This latest recording of Respighi's Sinfonia drammatica (the third so far) is by a long way the best, and the consequence is that the work has never sounded more convincing. Of course Respighi doesn't so much reveal his influences as flaunt them: there are some moments which might almost be by Franck or Strauss, Rimsky-Korsakov or Scriabin, until you try to locate where Respighi borrowed them from. Nor does he make many bones about liking his own first movement so much that on finishing his development section he launches with unabated vigour into another. In the slow movement he's similarly so pleased with his adaptation of Franck's cyclic principle that you're almost surprised when he stops. Only in the finale does his ingenuity fail to disguise the fact that at one or two moments he hasn't much idea of what to do next.
To luxuriate in the piece as an hour of sumptuous textures and gigantic crescendos without worrying too much about its status as a major symphonic statement would be the obvious conclusion, were it not for two factors, both very clear in this outstandingly sympathetic reading, which seem to point in opposite directions. On the one hand it sounds scarcely like the familiar Respighi at all; puzzlingly, since his orchestral mastery is already mature and Fountains of Rome was written barely two years later. If this is in any sense a disappointment the emotional temperature of the symphony, on the whole dark, indeed dramatic, with many moments of tension and unease, is striking as an element of Respighi's personality that was only intermittently heard again, in the best of his operas. Is it a reaction to the darkness of the times (it was completed just before the outbreak of the First World War)? Whatever the impetus, it gives the symphony urgency at moments when it needs it, and a sense that Respighi, for all his indebtedness to others and his riskily distended structure, is engaged in something more earnest than mere orchestral self-indulgence.
I have not felt like this about the work before, and I attribute it to Sir Edward Downes's knack for jolting you into thinking again about pieces that are easy to patronize. This is a stunning performance, intensely responsive to the work's emotional core; it is most magnificently played and sumptuously recorded, and has such conviction to it that the indulgent smile (''poor old Respighi! Pretending to be a symphonist!'') is quite often wiped from one's face.'