Ralph Moore has a new rave review for Manfred Honeck and the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra’s Brahms: Symphony No. 4 and MacMillan: Larghetto for Orchestra recording:
“From the way Honeck asks his orchestra to lean into the very first note, beseechingly and growing out of a whispered sigh, you know that this is a deeply thought out performance. Grand, stately, very “masculine” this recording is nonetheless lyrically flowing with its sights firmly set on the final movement – the apotheosis of its genre which is, of course, that of variations. … it is the fourth movement which crowns this recording. Honeck strives to make sense of Brahms’s desperate striving for an apt resolution to the thirty disparate variations of the passacaglia. Honeck and the Pittsburgh SO exhibit phenomenal power and intensity in their execution, making as coherent and compelling a case as possible for the strange composition of the movement; its violent culmination is almost shocking in its power and brevity. The Larghetto for Orchestra by James Macmillan makes an interesting pendant to the Brahms symphony.… I enjoy it… The clarity of this recording is miraculous: every strand of instrumentation is pellucid”
—Ralph Moore, MusicWeb International