Symphony No. 2 in E minor, Op. 27 (with Liadov - The Enchanted Lake, Op. 62)

Since his appointment as chief conductor and later music director in 2003, Andrew Litton and the Bergen Philharmonic Orchestra have richly proven a particular affinity for Russian repertoire, both on their numerous tours and in recording. Works by Prokofiev, Stravinsky, Rachmaninov, Tchaikovsky, Medtner and Scriabin have featured on discs that have garnered much critical acclaim. Marking the occasion of Litton's departure is this rendition of Sergei Rachmaninov's gigantic Second Symphony, with its playing time of 60+ minutes as broad and expansive as the Russian steppes. The work followed upon a first symphony which in 1897 had had a disastrous reception, and it took the intensely self-critical Rachmaninov ten years before making another attempt at the genre. Fortunately the first performance of the work in 1908 was a complete success, the broad melodic gestures and the arduous journey from the brooding melancholy of the symphony's introduction to the triumphant liberation at its close speaking directly to the St Petersburg audience. Later criticism of the symphony's broad scale prompted Rachmaninov to sanction several cuts, however, and it was only in the mid-1960s that it became common practice to perform the symphony complete - as in the present recording. Rachmaninov is joined on the disc by his older colleague Anatoly Liadov, whose brief and shimmering tone poem The Enchanted Lake provides an atmospheric ending to the recording - in the words of Liadov himself - an image of nature, as 'fantastic as a fairy tale', in which the listener will feel 'the change of the colours, the chiaroscuro, the incessantly changeable stillness…'