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Title: Workaday readings that badly need a pep pill
Review: Comparisons aren't odious when it comes to CDs, and this Bernstein collection from Marin Alsop, however well intended, is so laking in the composer's own verve and brio that the music emerges as almost unrecognizable. Strangley, Alsop bills herself as a Bersntein protegee -- did she bother to hear his riveting performances of Facsimile and the Serenade after Plato's Symposium? Every rhythmn is smoothed out and flattened. The exuberance has been drained out and replaced with soggy respectability. Alsop's Bournemouth forces are clueless about the American idiom, and if you take a cursory listen to readings of the Serenade done by Perlman and (especially) Isaac Stern, Philippe Quint seems like pretty weak tea.In short, the positive reviews below seem incomprehensible to me. Do these people like jazz played by Mantovani strings? They must.
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