Jessie Montgomery Brings Her Potently Relevant New Compositions Back to Her Home Turf

Oldtimers reminisce about the glory days of the East Village in the 1970s, but as violinist and composer Jessie Montgomery reminded last night, the blight of gentrification had already begun to infest the area. Greedy landlords were already hell-bent on evicting esidents of the multicultural artistic neighborhood, whose poets, musicians and artists by then were predominantly Puerto Rican. Montgomery’s show last night at the Metropolis Ensemble’s intimate Rivington Street digs with a series of ensembles, just a few blocks south of where she grew up, sent an acerbic shout-out to the LES’s defiant, determined people. It was a cosmopolitan party for the right to fight.

Joined by soprano Mellissa Hughes on vocals, Jessica Meyer on viola, Gabriel Cabezas on cello and Eleonore Oppenheim on bass, Montgomery led various permutations of the ensemble through a series of edgy, incisively melodic recent works. To begin the evening, Hughes’ regal, steady delivery imbued LES poet Bimbo Rivas’ bittersweet mid-70s tribute to his home turf with unexpected gravitas over the strings’ terse counterpoint.

Montgomery’s Duo for Violin and Cello had a similarly concise interweave. She likes to use the entirety of the violin’s range, and that vivid sense of color extends to other instruments as well. Unexpectedly, what was possibly the most riveting interlude of the evening was a still, stygian soundscape which she played with her duo Big Dog Little Dog with Oppenheim. Montgomery’s silken high harmonics contrasted with Oppenheim’s big muddy river, slowly fading out as the bassist bowed her strings right at the tailpiece for a sepulchral wash of overtones that finally vanished into silence. It’s hard to imagine another piece for bass that calls for so much in the upper registers.

Meyer’s Space in Chains, for soprano and viola, shifting from steady, swaying, incisive riffage to clenched-teeth flurries, giving voice to another neighborhood poet, Laura Kasischke, whose contention was that music is “The marriage of rhythm and antisocial behavior.” After Montgomery and Oppenheim’s twin canine project – “We switch off,” Oppenheim deadpanned, explaining who’s the big dog in the band – the group closed with Montgomery’s enigmatically lilting Lunar Songs, utilizing texts by J. Mae Barizo. Whoever thinks that new chamber music doesn’t have any social relevance missed this show.

The ongoing series of concerts at the second-floor space at 1 Rivington St. just east of Bowery continues on Nov 23 at 8 PM with the Attacca Quartet playing the album release show for their new recording of Nathan Schram‘s Oak and the Ghost; admission is $20/$10 stud/srs.

A Darkly Glorious, Poignant New Album of Rachmaninoff and Stravinsky and a Carnegie Hall Gig by Pianist Karine Poghosyan

It’s as validating for an audience or a critic to watch an artist move in a direction that maximizes that musicians’s talent, as it ultimately is for the artist. One ravishing example of an artist who followed her muse to a nirvana state is pianist Karine Poghosyan‘s new recording of Rachmaninoff and Stravinsky is streaming at Spotify. It’s repertoire she may not have been destined to play – but choosing that destiny was a stroke of brilliance. “If it doesn’t have a story, it doesn’t exist,” Poghosyan asserts, and she goes deep into the dynamics of some of the most challenging material in the Romantic repertoire for all the poignancy and exhilaration of those narratives. She’s playing the album release show on Nov 4 at 7:30 PM at Zankel Hall at Carnegie Hall; you can get in for $25

She begins the record with Rachmaninoff’s six Moments Musicaux, Op. 16. In the first, Andantino in B Flat Minor, a suspenseful, subtle rubato permeates the nocturnal lustre, Poghosyan’s starry triplets in contrast with the steady undercurrent. Then she eases the rhythm for the plaintive, Satie-esque theme that follows. The blend of bittersweetness and tenderness is exquisite. What a way to open the album.

