We do hope that Members will forgive its slight incline and that the Copyright Fairy will see fit to consider it as Fair Use...

Should sound quality not be the be-all and end-all then the Beethoven Quartet's recording is from memory really quite searing although probably even harder to come by than the Borodin version. The Fitzwilliam are also very fine indeed and there the sound is superb although you do have to live with a most unfortunate wrong note in the Serenade which gives an octave in what is supposed to be a 12-note series.

I've recently had the joy of listening to two recordings of the 15th Symphony discussed here and elsewhere recently - Kondrashin's live Dresden Staatskapelle performance and the Melodiya Rozhdestvensky one. Both of them struck me as quite gripping in very different ways - the very ending of the Kondrashin was a real ear-opener, being so much slower than any other performance I've heard; it made it in some ways more mysterious and sinister. I don't have a recording date for the Rozhdestvensky, but it's obviously more recent. The balance takes a while to get used to, with the percussion right under your nose, but I very much enjoyed the immediacy of it, although it's not a real reflection of a concert performance balance you might experience. I found the Adagio especially fine and the timbre of the USSR Ministry of Culture brass wonderful.

The third of the Romances to verses by English poets, Makferson pered kazn'ju (MacPherson before his Execution), was immediately recognisable as the tune later used in his 13th Symphony, Babi Yar.

I found the Burns original on the The Lied and Art Song website:

McPherson's Farewell

Farewell, ye dungeons dark and strong,
   The wretch's destinie!
 McPherson's time will not be long,
   On yonder gallows-tree.

         Chorus
 Sae rantingly, sae wantonly,
   Sae dauntingly gae'd he:
 He play'd a spring, and danc'd it round
   Below the gallows-tree.

 O what is death but parting breath?
   On many a bloody plain
 I've dar'd his face, and in this place
   I scorn him yet again!
 Sae rantingly, sae wantonly...

 Untie these bands from off my hands,
   And bring to me my sword;
 And there 's no a man in all Scotland,
   But I'll brave him at a word.
 Sae rantingly, sae wantonly...

 I've liv'd a life of sturt and strife;
   I die by treacherie:
 It burns my heart I must depart
   And not avenged be.
 Sae rantingly, sae wantonly...

 Now farewell, light, thou sunshine bright,
   And all beneath the sky!
 May coward shame distain his name,
   The wretch that dares not die!
 Sae rantingly, sae wantonly...

Has anyone heard the live Rozhdestvensky 4th on BBC Legends?

IGI

Glad you enjoyed the GR 15th and yes that is teh tune from the 13th, isn't it?

I have the Praga GR 4th, which I find very gripping..

Hi 338,

Thanks for your comments. I'm intending to continue to the third movement, though this has been side-tracked by discovering the Adagio Fragment which was intended to form part of the original 4th symphony, until the composer stopped in mid-flight and started again, apparently from scratch. It's been recorded twice, so far as I'm aware, and is included in the live LSO/Rostropovich double set of 4 and 15 on Andante, which I have, and the Caetani recording of 4, which I've not yet heard. I'm aware that it has some bearing on the completed symphony which followed it (a whole section appears in the third movement, and just where it stops there's the germ of the vitally important bassoon theme from the first movement), and have been on a hunt for a score for some while now. I finally located one at a decent price in the States a few weeks back, and quite by chance it has arrived today.

 I'll need to backtrack to this fragment before moving on to the third movement, being already aware that the opening notes - A to D, Bb to Eb on a solo unaccompanied viola - encompass the main intervals that pervade the eventual 4th symphony: semitones, perfect fourths and diminished fifths, and that there are oddities in its scoring - such as the requirement for an Eb clarinet, three bassoons and a contra-bassoon, four trumpets, eight horns and two tubas - which are shared with the replacement symphony. The volume also includes pages which were omitted from the final fragment, so I'll need to have a look through those to see if anything else was carried over to the completed 4th.

This may take some time....

Hi Ron,
             I have dug out 3 of my old cassette recordings of DSCH 4 of which one ties up with the original start to the first m.It is a recording I made of a live concert from the Barbican on 26/2/98.It is by the LSO-Rostropovich and after a short intro Rostropovich makes a speech introducing the first attempt at the first movement(as far as DSCH got).They then play the fragment before carrying on with the 4th as we know it today.I had forgotten I had the recording and I have today transferred it to CD in the best quality I could manage.I also transferred a live RPO-Ashkenazy(13/11/88) concert and a live BBCSO-Lazarev(5/11/92) concert.Unfortunatly I had to turn the tapes over at about 45mins so there are a few seconds missing at that point.I don't know why I did not record to HIFI VHS taoe as I did for a lot of stuff but there you are!I am better off now because I record to my PC's and I have two identical FM tuners(Sony 730es) which allows me a much longer recording time.A bit of editing is required of course!Anyway I was quite impressed by the Lazarev version(from a metal tape)sound wise, and although it starts as if it is going to be all over inside 50mins it does in fact last for more than 68 mins.               Cheers 338

Happy to oblige, Ron.

http://rapidshare.com/files/100586342/04_Fragment_of_the_Unpublished_Movem.m4p.html