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Title: A trial run for Rattle and the Berliners--pretty impressive
Review: If you don't believe in Liszt's Faust Symphony as serious music, you have to at least give it blood and guts. Otherwise the piece turns into a travesty and a bore. In this 1994 live appearnace in Berlin, a decade before he was appointed music director, Simon Rattle approaches the vulgarity a bit too daintily, much as Riccardo Chailly does.There's not much to choose between them. Chailly gets better sound from Decca, and the Concergebouw sounds wonderful. EMI gives Rattle quite good sound, though, and he seems a bit more committed than Chailly, more mysterious in parts of the first movement ("Faust") perhaps a bit less romantic in the second ("Gretchen"), and more sprightly in the third ("Mephistopheles").If you want a reading of fineese, this is a good choice, but it doesn't shake the world. For that, one must go to Bernstein or Horenstein.
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