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On Record – ORF Vienna Radio Symphony Orchestra / Jakub Hrůša – Kabeláč: Symphony no.2; Overtures (Capriccio)

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ORF Vienna Radio Symphony Orchestra / Jakub Hrůša

Kabeláč
Symphony no.2 in C major Op.15 (1942-6)
Overture no.1 Op. 6 (1939)
Overture no.2 Op.17 (1947)

Capriccio C5546 [54’51’’]
Producer Erich Hofmann Engineer Freidrich Trondl

Recorded 14-16 June 2023 (Symphony), 17 June 2024 (Overtures) at Konzerthus, Radio Kulturhaus, Vienna

Reviewed by Richard Whitehouse

What’s the story?

Capriccio continues its exploration of paths less travelled with a collection of early orchestral works from the Prague-based composer Miloslav Kabeláč (1908-79), all persuasively realized by the ORF Symphony Orchestra of Vienna while authoritatively conducted by Jakub Hrůša.

What’s the music like?

Although his output made little headway outside his native Czechoslovakia over his lifetime, with its dissemination subject to considerable restrictions imposed by those authorities either side of the Dubček era, Kabeláč has belatedly been recognized as a major figure from among the European composers of his generation. The three pieces featured here give only a limited idea of those radical directions that his music subsequently took, though a distinct personality is already evident such that they afford a worthwhile and rewarding listen in their own right.

His first such work for full orchestra, the Second Symphony occupied Kabeláč throughout the latter years of war and into a peace whose promise proved but fleeting. Uncompromising as a statement of intent, the first of its three movements unfolds from an imposing introduction to a sonata design as powerfully sustained as it is intensively argued. Beginning then ending in elegiac inwardness, while characterized by an eloquent theme for alto saxophone, the central Lento builds to a culmination of acute plangency. It remains for the lengthy finale to afford a sense of completion, which it duly does with its methodical yet impulsive course towards an apotheosis whose triumph never feels contrived or overbearing. Successfully heard in Prague then at the ISCM Festival in Palermo, the piece endures as a testament to human aspiration.

This recording is neatly and appositely rounded out with the brace of overtures Kabeláč wrote on either side of the symphony (neither of which appears to have been commercially recorded hitherto). Written in the wake of the Nazi’s invasion of Czechoslovakia, the First Overture is a taut study in martial rhythms whose provocation could hardly have been doubted at its 1940 premiere. Eight years on and the Second Overture is no less concise in its form or economical in its thematic discourse, while exuding an emotional impact which doubtless left its mark on those who attended its 1947 premiere and seems the more poignant in the light of subsequent events. Kabeláč was to write more searching orchestral pieces in those decades that followed, yet the immediacy and appeal of his earlier efforts is still undimmed with the passage of time.

Does it all work?

Yes, owing not least to the excellence of these accounts. While he has not previously recorded the composer, Hrůša directed a memorable performance of Kabeláč’s masterly orchestral work Mystery of Time in London some years ago and he conveys a tangible identity with his music. Those who have the excellent Supraphon set of Kabeláč symphonies (SU42022) need not feel compelled to acquire this release, but those who do will hear readings of this uncompromising music which are likely to remain unsurpassed in their authoritative playing and interpretation.

Is it recommended?

Very much so. Recorded sound could hardly be bettered for elucidating the frequently dense but never opaque orchestral textures, and Miloš Haase pens an insightful booklet note. Those yet to acquire Capriccio’s overview of Kabeláč’s chamber music (C5522) are urged to do so.

Listen / Buy

You can hear excerpts from the album and explore purchase options at the Presto website, or you can listen to the album on Tidal. Click to read more about the ORF Vienna Radio Symphony Orchestra and conductor Jakub Hrůša – and for more on composer Miloslav Kabeláč.

