Peter Maxwell Davies conducts: "Mavis In Las Vegas" (Collins Classics)
Mavis In Las Vegas took its cue from the composer being registered in a Las Vegas hotel under the contraction Mavis. This tickled his long-established taste for parody, with city sights such as an Elvis shrine, Caesar's Palace and the Liberace museum inspiring a concert overture formed as a set of variations. Like the other pieces here (Ojai Festival Overture, Carolisima, A Spell For Green Corn and An Orkney Wedding, With Sun- rise, all lovingly conducted by the composer) Mavis will appeal most to listeners for who up-front incursions of popular or folk idiom into an unthreatening orchestral environment of largely traditional classical features are still charged with a naughty thrill.
Michael Dervan
Berlin PO/Wilhelm Furtwangler Schumann: Symphony No 4; Furtwangler: Symphony No 2 (DG Originals, two mid-price discs)
The great German conductor Wilhelm Furtwangler (1886-1954) is generally regarded as a man whose best work was done in concert rather than in the recording studio. Spontaneity was one of the watchwords of his art, and a veritable industry thrives on the circulation of pirated versions of his many recorded concerts. Yet the 1953 studio recording of Schumann's Fourth Symphony, the music glowing with dark-hued intensity, finds the conductor at his most searingly intense; if you had to represent Furtwangler through just one of his 400plus recordings, this would be high on the shortlist. His own Second Symphony, written during the enforced idleness of post-war de-Nazification, is conceived in expansive, lushly romantic, rather overblown idiom securely in the shadow of Bruckner and Brahms.
Michael Dervan
Enescu: Symphony No 3; Romanian Rhapsody No 1. BBCPO/Gennady Rozh destvensky (Chandos) Enescu: Cello Sonatas. Gerhard Zank (cello), Donald Sulzen (piano) (Arte Nova Classics, £4.99)
Romania's greatest composer, George Enescu (1881-1955) is now mostly remembered through his untypically populist Romanian Rhapsodies. Chandos's excellent disc couples the more popular first of these with the Third Symphony, begun in the throes of the first World War. The piece calls for a huge orchestra and moves from a grave opening movement (echoes of both Bartok and Strauss) through a nightmarish scherzo to a finale (with wordless chorus) of C major calm and repose. The cello sonatas range earlier and later, the First (1898) striking in its motivic obsessiveness, if overlong, the Second sounding more individual and agreeably knotty in performances which are tightly-argued and illuminating.
Michael Dervan
