Editor’s Choice Orchestral Recording – August 2015
★★★★½

After some wonderful recordings for Chandos with the BBC Symphony Orchestra and the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra, Edward Gardner here continues the series he began as the newly-appointed Chief Conductor of the Bergen Philharmonic Orchestra with a second volume devoted to Janácek’s orchestral works.

For this listener at least, the highlight of the first volume (CHSA5142) – and this despite superlative accounts of the Sinfonietta and The Cunning Little Vixen Suite – wasn’t an orchestral work at all, but the gorgeous Capriccio for piano left hand, flute/piccolo, two trumpets, three trombones and tenor tuba. I put that down partly to novelty – I wasn’t familiar with the piece – and partly to the refined pianism of Jean-Efflam Bavouzet, who even with one hand tied behind his back, so to speak, cannot suppress a characteristically Gallic lyricism.

There’s something of Bavouzet’s precision in violinist James Ehnes’s fearless, fluent negotiation of extremes of interval and register in Janácˇek’s chamber-like ‘violin concerto’ The Wandering of a Little Soul – actually a realisation by Miloš Šteˇdronˇ and Leoš Faltus (the same team who reconstructed...