Great to see that Festmusik: A Legacy is getting a lot of notice from the music press. Hot on the heels of the exemplary review from BBC Record Review, both Classical Music Magazine and the specialist brass website, 4Barsrest.com, awarded our Chandos recording 5 stars. Both reviews are very complementary about the title track with CM mentioning the “crackling attack” and 4BR commenting, “directed with lucid appreciation by John Wilson, performed with subtly defined degrees of burnished texture and chiaroscuro light and shade by the combined talents of some of the UKs finest brass players”
However both reviews pick out as highlights the arrangement of Strauss’ Zwei Gesänge with 4BR mentioning that it is the;
“crowning glory…packed to the rafters with expanded lineal phrases and rich harmonic progressions”
4Barsrest.com
Also Classical Music expands similarly:
“the playing in the arrangements of the Two Songs is extraordinary. How do human lungs sustain the vast phrases and endless pedal-points of Der Abend (Evening) – a golden, ten-minute drift of Straussian serenity? And, in Chandos’s typically full recorded acoustic, the sheer glory of sonority in the climaxes of the more eventful Hymne is quite overwhelming.”
Classical Music
To see the full reviews, follow the links below.