Poghosyan plays the rivulets and daunting cascades of No. 2 in E Flat Minor with a dramatic sway, then lets the spaces in between the somber notes of No. 3, Andante Cantabile in B Minor resonate equally, ramping up the misterioso factor. But counterintuitively, she takes a muted, furtively scampering approach to the rapidfire chromatics of No. 4, Presto in E Minor, first in the righthand and then the left: the exchange of power throughout the piece is magnetic in every sense of the word.

With its understated wave motion, No. 5, Adagio Sostenuto in D Flat Major comes across as a genial canal boat theme – or Volga riverside promenade, maybe. The last in the series, Maestoso in C Major is clearly a triumphant love song, as Poghosyan sees it, rich with understatement and siklen legato, resisting any temptation to go for bombast as others might.

All that is a setup for the daunting virtuosity of Stravinsky’s own piano arrangement of three movements from Petrouchka, a Poghosyan concert favorite. The first, the Danse Russe, has a stunningly fleet-fingered pointillism: it’ balletesque in the best sense. Again, Poghosyan’s use of space to set up the phantasmagoria and funhouse-mirror disquiet of Chez Petrouchka is stunning, particularly as it sets the stage for her richly resonant approach as the music grows more lush and enveloping. So the return to pinpoint precision in La Semaine Grasse is a stark contrast – but an unexpectedly wry one. What a ridiculously funny romp some of this music is: Poghosyan can’t resist a good joke when she can find it.

As she also likes to do, she pulls out a rare gem: Rachmaninoff’s Lilacs, Op. 21, No. 5, a rare carefree moment from someone best known for his most haunting works. A growing storm lingers as Poghosyan makes her way cautiously into his Piano Sonata No. 2 in B Flat Minor, then turning the drama and angst loose before spaciously backing away again. The relative calm Poghosyan brings to the rest of the first movement is a rarity: was it hard for her to resist rampaging through it, or is this (more likely) the case of someone determined to create a full portrait rather than simply going for adrenaline?

Gentle hesitancy slowly moves toward joy in the similarly restrained second movement before Rachmaninoff darkens the skies: that grimly gorgeous theme is one of the album’s most striking passages. In the final movement, Poghosyan maintains the understatement, especially when the most Stravinsky-esque, distantly carnivalesque melodies appear.

Poghosyan returns to Stavinsky to close the album with the Agosti arrangement of three movements from the Firebird Suite: a glittering, gleefully precise tour of the carnivalesque Dance Infernale, a steady, portentous Berceuse and an almost allusively regal Finale.

Whatever slight imperfection might exist in this rich interpretation of some of the most difficult music in the repertoire disappears in light of Pogosyan’s erudite, richly insightful, crepuscularly thrilling interpretations. Fans of Vladimir Horowitz’s virtuosically passionate approach to this music will find Poghosyan’s own individualistic take on it to be equally rewarding.

A Dynamic, Intimate Live Album and a Birdland Gig From Jazz Piano and Vocal Siren Champian Fulton

At this point in jazz history,  Champian Fulton is the best piano-playing jazz singer, and the best pianist who happens to be a singer. With her blend of precision and flair on the keys and her nuanced approach to the mic, she’s been unstoppable lately. Her career validates the old proverb that you get good at what you do: somehow, in between gigs, she manages to find the time to make albums. And she likes to flip the script: she’s done everything from reinventing Dinah Washington – a major influence – to a devious all-instrumental piano trio record, and now her latest release, Dream a Little, an intimate but often fiery live set with saxophonist Cory Weeds. The new record, a mix of standards, a couple of rarities and an original is streaming at Bandcamp. Fulton’s next New York gig is a two-night stand at Birdland on Oct 30-31, with sets at 7 and 10 PM; you can get in for $20.

Weeds opens the first track, Dream a Little Dream, with a balmy solo before Fulton’s piano brings in some James P. Johnson gravitas, a contrast that lingers through an unexpectedly restrained, even suspenseful take of a song that Mama Cass Elliott made epic drama out of.

Weeds does the flying – gently – in Fly Me to the Moon, the two folllowing the same dynamic, both Fulton’s piano and voice infused with calm take-charge attitude. Strap on that seat belt, buster!

