The Norwegian Chamber Orchestra, now 10 years old, has been described by no less than Rostropovich as ''one of the great ensembles of today'', and this recording supports his enthusiastic advocacy. The playing is warm and agile rhythmically precise but not rigid, and the Simax recording itself, though made in a rather reverberant church, is bright and sharply focused.
Iona Brown has been the ensemble's Artistic Director since 1981 and has obviously fired them with her own enthusiasm for Britten's Frank Bridge Variations, which receives a truly virtuoso performance but one that is imbued with a real feeling for its remarkable range of emotions. Observance of dynamics is scrupulous, the tracery of the inner parts is audible but within the context of the whole, and there is immaculate intonation in the most difficult passages. Particularly impressive are the playing and interpretation of the ''Wiener Walzer'', with its ghostly middle section (which must have sounded uncomfortably prophetic at its first performance in Salzburg in 1937) and the icy harmonies in ''Chant''. But the whole performance is no less a triumph than Hickox's CD with the Northern Sinfonia on ASV.
The orchestra's warm tone is heard to great advantage in the touching slow (first) movement of the Mozart Divertimento, K137/125b and there is a very successful account of Tchaikovsky's Serenade, the Elegy being most gracefully phrased and the Waltz exhilarating in its verve. I enjoyed this disc very much and so will you.'