Published post no.2,793 – Monday 9 February 2026

On Record – Malmö Opera Chorus and Orchestra, Mark Fitz-Gerald – Shostakovich: The Human Comedy, The Shot, The Nose (Discarded Versions) (Naxos)

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Tor Lind (bass), Kenny Staškus Larsen (flute), Allan Sjølin, Jesper Sivebaek (balalaikas), Edward Stewart (guitar) (all soloists in The Shot); Lars Notto Birkeland (organ, The Nose); Christian Enarsson (piano, The Human Comedy); Malmő Opera Chorus and Orchestra / Mark Fitz-Gerald

Shostakovich
The Shot – incidental music, Op.24 (1929)
The Human Comedy – incidental music, Op. 37 (1933-4)
The Nose, Op. 15 – appendix (1927-8)
The Vyborg Side, Op. 50 – March of the Arnachists (1938)

Naxos 8.574590 [56’42’’]
Russian text & English translation included
Producer Sean Lewis

Recorded 5-7 March at Opera House, Malmő and 4 April 2024 at Fagerborg Church, Oslo (The Nose)

Reviewed by Richard Whitehouse

What’s the story?

Naxos continues its ground-breaking series devoted to Shostakovich’s film and theatre scores, given with conviction by the Malmö Opera Orchestra and authoritatively conducted by Mark Fitz-Gerald, who has edited and often reconstructed these pieces from their surviving sources.

What’s the music like?

It is all too easily overlooked that, prior to being one of the leading composers of symphonies and string quartets from the 20th century, Shostakovich became established primarily through music for the theatre and cinema; in the process, he frequently transferred musical ideas from one medium to the other. The present release features the complete incidental music from two of his most ambitious such undertakings, along with hitherto unknown passages from his first opera and an item from one of his film scores – much of this material recorded for the first time.

Shostakovich’s first assignment for Leningrad-based TRAM (Theatre of Working Youth), his incidental music for Aleksandr Bezymensky’s verse-drama The Shot had a fraught rehearsal process prior to its relatively successful first-run. Few of the mainly brief numbers survived intact but the outcome, as reconstructed from piano sketches, is a lively if not overly anarchic score – highlights being the Mussorgskian pastiche ‘Workers’ Song of Victory’ (track 1) and the poignant ‘Dun’dya’s Lament’ (16) with its guitar part deftly restored by Edward Stewart.

Some five years on and the experimental zeal of Soviet theatre had largely evaporated, hence the music for Moscow-based Vakhtangov Theatre’s production The Human Comedy. Adapted by Pavel Sukhotin from Honoré de Balzac’s epic, its essence seems one of nostalgia for things past – typified by the theme, nominally evoking Paris, which Shostakovich threads across his half-hour score. Complementing this are more animated or even uproarious numbers, several of which found their way into those Ballet Suites latterly assembled in Stalin’s twilight years.

The programme is rounded out, firstly, with three fragments from The Nose – the undoubted masterpiece of Shostakovich’s radical years. Taken from each of its acts, they pursue musical directions likely impractical in a theatrical context; though what was intended as an overture to Act Three (41) could still make its way as a scintillating encore. Finally, the ‘March of the Anarchists’ (43) from the film The Vyborg Side: reconstructed from its original soundtrack, it finds the composer remodelling music from Weill’s The Threepenny Opera in his own image.

Do the performances work?

Pretty much throughout – accepting, of course, the fragmentary nature of the two main works as determined by their function. In particular, the five-movement suite assembled – not by the composer – from The Human Comedy (and recorded by Edward Serov with the St Petersburg Chamber Orchestra for Melodiya) brings together various of those individual pieces to more cohesive overall effect. Not that the present performances are at all wanting in expertise and conviction, making for an album which is a necessary listen for all admirers of this composer.

Is it recommended?

Very much so. The booklet features detailed notes from no less than Gerard McBurney, with a brief contextual note by Fitz-Gerald. Hopefully there will be further such releases from this source, and not forgetting that several of Shostakovich’s film scores have still to be recorded.

