My colleagues have not been especially enthusiastic about Seiji Ozawa’s other Philips recordings with the Saito Kinen Orchestra. There has been an “uneventful” Unfinished Symphony with an uneven Beethoven Seventh (7/95), and an Oedipus Rex with unconvincing balance and “crude edges” (3/94). On the other hand, if you have shared CH’s admiration of the “passion and strength” in Tchaikovsky’s Serenade in C (9/94) you might well feel no less positive about these aspects of Ozawa’s way with Schoenberg and Stravinsky on this new CD.
Passion and strength are certainly in evidence in Verklarte Nacht. Indeed, they dominate to such an extent that the overall effect is dangerously relentless. Even when the score asks for calmness and repose Ozawa continues to mould the music without respite. This is an overtly conducted performance, with none of those echoes of the score’s chamber-music origins which I have admired in accounts by the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra or the Sinfonia Varsovia.
Apollo is also shaped and sculpted bar by bar, but here Ozawa’s approach is well suited to the music’s inimitable blend of the artificial and the heartfelt. It’s not the most balletic nor the most Olympian of performances – Sir Simon Rattle on EMI still holds the palm in those respects – but it has an appealing expressive warmth, despite the rather dry acoustic.
This chalk-and-cheese coupling is supplemented by a gentle account of the Capriccio Prelude, played by a string sextet. The Saito Kinen Orchestra achieve a high level of technical competence throughout, but the sound quality is all too consistently on the bright, even harsh side.'