What to stream from the Houston Symphony
Jones Hall may be dark for the foreseeable future, but lovers of the Houston Symphony need not despair. The orchestra has accrued an impressive catalog of recordings that spans a half century and features many of its most celebrated music directors. The major streaming services offer two dozen or so examples, but the following stood out for a variety of reasons — which, let’s be honest, largely come down to personal taste.
Shostakovich, Symphony No. 11 (1958; reissued 1994)
Under his leadership from 1955 to 1961, the British-born Leopold Stokowski lent the symphony a bit of celebrity cachet because of his long tenure with the Philadelphia Orchestra and appearance in Walt Disney’s “Fantasia.” This U.S. premiere is Houston Symphony CEO John Mangum’s choice for his orchestra’s favorite recording. “The piece sounds tailor-made for conductor and orchestra,” he says. “The performance is thoroughly exciting and totally committed, and it refracts Shostakovich’s musical storytelling through a Hollywood lens, with playing of sweep and glamour.”
Available: Apple Music, Spotify
Bartók, Concerto for Orchestra (1960)
Premiered in 1944, this fivepart suite quickly became one of the Hungarian composer’s best-known works for its elusive melodies and ingenious orchestration; each pair of wind instruments in the bustling second movement, which Bartok called “Game of Pairs,” is scored at a different interval. Stokowski and the orchestra tackle the concerto with aplomb, exploring the score’s variety of textures to the fullest while illuminating its complex moods.
Available: Apple Music, Spotify
Burt Bacharach, ‘Woman’ (1979)
Undoubtedly the most peculiar entry in the orchestra’s discography is this live-recording collaboration with the orchestral-pop mastermind and songwriter behind “The Look of Love,” etc. Heavy on easy-listening ambience and smooth-jazz flourishes, “Woman” sounds horribly dated but has its merits; Carly Simon croons the evocative ballad “I Live in the Woods.” An acquired taste, to be sure, but worth a listen out of sheer curiosity alone.
Available: Apple Music, Spotify
Richard Strauss, Four Last Songs, etc. (1996)
Renee Fleming’s haunting soprano anchors an ethereal and sublime interpretation of Strauss’ musical valediction, completed a year before the long-lived German composer’s death in 1949. (He was 85.) Christoph Eschenbach and the orchestra tack on four more art songs that explore earthier matters — motherhood, nature — and a performance of the orchestral suite from “Rosenkavalier,” which condenses Strauss’ comic opera into 25 minutes of cavorting horns and a grand waltz or two.
Available: Apple Music, Spotify
Violin Concertos of John Adams & Phillip Glass (1999)
Soloist Robert McDuffie’s iridescent technique animates these complementary concertos by the American minimalist icons. In the Adams, from 1993, he plays the role of nomad, swooshing and scraping his way through hollow corridors and airy canyons. The Glass, premiered six years earlier, casts McDuffie as more of a heroic, soulful seeker. Eschenbach and his ensemble, meanwhile, wisely lie low unless called upon for well-placed pizzicato or stray eruptions of percussion.
Available: Apple Music
Mahler, ‘Das Lied von der Erde’ (2011)
Conductor Hans Graf, mezzosoprano Jane Henschel and tenor Gregory Kunde navigate the fraught emotional territory of Mahler’s autumnal work, which Leonard Bernstein once called the Austrian composer’s “greatest symphony.” Its six movements — including a whopping 30-minute finale — cycle through seasons of pastoral pleasantness and murkier moments of unbearable pain. Mahler never lived to see “Das Lied” performed, but Graf and company do justice to its formidable legacy.
Available: Apple Music, Spotify
Alban Berg, ‘Wozzeck’ (2017)
It took five years to come out, but in 2018 the orchestra won its first Grammy Award for this live recording of Berg’s innovative 1925 opera about an ineffectual German soldier whose life becomes a living hell. Underneath dynamic performances by soprano Anne Schwanewilms and baritone Roman Trekel, Berg’s atonal, unforgiving score mirrors the brutal and tragic plot — which Graf and the orchestra bring to life with music that is often, appropriately, the stuff of nightmares.
Available: Apple Music, Spotify
Dvorák: Symphony No. 9, etc. (2017)
Better known by its subtitle, “From the New World,” the Czech-born composer’s 1893 musical account of his travels in America remains one of the biggest crowd-pleasers in the modern repertoire. Led by current music director Andrés Orozco-Estrada, the symphony’s performance — lyrical, vibrant, thrilling — invests this old warhorse with the vitality it deserves. The same composer’s Slavonic Dances No. 3 and 5 make for zesty and fun encores.
Available: Apple Music, Spotify
Music of the Americas (2018)
Speaking of the New World, Orozco-Estrada and his players use this musical travelogue to revel in the Western hemisphere. The album opens with Mexican composer Silvestre Revueltas’ sensual 1937 tone poem “Sensemayá” before heading farther south for tango maestro Astor Piazzolla’s stirring “Tangazo: Variations on Buenos Aires,” then jetting off to Europe for George Gershwin’s saucy and debonair “An American in Paris.” The centerpiece, however, is Leonard Bernstein’s symphonic dances from “West Side Story,” full of swooning romance and streetsmart swagger. But where’s Canada?
Available: Apple Music, Spotify