tend to like it. Music, pure music, is really a far more significant thing than most issues I can think of.
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