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Site review by Castor October 14, 2006
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Performance: Sonics (MC): |
This is the second version of Grainger’s ‘The Warriors - music to an imaginary ballet for orchestra and three pianos’ to appear on SACD. The first by John Eliot Gardiner and the Philharmonia on DGG was somewhat bizarrely coupled with Holst’s The Planets, the rather contrived link being Balfour Gardiner, who was a friend and champion of Holst and father of the conductor John Eliot Gardiner.
The present disc is, more logically, an all Grainger programme and as well as The Warriors contains amongst other things the lovely four movement ‘Danish Folk-Music Suite’ and four world premier recordings including ‘Beautiful Fresh Flower’, a Chinese melody used by Puccini in Turandot and here played in an interesting, if quirky arrangement, for strings, vibraphone and tam-tam by a fellow Australian composer Peter Sculthorpe.
Geoffrey Simon and the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra give terrific performances of all the varied pieces on offer. There is little to choose between the performances of Gardiner and Simon in The Warriors. Both recordings are superbly vivid capturing the wildness of the music and unravelling the complex details of the scoring that includes a variety bells, wooden and steel marimbas etc., although the off-stage brass is more realistically balanced on the DGG recording.
I have seen The Warriors described as ‘noisy, eclectic tosh’. Eclectic it is, with echoes of Strauss, Ives and Stravinsky, but for a more considered view of its musical worth see the review by ‘seth’ of the DGG version Holst: The Planets, Grainger: The Warriors - Gardiner.
The original recording was made in 1989, a joint production between the Australian Broadcasting Corporation and Koch. It has now been re-mastered for SACD and a multi-channel version skilfully and very successfully created by Phil Rowlands. The order of the pieces has been altered from that on the Koch CD and a few errors in the excellent booklet notes have also been corrected.
If you thought that Percy Grainger was only a folksong miniaturist who just wrote pieces like ‘Country Gardens and ‘Molly on the Shore’ then this SACD will come as a revelation.
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Copyright © 2006 Graham Williams and SA-CD.net
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