By contrast, Lullaby For Art  is a starkly pulsing, latin-tinged instrumental theme with bitingly bluesy solos from both musicians. Fulton’s clenched-teeth intensity before the third verse is one of the album’s most stunning moments.

The duo’s take of Darn That Dream has a wistful, expansive solo first verse from Fulton, Weeds fluttering among the clouds, a dynamic they mirror with a steady, subtly stride-influenced version of Pennies From Heaven. Then they pick up the pace with Once I Had a Secret Love, Weeds’ precise chromatic volleys setting the tone.

Fulton’s slowly swaying interpretation of I Thought About You leaves no doubt that it’s about being haunted by a memory. As he does throughout the record, Weeds plays tersely, developing melodic themes rather than blowing endless, too-cool-for-school practice patterns like too many other reed players do.

The two make low-key, striding swing out of Tangerine: Fulton likes to use her low lefthand a lot, and that device works particularly well here, grounding Weeds’ cheery lines. I’d Give a Dollar For a Dime – Joe Williams’ 1930 shout-out to what seemed already had become jukebox nostalgia – dips and weaves with a dreamy charm. They close the record with a coy jump blues take based on Eddie Lockjaw Davis’ version of Save Your Love For Me

While this is first and foremost a collection of bittersweet love ballads, it’s also uproariously funny when least expected: Fulton has a subtle and often sly sense of humor, particularly on the keys. As if we need yet more proof that more artists should be making live records, this is it.

Cutting-Edge, Diverse Sonics and a Williamsburg Album Release Gig From the Dither Guitar Quartet

The big news about the Dither Guitar Quartet is that Gyan Riley is in the band. He’s the rare scion of a famous western musical legacy (son of iconic minimalist composer Terry Riley) who’s an individualistic artist in his own right. On the ensemble’s new album Potential Differences – streaming at Bandcamp – he makes a good fit with returning members Taylor Levine, Joshua Lopes and James Moore. This is the band’s most accessible record to date: fans of psychedelic rock and metal who can handle strange and often troubling tonalies should check it out. Dither are playing the release show at the Frost Theatre at 17 Frost St. in Williamsburg on Oct 27 on a bill that starts at 2 in the afternoon and continues into the night. It’s not clear who’s playing when, but there are a bunch of interesting, individualistic acts on the bill including but not limited to singer Alicia Hall Moran and the Mivos Quartet, sort of a reprise of the New Music Bake Sales in Fort Greene and then Roulette a few years back.

The album’s first track is The Garden of Cyrus, by Eve Beglarian, a 1985 piece pulsing with steady, emphatic echo chords, the group quickly adding polyrhythms that shift in and out of the mix. The variety of timbres, the mix of familiar and odder harmonies and the reverb in the room give it a Sonic Youth vibe.

Riley’s The Tar of Gyu is a strangely shifting blend of buzzy volume-knob swells, delicate toy piano-like phrasing and hardbop. The gently ringing harmonics and rising chromatic menace of Paula Matthusen‘s But Because Without This provide considerable contrast.

The album’s centerpiece, the four-part Ones, by Jascha Narveson, offers comic relief. The opening segment, The Wah One, is a playfully hypnotic mashup of the intros from the Theme From Shaft and Pink Floyd’s One of These Days. Then there’s the distortedly circling The Driving One, The Warped One with its down-and-up tuning-peg goofiness and finally the clock-chime harmonics of The Floaty One.

The group shift from gritty late 70s Robert Fripp-style riffage to eerie spacerock bubbles, austere resonance, wry hints of Eddie Van Halen and back in Lopes’ Mi-Go. Moore’s Mannequin is a desolate, morosely howling soundscape. Candy, by Ted Hearne, takes awhile to get going but eventually develops coy humor and incisively paired harmonies between the guitars.

Renegade, a Levine composition, sets growling, increasingly dissociative menace and shred over a piledriver beat. The quartet wind up the album with James Tenney’s 1967 dronescsape Swell Piece. Many different flavors; this group rock harder than just about anyone in the avant garde.

