Berg: Lulu Suite: Three Orchestral Pieces: Efraty/RCO/Gatti

(RCO Live)

4 / 5

  1. Berg
  2. Lulu Suite: Three Orchestral Pieces
  3. Efraty/RCO/Gatti
  4. RCO Live
  1. £12.99
  2. 2008
  3. Buy CD

UK audiences tend to think of Daniele Gatti as the painstaking orchestral trainer who has spent the last decade or so rescuing the Royal Philharmonic from their notorious decline in the 1990s. On the European mainland, however, his reputation is considerably more starry, especially for his work with the Royal Concertgebouw. This beautiful disc from the orchestra's own label gives us some indication why. Gatti's Berg is very much post-Romantic rather than proto-modernist, with the Mahlerian influences emphasised. In the Three Orchestral Pieces, however, he generates shocking intensity throughout: the work dates from 1915, and here you really do feel you've been witness to the wartime dissolution of a world. The Lulu Suite is altogether more equivocal. Sensationally played, it's languid, sleazy and very erotic - but the soprano solos are tremulously done by Anat Efraty, while Gatti is either unable or unwilling to go to extremes when both music and subject get really violent.

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