Listen / Buy

You can hear excerpts from the album and explore purchase options at the Naxos website, or you can listen to the album on Tidal. Click to read more about Mark Fitz-Gerald’s recordings for Naxos, the Malmő Opera Orchestra and the Shostakovich Centre.

Published post no.2,792 – Sunday 8 February 2026

In Concert – Natalya Romaniw, CBSO / Eduardo Strausser: Shekhar, Richard Strauss & Brahms

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Natalya Romaniw (soprano, below), City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra / Eduardo Strausser (above)

Shekhar Lumina (2020) [UK Premiere]
Richard Strauss Vier letzte Lieder (1948)
Brahms Symphony no.4 in E minor Op.98 (1884-5)

Symphony Hall, Birmingham
Wednesday 4 February 2026

Reviewed by Richard Whitehouse Pictures (c) Rodrigo Levy (Eduardo Strausser), Frances Marshall (Natalya Romaniw)

Eduardo Strausser has been welcome visitor to the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra on several earlier occasions (see elsewhere on this website), with this afternoon’s programme demonstrating a keen ear for his juxtaposing of contemporary music and established classics.

Equally well-established as an instrumentalist and multi-media artist, Nina Shekhar (b.1995) is an Indian-American with a substantial output to her credit – not least Lumina. Premiered in Los Angeles and subsequently heard across the United States, its eventful 12 minutes explore what she has described as ‘‘… the spectrum of light and dark and the murkiness in between’’. The incremental emergence of sound and texture brings Ligeti’s 1960s pieces to mind, while the build-up of its central phase towards a culmination of palpable emotional fervour is both adeptly managed and powerfully sustained, before the gradual return to its inward origin. The present performance left little doubt as to Strausser’s belief in this music, even if that opening stage would have benefitted from a more attentive response by some of those in the audience.

Richard Strauss’s Four Last Songs is too frequently encountered in concert these days, so that it takes something special to make one reflect anew on its achievement as among the greatest of musical swansongs. This account got off to rather an inauspicious start – Natalya Romaniw overwrought in the vernal deftness of Frühling, not aided by overly opaque textures – though it subsequently came into its own. Arguably the most perfectly realized of all orchestral songs, September found an enticing balance between joy and resignation, while if leader Jonathan Martindale’s solo in Beim Schlafengehen was not quite flawless, it eschewed sentimentality to a (surprisingly?) rare degree. Im Abendrot rounded off the performance with Romaniw’s eloquent retreat into an orchestral backdrop which itself faded into serene and rapt fulfilment.

If by no means his final work, Brahms’s Fourth Symphony surely marks the onset of his final creative period. In its overtly austere sound-world and an abundance of hymn-like or chorale-inflected themes, it is also the most Bachian of his orchestral works but Strausser was right to offset this aspect against that surging emotion as underlies even the most speculative passages of its opening movement. The coda built methodically yet not a little impulsively towards an apotheosis as dramatic as anything by this most Classically inclined of Romantic composers.

After this, the Andante emerged in all its autumnal warmth and expressive poignancy – if not the most perfectly realized Brahms slow movement then surely the most profound. Bracingly energetic if never headlong, the scherzo prepared unerringly for the finale – the effectiveness of its passacaglia format having on occasion been questioned, while conveniently overlooking that parallel sonata-form dynamism such as galvanizes this movement on its intended course. Suffice to add that the closing pages felt as inevitable as any performance in recent memory.

Overall, a fine showing for the CBSO – notably its woodwind and brass – and Strausser, who will hopefully return soon. The orchestra is heard later this month with Omar Meir Wellber in a no less stimulating programme of Beethoven’s Third Piano Concerto with Haydn’s ‘Nelson’ Mass.

