Michael Stern and the Kansas City Symphony’s Brahms Reimagined Orchestrations recording receives a strong recommendation from Gramophone Magazine in the August 2024 issue:
“Listening to these polished performances, I marvel that the Kansas City Symphony was founded as recently as 1981. Kudos, then, to Michael Stern, who’s stepping down as music director after 19 seasons, for helping to make the KCS a worthwhile destination on the musical map. Indeed, given Reference Recording’s crystalline sound (courtesy of Keith O Johnson’s engineering wizardry), which leaves absolutely nowhere to hide, the orchestra’s account of Schoenberg’s arrangement of Brahms’s G minor Piano Quartet is most impressive…
What a stroke of genius… to include Virgil Thomson’s orchestration of Brahms’s Eleven Chorale Preludes. Like Schoenberg, Thomson occasionally utilises percussion instruments Brahms never employed, like the chimes in No 4, ‘Herzlich tut mich erfreuen’, although this is subtly done. Here and there he’ll also emphasise some of the music’s rhythmic quirks (syncopations, hemiolas), and while I’m not sure this fits with the contemplative spirit of the original, it enlivens the listening experience nonetheless. Thomson’s arrangements alone make this spectacularly recorded album well worth hearing.”
—Andrew Farach-Colton, Gramophone