Stravinsky: Petrushka; Debussy: Jeux; Prélude à l’Après-midi d’un Faune album evaluation – flat and muted | Classical music

With three main European orchestras already in his cost, and with rumours that he’s about to be named as the subsequent chief conductor of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, Klaus Mäkelä appears to have the world of orchestral music at his ft. However on the idea of the recordings that he has launched to this point – a distinctly patchy set of the Sibelius symphonies and an underwhelming pairing of Stravinsky’s Firebird and The Ceremony of Spring – it’s fairly exhausting to know why he has turn into such a sizzling property.

This newest disc of Stravinsky and Debussy doesn’t present far more enlightenment. Mäkelä actually has the knack of getting one of the best out of orchestral gamers – in Petrushka (the 1947 revised model of the rating) all the pieces is crisp and exact. Although there appears to have been some post-performance “enhancement” of the sound, in order that the xylophone participant seems to have been consigned to an adjoining room, and the solo flute in the beginning of Prélude à l’Après-midi d’un Faune appears to hover someplace close to the again of the sound image, the enjoying of the Orchestre de Paris (a member of Mäkelä’s orchestral steady) is persistently first charge.

However there may be nonetheless one thing vapid concerning the four-square remedy of Petrushka, with no sense of actual drama behind the vividly projected gestures. The 2 Debussy items appear much more prosaic. You’d hardly guess from these flat, muted accounts that Jeux is likely one of the marvels of early Twentieth-century modernism, or simply what a musical revolution Prélude à l’Après-midi d’un Faune set in movement; presenting them as fairly confections simply isn’t sufficient.

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