This
is rather a disappointment. It’s not necessarily that Fedoseyev’s
bracing and brisk reading with a finale cut takes only just over
52 minutes so much as the recording causes sometimes insurmountable
problems. No location is specified but the recording engineers
have not been able to subdue a ruinous glassiness on the violins’
tone and there is a muddiness throughout that obliterates a considerable
amount of detail. This is particularly true in the slow movement
where wind counterpoint is barely audible.
Fedoseyev
is here committed to a performance of symphonic stature and cohesion.
He favours fluidity over lingering, the presumed long line to
incidental felicities. So his first movement can be rather abrupt
and occasionally curtly phrased with some want of affection. There
are also some moments of bumpy phrasing; things don’t quite flow
and again he’s hardly helped by a sound quality that veils string
entries and submerges things generally. In the slow movement he
is clear-eyed, caesurae between paragraphal points brief, his
goal one of symphonic tension exercised through tempo relation.
I admire the ambition whilst finding the results unconvincing
and unmoving. In the finale I’m afraid untamed trumpets tend to
overbalance the texture and the strings are never really "there"
in the balance; and for all Fedoseyev’s ambitions at a real
symphonic statement the end result can be a bit slack rhythmically.
Coupled
with the symphony are the early and charming Scherzo and a pleasantly
aloof Vocalise (but then who wants a pleasantly aloof Vocalise?).
Jonathan
Woolf
Tchaikovsky Symphony Orchestra
of Moscow Radio/Vladimir Fedoseyev