Michael Stern and the Kansas City Symphony’s One Movement Symphonies recording gets a Five Star review from BBC Music Magazine:
“this orchestra offers here a classy standard of playing, plus the conductor-and-orchestra chemistry that’s needed to generate musical results as memorable as these, and in three very different works. … The Kansas players respond superbly to [Samuel Barber’s] virtuoso drive and momentum, with a burnished fullness of tone which also brings out the best qualities of Scriabin’s The Poem of Ecstasy. This is music that can easily degenerate into a narcissistic orchestral debauch; here, on the contrary, Michael Stern’s deft command of tempo-switches and the orchestra’s quicksilver response reveals a shimmering tour de force. …the finest listening experience comes in Sibelius’s last and perhaps greatest symphony. …some special orchestral playing, with an emotional charge that’s both unexaggerated and full-hearted.”
—Michael Beek, BBC Music Magazine