To read more about the CBSO’s 2025/26 season, visit the CBSO website. Click on the names for more on conductor Eduardo Strausser soprano Natalya Romaniw and composer Nina Shekhar

Published post no.2,791 – Saturday 7 February 2026

In Concert – Zoë Beyers, English Symphony Orchestra / Kenneth Woods: Vaughan Williams, Sawyers & Elgar @ Cheltenham Town Hall

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Zoë Beyers (violin, above), English Symphony Orchestra / Kenneth Woods

Vaughan Williams The Wasps (1909) – Overture
Sawyers Symphony no.6 ‘A Pastoral’ (2022) [World Premiere]
Elgar Violin Concerto in B minor Op.61 (1909-10)

Town Hall, Cheltenham
Sunday 1 February 2026

Reviewed by Richard Whitehouse Photo of Zoë Beyers (c) Bill Leighton

This afternoon’s concert in the second season of its Cheltenham residency found the English Symphony Orchestra tackling, appropriately enough, an all-English programme; the Overture from Vaughan Williams’s incidental music to The Wasps being an ideal curtain-raiser with its interplay of incisiveness and eloquence ideally judged. The performance was enhanced by an unerring balance that allowed such as Rita Schindler’s dextrous harp playing to register with real clarity. Hopefully the whole suite will appear at an ESO concert sometime in the future.

The music of Philip Sawyers has appeared frequently on ESO programmes this past decade, with his Third Symphony launching the orchestra’s 21st Century Symphony Project back in 2016. A decade on bought the premiere of his Sixth Symphony – less epic in scope than the Third or Fourth in this cycle and without the searching ambiguities of the Fifth, but a piece whose modest length (30 minutes) or forces (double woodwind, horns and trumpets) likely belie the emotional range of what is being played out across these four compact movements.

Its subtitle evidently an afterthought, ‘A Pastoral’ deftly characterizes this symphony audibly influenced by if never beholden to that by Beethoven. Hence the opening Moderato implies a journey whose destination seems at best uncertain, its accumulating tension carried over into an Andante where scenic aspect is countered with more subjective preoccupations. Nor is the Allegro of an unchecked jollity, the insistent rhythmic profile accumulating an impetus such as takes on more elemental qualities in its visceral latter stages. The final Allegretto surveys all that went before (whether motivically or emotionally) through a process of clarifying and honing earlier ideas towards an ending which, with its evocation of birdsong, affords closure but not catharsis. An ambivalence Sawyers will hopefully address in his Seventh Symphony.

Assuredly directed by Kenneth Woods (below), this first performance was almost all that could have been wished as to accuracy of ensemble or interpretive insight. Good to hear it was recorded for future release, and hopefully Sawyers’s Sixth will receive more hearings before too long.

After the interval, Zoë Beyers repeated what was a well-received account of Elgar’s Violin Concerto from last year’s Elgar Festival. With its opulent scale and solo part that had been conceived for Fritz Kreisler, this could never be other than a testing proposition but Beyers succeeded admirably in conveying that formal intricacy and expressive force which typify this work. The opening Allegro was rarely other than cohesive, thanks not least to Woods’s astute accompanying, and the Andante radiated an emotional warmth with no risk of undue emoting. Beyers had the measure of the lengthy finale, duly coming into her own with that accompanied cadenza such as reviews previous themes at an emotional remove and whose ambivalence resonated long after activity had been resumed on the way to a decisive close.

An engrossing performance which concluded this concert in impressive fashion. Woods and the ESO return to Cheltenham Town Hall next month with a new piece by David Matthews, alongside Mozart’s Sinfonia Concertante (for strings) and Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony.

