The Minnesota Orchestra and Osmo Vänskä bring us Gustav Mahler’s Third Symphony, an extraordinary work by any standards. Scored for extended Wagnerian woodwind and brass sections, posthorn, a large array of percussion, women’s chorus, alto soloist and boys’ choir, the symphony has a duration of over 100 minutes and is filled with extreme emotion, revealing what the composer wanted to say about his own connection with nature and humanity’s place in it: ‘My symphony will be something the world has never heard before! The whole of nature will have a voice in it…’ he wrote about this mammoth work.

The Danish orchestra under Michael Schønwandt play clearly… Dietrich Henschel as the Harper and Roland Wagenführer as the Youth are both excellent.

The precision and polish of the ensemble in the playing of the conductorless Orpheus Chamber Orchestra remains a marvel. These performances follow up the success of the group's three previous DG discs of Haydn symphonies, but I am sorry that the pattern adopted last time of having three works coupled, representing different periods, has not been adopted again. The idea here is to couple one of the last of the ''London'' Symphonies with No. 78, one of three symphonies (Nos. 76-78) which represented a London contact in advance, intended as they were for possible performance in the Hanover Square Rooms.

Though born in Italy, Luigi Boccherini was based for most of his life in Madrid, where he played the cello and wrote more than a hundred string quintets. They’re perfectly formed from the simplest chords, and not without their touches of profundity. The cello sonatas sound at times too much like performers’ music. The explanation lies in changing styles of string technique and the rise of the piano, though Anner Bylsma’s playing gives them a new lease of life.

As ever, the conductor-less New York orchestra give lithe, impeccably groomed performances. Tempos tend to be swift, articulation exceptionally buoyant and precise, phrasing stylish and gracious. . . . [A]ll three minuets are beautifully judged, poised and light of foot . . . and the Andantes of the two D major symphonies are nicely done, too, with an awareness of deeper currents beneath the perky charm of No. 73. . . . [T]here's a lot of pleasure to be had from these nimble and elegantly crafted performances, cleanly recorded . . .

Marek Janowski, Music Director of the Suisse Romande Orchestra since 2004, has made an excellent recording for Pentatone with that orchestra–a coupling of symphonies of Franck and Chausson. With the Pittsburgh Symphony, he has recorded the four Brahms symphonies: Symphony No. 1, Symphonies 1 and 3, and Symphony No. 4. These Strauss performances were recorded live in Pittsburgh's Heinz Hall October/November 2008, produced and recorded by Job Maarse, who did a fine job.

During the first half of the nineteenth century Sigismund von Neukomm was one of Europe’s most highly regarded composers. Although he maintained an intimate artistic friendship with Joseph Haydn until the older composer’s death, he was a composer with a mind of his own and full of originality. This fact is very convincingly demonstrated by his four orchestral fantasies presented here which he termed an ‘Essay in a New Genre’. Here we encounter Sturm und Drang and anticipations of romanticism in their purest form.

Musical maverick Martin Fröst’s most ambitious Sony Classical release yet sees him as both clarinetist and conductor, joining soloists Lucas Debargue (piano), Ann Hallenberg (Mezzo-Soprano) and Elin Rombo (Soprano) and the Swedish Chamber Orchestra, of which he is chief conductor, in a double-album of masterpieces capturing the paradox of Mozart’s fragile existence and extraordinary creativity.

'Mendelssohn in Birmingham’ is an exciting new recording project with the CBSO and its Principal Guest Conductor, Edward Gardner. It celebrates Mendelssohn’s special relationship with the city’s Town Hall and will feature the complete symphonies recorded there. It was a venue much loved by Mendelssohn and saw him conduct many of his own works there, including premieres. ‘Mendelssohn in Birmingham’ also encompasses a major concert series at the Town Hall which will run alongside these recordings.

When Aram Khachaturian composed his Symphony-Poem in 1947 in search of new, contemporary forms of expression, he took a great risk. His idea of music for the modern Soviet man collided abruptly with the ideas of those who believed they had the right to decide on the limits of creative spirits and who had the power to enforce these ideas by any means. The result was that the symphonic poem for fifteen solo trumpets, organ and large orchestra disappeared from the scene for a decade and a half before it experienced its resurrection as the 'third symphony' now exactly sixty years ago and has since received ever greater attention.

For the second installment in his Mahler cycle for harmonia mundi, Daniel Harding revisits a symphony which clearly represents a turning point in the composer’s output. The years following Mahler’s early period (marked by Des Knaben Wunderhorn) saw the production of works of ever greater complexity and sardonicism, which show no trace of naïveté. Within a framework of utmost intricacy, the themes, musical gestures, and building blocks (for instance, the interval of a minor third which opens the Fifth Symphony’s famous Adagietto) trace a journey from darkness to light which culminates in the striking modernity of the finale.

It seems, and was, ages ago that I last reviewed a disc of Estonian Heino Eller's orchestral music. That disc from Bella Musica-Antes is still worth hunting down as it overlaps with this Ondine example only in relation to the single-movement 24-minute violin concerto. The Ondine recording is unflinchingly forward and vivid. Eller's Violin Concerto has about it much the same rhapsodic air as the concertos by Delius and Moeran and RVW's Lark.

The pre-eminent Lisztian of our day returns to Brilliant Classics for a symphonic sequel of transcriptions. In 2018, Brilliant Classics issued Leslie Howard and Mattia Ometta playing the 12 symphonic poems of Liszt in the composer's own transcriptions for piano duo (95748). The set won glowing reviews: 'Not only do Leslie Howard and Mattia Ometto navigate Liszt's technical challenges with fluency and ease,' wrote Jed Distler for Classics Today, 'but they also treat the scores seriously… Howard's excellent annotations and Brilliant Classics' budget price further clinch my recommendation for collectors.' As before, Leslie Howard supplies his own, invaluable insights to accompany this trio of symphonies in Liszt's transcriptions for piano duo. As with the symphonic poems,

45 years after his debut Philips recording of Beethoven’s 9th, Seiji Ozawa returns to this epic masterpiece. The Mito Chamber Orchestra features many international star players including Radek Baborák (horn), Ricardo Morales (clarinet) and Philippe Tondre (oboe). The German baritone Markus Eiche leads a quartet of leading Japanese soloists and the Tokyo Opera Singers in a fascinating performance on a chamber orchestra scale.

A fantasy that turned into a symphony? First and foremost, this double album enshrines the exemplary work of an ensemble whose designation 'Baroque Orchestra' by no means limits it's excursions into later repertories: under the watchful eye of a gifted conductor, the 'Freiburgers' (and co.) offer us a profoundly renewed vision of the Ninth, that myth among myths, that touchstone of a genre in quest of the absolute - and the direct descendant of a much earlier 'Choral Fantasy'. The latter work showcased one of Beethoven's most extraordinary talents: improvisation. Kristian Bezuidenhout has joined forces again with his concerto partners to let us experience this little-known score as if it had just been premiered… then transcribed by Beethoven himself!