Tour de France Musicale / Kreizberg, Netherlands Philharmonic Buy Cheap Low Cost

This is a hybrid Super Audio CD playable on both regular and Super Audio CD players.

Kreizberg’s way with this delectable French program on PentaTone is less fine and airy than Paavo Järvi’s approach to the Impressionists in recent Telarc SACDs. Kreizberg demands a sound that is more voluptuous, and his Netherlands woodwinds don’t generally “float” as gently as Järvi’s in Cincinnati; their presence is much more palpable, which is a matter of playing as much as recording. The final pages of Daphnis, for example, are wilder than anything Järvi allows himself in this repertoire.

Which is not to say that Kreizberg and the Netherlands Philharmonic are inappropriately beefy or over-aggressive. Their way with Fauré’s Pelléas, for example, is quite lovely, the Prélude mournful, then wistful, and the Sicilienne delicate but not too slow, with a nice emphasis on the languidly erotic inner voices. Debussy’s faun has a slow and dreamy but not drowsy afternoon. Insofar as anyone can do anything with Boléro other than let it play out, Kreizberg maintains a medium tempo, and what initially are somewhat ordinary solos gain character as the piece progresses.

Of particular interest here is Percy Grainger’s arrangement of La vallée des cloches in a Westernized gamelan style. This initially seems misguided; Ravel did write a few gamelan-inspired “Asian” pieces, but this isn’t one of them—what we have here is a meditation on mysterious, pastoral European church bells. Yet Grainger scored the piece with undeniable beauty, featuring the delicate tones of celesta, marimba, vibraphone, tubular bells, and piano strings struck by sticks. PentaTone reproduces this with exquisite immediacy, making this a perfect SACD demonstration track when the demonstration is about timbral fidelity rather than loudness or surround effects.

All in all, whereas Järvi is likely to caress this sort of music, Kreizberg wraps himself in it. How fortunate that we don’t have to settle for one approach or the other.

James Reel, FANFARE