eMusic Review 0
If you thought that Harmonia Mundi only focused on the smaller-scale delights of the Baroque repertoire or period-instrument versions of "core" works, then here's a magnificent disc to adjust your preconceptions. Kent Nagano, not a conductor one immediately associates with long-breathed masterpieces of the High Romantic repertoire, gives us a Bruckner Sixth of magnificent control and vision. This is one of those works that seems to elude its interpreters — even such masters as Karajan and Haitink failed to give us a totally convincing account. Not so Nagano, who unfolds this large, muscular work with a fantastic ability to "land" a paragraph exactly where it should be. The Deutsches Symphony Orchestra of Berlin plays magnificently for its conductor. Maybe the acoustics of Berlin's Philharmonie, the Berlin Philharmonic's home, where both Karajan and Günter Wand wove Brucknerian magic, proved an inspiration.
