Wednesday, April 30, 2014


“Since Vasily Petrenko and the Liverpudlians haven't disappointed in any instalment of their Shostakovich cycle so far, the chances were they would excel here. And they do. A special coup at the start is the high-frequency shock...Petrenko drives weird sounds to appropriate extremes...The many wild climaxes are exceptionally vivid.” --BBC Music Magazine, December 2013 *****

Gramophone Magazine Disc of the Month - November 2013



“Petrenko makes following its thought processes, its phantasmagorical journeying between worlds so much easier. He makes perfect sense of the seemingly senseless...The skewed logic of the piece is made gripping, the disparate and the enigmatic reconciled.” --Gramophone Magazine, November 2013

“the Liverpool players get around the enormous technical challenges with great verve, and the self-destructive climaxes are never shirked. But there's a brittleness to how Petrenko treats some of the episodes...Much of his reading, though, is spot-on” --The Guardian, 3rd October 2013 ****

“Haitink has acknowledged that the Fourth “is a difficult work to handle and has to be kept on a leash”. Petrenko echoes that view in this performance; the proportions and sometimes wild discourse are held in perspective. But it also tempers punch with sensitivity” --The Telegraph, 31st October 2013 ****

“Petrenko’s exhilarating and powerfully emotional performance maintains the high standard of earlier instalments of this remarkable cycle.” --Sunday Times, 3rd November 2013

0 comments:

Post a Comment

Subscribe to RSS Feed Follow me on Twitter!