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Editorial Reviews
Amazon.com
Riccardo Chailly's Bartók is strikingly different. Every phrase is subjected to delicate tonal coloring, long-buried instrumental details are brought out to striking effect, and tempos are generally slower than usual. Here's a Bartók with impressionist roots, not the starker, more angular modernist we've come to know. But it's not less exciting--just listen to the wild riot of sound produced by the Concertgebouw at the opening of The Miraculous Mandarin, whose grotesqueries are only enhanced by the wide tonal palette Chailly lavishes upon it. And once you hear his way with the sliding inner string voice accompaniments of the Concerto for Orchestra's second movement, it's hard to accept the way other conductors bury them. The Concerto's opening has weight and gravity few conductors bring to it, just the kind of care the work needs to prevent it from becoming just another orchestral showpiece. The Mandarin, too, benefits from Chailly's approach. Its reputation is based on a sensationalist story line enhanced by sometimes lurid music, but most of the score is more subtle, full of delicate colorations and muted dynamics, here interpreted with poetry and feeling. Terrific sound seals a strong recommendation, especially for the jaded who think the Concerto can no longer surprise. --Dan Davis
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Don't underestimate Chailly and the world's finest orchestra!,
By
Amazon Verified Purchase(What's this?)
This review is from: Bartok: The Miraculous Mandarin / Concerto for Orchestra ~ Chailly (Audio CD)
There has long been a tendency to put Chailly and the Concertgebouw into a bag, as it were, involving the presumption that the orchestra and hall are best suited to late Romantic composers up to and ending with Mahler. While there is certainly merit to this position, one only needs recall the 20th Century repertoire championed by these forces (e.g. the Varese box-set on Decca) to understand why they are uniquely suited to record possibly the definitive versions of both these works by Bartok. Imagine my surprize, then when I found it nigh-on impossible to find a review of this disc in the usual sources (the Penguin Guide, Gramophone Best Recordings, etc.) Apparently this has something to do with the fact that the recordings were made in 1995 and 1997 yet did not see the light of day until 2002. While this frequently bodes ill for a CD, nothing could be farther from the case in the present instance. The performances of both works, but especially the Mandarin, represent the state of the art in both recorded sound and interpretive insights. The Miraculous Mandarin is variously referred to as "barbaric, relentless, unforgiving" and so on, underscoring the sleazy elements in the scenario. I have always considered the essence of Bartok to be about making ugliness beautiful, as in the way he can take dissonant harmonies and somehow make them sing. This is largely a function of his gifts as an orchestrator, and in that regard he definitely belongs in the same lineage as Wagner, Debussy, Ravel and Mahler. The balance achieved by Chailly between the ugliness and beauty in Bartok's score is near-perfect here, and he owes a large part of this to the recording. I have attended concerts at Amsterdam's Concertgebouw and have numerous recording from that venue and can say without hesitation that this is one of the most incredibly recorded of them all. (As a sidebar, I have become more and more convinced over the years that the primary qualities involved in interpreting a given piece of music that are usually attributed to conductor and orchestra are far more a function of the recording quality, the venue, the engineer, etc than is usually acknowledged among reviewers). The many layers and nuances lurking beneath the surface in Bartok's 2 masterworks are here revealed as never before. As a listener who has listened to literally dozens of different versions of these 2 works, let me simply say that a life spent without hearing these versions of the Mandarin and the Concerto would indeed be a life of impoverishment.
11 of 13 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
More fireworks from Chailly and the sensational RCOA,
By
This review is from: Bartok: The Miraculous Mandarin / Concerto for Orchestra ~ Chailly (Audio CD)
How many recordings of the "Concerto for Orchestra" do we really need? The answer is: more like this one! This is a lustrous performance, full of excitement, but not as brutal as say, Solti's (whose Bartok recordings I greatly admire). This piece really shows off this orchestra well, coupled with Chailly's instinctively dramatic reading. The even happier news is that the complete "Miraculous Mandarin" is equally compelling, and perhaps more valuable since it has not been recorded as frequently as the "Concerto." The caliber of the orchestral playing in this is simply astonishing. When I first listened to the disc, I must have re-played the middle section three or four times in a row - the music comes in torrents, raining down on your head. A thrilling experience.
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
One of Chailly's best recordings,
By Santa Fe Listener (Santa Fe, NM USA) - See all my reviews (TOP 500 REVIEWER) (HALL OF FAME REVIEWER)
This review is from: Bartok: The Miraculous Mandarin / Concerto for Orchestra ~ Chailly (Audio CD)
What's so frustrating about Riccardo Chailly is that he has everything necessary for greatness except greatness itself. A master technician who is completely in tune with modernism (traits he shares with Salonen), Chailly can throw up a tapestry of details that never quite add up to a picture. But here in this excellent Bartok program he gets two scores that suit him perfeclty.
Bartok was as precise and meticulous as Chailly, and he was an anti-tomantic as well. The grotesqueries, twadriness, and lurid horrors of The Miraculous Mandarin add up to a japery against innocence and romance, stoll shocking in its brutality today. Chailly doesn't need to underline the horrors, only to play every note of the score perfectly, and so he does. The Concerto for Orchestra proceeds along similar lines: perfect execution, with vigor, of music that has every effect built in by the composer. In the end, Chailly is playing catch-up with great Bartok performances from Bernstein, Reiner, Boulez, and Ivan Fischer, but on his own terms he's made a very fine recording, outstanding for sheer thrills of execution.
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