As with previous releases in this series, Oleg Caetani has strong and musically rewarding ideas about how this piece should go. He begins the first movement at a good clip, rather like Kondrashin, and happily makes no attempt at subtlety. His flexibility of pulse binds the movement’s patchwork construction together especially well. I was concerned at first that his comparatively slow attack on the crazy fugue at the climax of the development section was a concession to the strings, but it’s so imaginatively phrased (my goodness, there’s a real melody in there!), and the layers of texture are built up with such impressive clarity that I found the approach wholly convincing. Why, though, here and elsewhere (the big chorale in the finale), is there no tam-tam at the climaxes? It’s like leaving the icing off the cake. There’s no excuse for it.
Caetani coaxes a full measure of dry humor from the scherzo, and once again in the finale he has the full measure of the music’s bizarre range of moods. His shaping of the central ballet suite is particularly characterful, and the orchestra’s wind section does fine work as well. The brass and strings don’t quite match what Previn gets from the Chicago Symphony (EMI), but then no one else does either, and a little roughness in this music certainly isn’t out of place. If the final climax isn’t quite as scorching as it could be due to the inaudible percussion, in all other respects the recording is stunningly realistic and pulverizing in its impact. The inclusion of the related, unpublished fragment makes for an interesting filler. It sounds just like a sketch for some unknown bit of the Fourth Symphony, though it sheds no special light on the work as we know it today. For Caetani’s insights as well as for the superior sonics, I have no problem recommending this recording, but it still falls just a hair short of the very best. [10/7/2004]