To read more about the orchestra’s 2025/26 season, visit the English Symphony Orchestra website. Click on the names for more on violinist Zoë Beyers, conductor Kenneth Woods and composer Philip Sawyers

Published post no.2,786 – Monday 2 February 2026

On Record – BBC Philharmonic Orchestra / Michael Seal – Bliss: Miracle in the Gorbals, Metamorphic Variations (Chandos)

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BBC Philharmonic Orchestra / Michael Seal

Bliss
Miracle in the Gorbals, F6 (1944)
Metamorphic Variations, F122 (1972)

Chandos CHSA5370 [79’57”]
Producer Brian Pidgeon Engineers Stephen Rinker, Owain Williams (Miracle in the Gorbals), Amy Brennan (Metamorphic Variations)

Recorded 27 February 2025 (Metamorphic Variations), 1 March 2025 (Miracle in the Gorbals), MediaCity UK, Salford, Manchester

Reviewed by Richard Whitehouse

What’s the story?

Chandos issues the most important release of music by Arthur Bliss for the 50th anniversary of his death – coupling the second of his four ballets, in its new critical edition, with the last as well as the most ambitious of his orchestral works in what is its first complete recording

What’s the music like?

With its striking choreography from Robert Helpmann (after the story by Robert Benthall), Miracle in the Gorbals was initially even more successful than its predecessor Checkmate – being revived annually between 1944 and 1950. Other than a 1958 revival, however, there was no more stagings until that by Birmingham Royal Ballet in 2014; not least because the magic realism that transcends an otherwise grimly realistic scenario and struck a resonance in wartime Britain became passé soon afterward. Yet the quality of a score as finds Bliss at his most populist but also most uncompromising cannot be denied, and this new recording conveys these extremes in full measure. Hearing sections III (The Girl Suicide), X (Dance of Deliverance) and XV (The Killing of the Stranger) ought to banish any lingering doubts.

Premiered at Croydon’s Fairfield Halls during April 1973, Metamorphic Variations is Bliss’s lengthiest orchestral work. Shorter than intended, even so, with two sections being omitted at its first hearing and subsequently. This recording sees their belated and rightful reinstatement.

The three primary ideas are outlined in Elements: an oboe cantilena, a phrase for horns then strings, and a cluster from woodwind – melodic, rhythmic and harmonic possibilities that are explored intensively in what follows. The additional sections are an atmospheric Contrasts, whose absence has been to the detriment of overall balance, then a Children’s March which pivots from innocence to experience. Highlights include an increasingly animated Polonaise and Funeral Processions with its anguished culmination. Towards the close, a proclamatory Dedication duly underlines the inscription to artist George Dannatt and his wife Ann, then Affirmation draws those initial elements into a sustained peroration that pointedly subsides into a return of the oboe cantilena which, in turn, brings the closing withdrawal into silence.

Do the performances work?

Although the concert suite from Miracle in the Gorbals has received persuasive accounts by the composer (EMI/Warner) and Paavo Berglund (Warner), the complete ballet has only been recorded by Christopher Lyndon-Gee with the Queensland Symphony (Naxos) – compared to which this latest version, aside from its using the critical edition by Ben Earle, is superior in playing and recording. Here, as in Metamorphic Variations, the BBC Philharmonic responds assuredly to Michael Seal whose interpretative stance is distinctively his own. This latter has been recorded by Barry Wordsworth (Nimbus) and David Lloyd-Jones (Naxos), along with a broadcast from Vernon Handley (BBC Radio Classics), but the newcomer’s conviction gives it an advantage apart from those variations whose reinstatement enhances the work’s stature.

Is it recommended?

Very much so, not least given the spaciousness and realism of its SACD sound, together with informative notes from Ben Earle and Andrew Burn. Is it too much to hope Chandos will yet tackle either of Bliss’s operas which, along with The Golden Cantata, are his only significant works still to be commercially recorded? Michael Seal would be the ideal candidate to do so.

Listen / Buy

You can hear excerpts from the album and explore purchase options at the Chandos website, or you can listen to the symphonies on Tidal. Click on the names to read more about the Arthur Bliss Society, conductor Michael Seal and the BBC Philharmonic Orchestra

Published post no.2,783 – Friday 30 January 2026