Sir Simon Rattle's Bartokian credentials have never been better displayed on disc, while this particular version of The Miraculous Mandarin ballet is the best to have come my way since Antal Dorati's BBC SO Mercury recording from the 1960s (not to be confused with his earlier—and still unrivalled—Chicago Symphony version of the Suite). Here, tone and texture are securely on target, and I'm happy to report that those oddly elusive second and third trumpets at fig. 21 (which were curiously absent from at least three recent rivals) are here properly reinstated. Granted, the CBSO's playing might not have quite the finish of Leonard Slatkin's Saint Louis Symphony, but Colin Parr brings an appropriate suggestiveness (or perhaps I should say 'sleaze') to the ''Seduction Games'', the strings and winds project with impressive confidence throughout, the trumpets prior to ''The Chase'' are more rhythmically secure than most, and the various dramatic incidents that succeed the closing pages of the Suite (and which include some of Bartok's most powerful music for the stage) are given with a genuine sense of pathos. The chorus is well balanced, the percussion, too while Rattle himself drives all with a combination of animal vigour and teeming imagination. So, if you're after the complete ballet (a preferable option to the senselessly truncated Suite), then this is a definite first choice.
However the disc's main claim to distinction is a live recording of the Concerto for Orchestra that, for sheer character and communicative power, virtually sweeps the board certainly as far as the digital field is concerned. Right from the opening Andante non troppo, it is clear that everyone is wholly engaged in the task in hand. At 3'16'', Rattle intensifies the acceleration process so that the flight into Allegro vivace is especially exciting, whereas at 8'00'' a subtle crescendo over the movement's most exciting climax (where the entire wind and brass sections play flat out) stretches the dynamic capabilities of David Murray's excellent recording to the full. The ''Giuoco delle coppie'' reveals unusually clear pizzicatos, and although the brass paragraphs at 2'57'' (bar 123) are perhaps a little halting, Rattle's affectionate ritardando just prior to the main idea's return (4'05'') can't fail to raise a smile (and listen in particular to the bassoon thereafter).
The ''Elegia'' is especially intense, with a positively outraged return of the first movement's initial forte idea (1'57'')—the dotted trumpet lending a genuinely Magyar tang to the proceedings. Again, a rhapsodizing, folk-like spontaneity spices both the viola passages at 3'32'' and, most especially, its mirror image on the winds a little later. The closing minute or so of the ''Intermezzo'' is more tender than any other I've encountered in recent years, while the finale is full of witty incident: the trilling violas at 2'01'', the expressive divisi strings at 2'26'', the ensuing accelerando and fugue—every little variation played for all it's worth and the whole brimming over with life and energy. However, Rattle's most telling interpretative stroke occurs at 7'23'', that mysterious, curiously elusive piu presto passage that most other conductors treat like some sort of hybrid interpolation marking time until the final pages arrive.
Rattle, though, will have none of it: his reading betrays pin-point focusing, with intelligent phrasing, careful articulation and a sense of dramatic inevitability that lends the passage a new-found musical logic. The dosing moments are thrilling, with a lacerating final chord tailed by a grateful but hardly ecstatic volley of applause. If it had been from the Proms, the cheers and shouts would ~1 doubtless have been deafening—and for good reason. So take my advice and give this one a try: it certainly upstages its most recent predecessors.'