4 SACDs for the price of 3

Singapore Symphony Orchestra
Lan Shui, conductor

• Release Date: 5th Feb 2021
• Format: SACD-Hybrid
• Catalogue No: BIS-2512 SACD
• Label: BIS
• Total Time: 4 hours 59 minutes (4 discs)
  

REVIEWs:
"Sound quality shoots up quite a few notches for Rachmaninov's 'Symphonics and Orchestral Music' featuring the excellent Singapore Symphony Orchestra under the assured leadership of Lan Shui, sessions stretching from 2001 to 2015 that securely disprove the tiresome myth that the best performances of a particular composer always originate from his/her country of origin- In fact, the most striking aspect of this set is that the performances sound so Russian, less in tone than in a deep-rooted sense of melancholy." - Gramophone, May 2021

"Shui is utterly at home in music which both paints such vivid pictures and explores the full resources of his orchestra, and this is a sumptuously tailored performance" - Music Web International, Feb 2021 

SERGEI RACHMANINOV (1873 - 1943)
Disc 1 
Symphony No. 1 in D minor, Op. 13
Symphonic Movement in D minor
Prince Rostislav

Disc 2 
Symphony No. 2 in E minor, Op. 27
Vocalise, Op. 34 No. 14

Disc 3 
Symphony No. 3 in A minor, Op. 44
Symphonic Dances, Op. 45

Disc 4
The Rock, Op. 7
Four excerpts from the opera Aleko
Capriccio bohémien, Op. 12
Scherzo in D minor
Prelude to the opera The Miserly Knight Op. 24
The Isle of the Dead, Op. 29

Sergei Rachmaninov was one of the twentieth century’s outstanding pianists, but the large body of purely orchestral music he composed is no less an expression of his musical character. His great strength was that he managed to preserve intact a vision he had discovered very early in life. This contemporary of Schoenberg, Scriabin, Ravel and Ives was unconcerned with musical fashions and had no wish to be a pioneer. Instead, and over a period of half a century he refined and deepened a language which derived naturally from his late-nineteenth-century Russian background. With this four-disc box set, the Singapore Symphony Orchestra and Lan Shui present a comprehensive collection of Rachmaninov’s music for orchestra – from the Scherzo in D minor, his first surviving piece for orchestra, completed just before his fifteenth birthday to the canonical works: the Symphonies and the Symphonic Dances.

The recordings were made between 2008 and 2015, with the three symphonies (previously released on separate discs) described as ‘eine formidable Gesamteinspielung’ on the website Pizzicato. But there is much more to Rachmaninov’s orchestral music besides the symphonies, and this box offers the listener opportunity to explore the young composer’s fascination with Gypsy themes (in the excerpts from the opera Aleko and Capriccio bohémien) as well as his lifelong preoccupation with death, in the form of the four notes of the Dies irae plainchant motif. This is heard again and again in Rachmaninov’s music, up until his very last work, the Symphonic Dances, where, at the very end of the third and final dance, this symbol of death is finally laid to rest. (www.bis.se)