Gliere: Symphony No. 3 "Il'ya Murometz.".(Sound Recording Review)

Leon Botstein, London Symphony Orchestra. Telarc CD-80609.

It's always good to see someone pushing the envelope, you know? Every time I pick up a new Telarc disc, they always seem to be doing just that. Not that I usually hear much difference for all their innovation, but in audiophile land I guess that's beside the point. Anyway, here they use the new Sony/Philips DSD recording system, Direct Stream Digital, which is supposed to be better than sliced bread. More on the sound in a minute.

Russian composer (born in Ukraine) Rienhold Gliere (1875-1956), perhaps best known for his 1927 ballet The Red Poppy, wrote his massive Third Symphony some sixteen years earlier, but he had already attained a remarkable maturity, if not creativity. Gliere was one of those guys who took little heed of the Russian Revolution and fit right in with the new Stalinist regime that followed, being a rather conservative fellow by nature. His Symphony shows it. While much of the musical world was following the sweeping changes of Stravinsky, Gliere was content to do amalgams of such Romantics as Wagner, Rimsky-Korsakov, and Richard Strauss.

Not to worry. His Third Symphony, titled "Il'ya Murometz" after a Russian folk hero, is filled with charming, if sometimes repetitious bits and pieces of older tunes, legends, tone poems, and such, filling out over seventy-two minutes of music making. The four movements that comprise the symphonic story are really little miniatures that tell episodes in the life of the hero, much as we observe in his compatriot Rimsky-Korsakov's Scheherazade. The extended first movement--quiet and still at the beginning, rising to a persuasive climax--tells of Il'ya's introduction to the world of mighty heroes after sitting on a stove all his life (don't ask). The second, an Andante of equally prodigious length, tells of his adventures with Solovei, the brigand. The third movement, a relatively short Scherzo, continues Il'ya's exploits "At the Court of Vladimir the Mighty Sun." And the work concludes with a long Finale that tells of the hero's death and petrification.

None of it is particularly thrilling, but much of it is fun, having as it does it moments of light repose and its scheduled moments of climactic grandeur. Maestro Leon Botstein and the London Symphony Orchestra present all of it in high academic style, to be sure, but with a degree of fizz, too, with the presentation's ...