BBC Music Mag Awards
The votes are in! Find out if your favourite nominated disc has won a coveted award
IN DECEMBER LAST YEAR we gathered together our jury of expert critics and members of the magazine editorial team for a day devoted to the best classical recordings of 2016. They had been tasked with the enjoyable but undoubtedly sizeable job of listening to every disc given five stars in BBC Music
Magazine last year. Now the job was to whittle down the hundreds of CDS to just 21, three in each of seven categories. After much debate, we got there. The wonderfully varied lists of nominees were revealed in the February issue, and we invited you to vote for your favourites.
And thousands of you voted. Several of the categories were very close but seven clear winners emerged, to which our jury added awards for Premiere, Newcomer, DVD and the overall Recording of the Year. So, here in full are the winners of the twelth annual BBC Music Magazine Awards. And don’t forget you can head to our website at classicalmusic.com/awards to hear tracks from all the winning recordings.
‘I always read that the RLPO is one of the most Russian orchestras outside of Russia,’ says Petrenko. ‘What the musicians bring is discipline, which is as important as emotion in Tchaikovsky, and a very special sound. We’ve developed the string sound in Russian music over the past decade but also the brass and woodwind are outstanding in this recording. It’s a combination of two cultures and two countries which gives such results.’
Tchaikovsky has always been important to Petrenko. ‘The composer’s Children’s Album was on the table of every Russian family for their kids to study,’ he explains. He has since recorded plenty of the composer’s orchestral music – ballet excerpts, concertos, overtures – with his Liverpool ensemble. But there was a particularly special reason for programming the six symphonies for the orchestra’s 175th anniversary season – both Tchaikovsky and the RLPO were born in 1840. ‘For me Tchaikovsky is not just the cry of emotions. He was a philosopher,’ ref lects Petrenko. ‘He had a lot of thoughts about the fate of Russia and about his own fate. I’m very glad that this orchestra and the audience here recognised him as a thinker. It’s a very special feeling to play this music in Liverpool.’
‘Symphonies Nos 4, 5 and 6, and Manfred, are for me like a process. Tchaikovsky is exploring mortality,’ says Petrenko. ‘In No. 4 there’s a clear victory of life over death. In Manfred, death is a revelation. He peacefully dies. In No. 6, there’s a clear feeling that this is it. It’s a way of acknowledging the power of death in music.’ So how does the ever-popular Fifth Symphony fit in to this narrative? ‘No. 5 is in the middle. It starts with thoughts about the essence of being human, and the very end is questioning: is it a victory of life or death? It can be read both ways,’ explains Petrenko. ‘It also has all the beautiful waltzes and different aspects of life and society that Tchaikovsky had seen at that time. It’s not just sitting in a small room, it is also living a full life, bearing in mind the fact that the clocks are ticking.’
Yet it wasn’t just the originality of Petrenko’s approach to the Fifth that stunned BBC
Music Magazine’s critic David Nice when he reviewed the album in October 2016. He also loved the ‘bright-eyed approach to less familiar works’ – the First and Second Symphonies. ‘They are certainly more rarely played,’ agrees Petrenko. ‘And I think the reason is that they are hard. No. 1 is simply so transparent. It’s in some ways close to Mendelssohn and Schumann. No. 2 needs a lot of power and special “Little Russian” – Ukrainian – colour. The border between finding a lot of colours and being vulgar is very narrow. We worked very hard on these aspects.’
The recordings were made around the live symphony cycle, not always easy given that the Philharmonic Hall was just opening after refurbishment. ‘There was a lot of dust!’ laughs Petrenko. ‘But I was so grateful to the orchestra who were on my side and the side of music. All credit to the recording team too. I would also like to give my gratitude to everyone who voted for us and to everyone who has already got the CD. And if they haven’t yet, then they are in for a treat!’
‘Tchaikovsky had a lot of thoughts about the fate of Russia’