Lea Bertucci Brings Her Otherworldly Sonic Cocoon to Downtown Brooklyn

Sound artist Lea Bertucci‘s magically enveloping ep Resonant Field materialized here back in May and is streaming at Bandcamp. She’s playing on a great twinbill on Oct 22 at 8:30 PM at Issue Project Room in a duo set with alternately feral and meticulous singer Amirtha Kidambi  opening for improvisational Japanese noise band Asa-Chang & Junray in their US debut. Cover is $15/$12 stud/srs.

The first track on the album is Wind Piece, a desolately drifting tableau with creepy microtones, close-harmonied resonances and stealthy, squiggly accents filtering through the mix. Finally, at the end, Robbie Lee fires off (or more likely, loops) a series of triumphant riffs on baroque flute.

The second track, Warp & Weft comes across as what might happen if the reeds around the low A key on an accordion decided to all meditate themselves into a vast poppy field populated by the occasional slug or wandering bee, eventually taking shelter as a gentle rain moves in. Bassist James Ilgenfritz’s increasingly unhinged, tremoloing, heavily processed lines as the piece winds out raises the adrenaline factor exponentially.

Bertucci layers drones, slowly rising sheets of sound and uneasy, wavering phrases in the even more epic, practically eighteen-minute title track. A multi-layered, ghostly, gently echoing, dynamically shifting, Pink Floydian rainscape ensues.

Bertucci closes the recording with Deliquescence, its flickers and then eerie, concentric upper-register circles over omious brown noise wafting in the background, You are returning to the primordial ooze that spawned you and still loves you after many thousands of years, so dive in.

Things Go Bump in the Night With the Momenta Quartet

It’s extremely rare that an artist or group make the front page here more than once in a single week. But today, because the Momenta Quartet play such stylistically diverse, consistently interesting music, they’ve earned that distinction – just like the Kronos Quartet have, on two separate occasions, since this blog went live in 2007. Some people are just a lot more interesting than others.

This year’s annual Momenta Festival is in full swing, with its usual moments of transcendence and blissful adrenaline. The Momenta Quartet’s violist Stephanie Griffin programmed night one; night two, violinist Emilie-Anne Gendron took charge. As she put it, the theme was “Lively things that happen at night.” She wasn’t kidding.

Maybe, to provide a little break for her bandmates – who also include violinist Alex Shiozaki and cellist Michael Haas – Gendron supplied a major portion of the adrenaline with an irresistible romp through Erwin Schulhoff’s rarely performed Sonata For Violin Solo. Throughout its eclectic shifts from evocations of Appalachian, Middle Eastern, Asian and rustic Romany music, she swayed and practically clogdanced at one point, and that vivacity was contagious.

The high point of the night was one of the group’s innumerable world premieres, Roberto Sierra‘s sublimely shapeshifting, relentlessly bustling Cuarteto Para Cuerdas No. 3. Flurrying, almost frantic interludes juxtaposed with brief, uneasily still moments and all sorts of similarly bracing challenges for the group: slithery harmonics, microtonal haze spiced with fleeting poltergeist accents, finally a wry series of oscillations from Haas and a savagely insistent coda. Distant references to boleros, and a less distant resemblance to restless, late 50s Charles Mingus urban noir drove a relentless tension forward through a rollercoaster of sudden dynamic changes. There were cameras all over the room: somebody please put this up on youtube where it will blow people’s minds!

There was even more on Gendron’s bill, too. The hypnotic horizontality and subtle development of playful minimalist riffs of Mario Lavista’s String Quartet No. 2 were no less difficult to play for their gauzy microtonality and almost total reliance on harmonics. Harry Partch’s Two Studies on Ancient Greek Scales have a colorful history: originally written for the composer’s own 88-string twin-box invention, the Harmonic Canon II, the Momentas played the string quartet arrangement by the great microtonal composer Ben Johnston, a Partch protege. Part quasi Balkan dance, part proto horror film score, the group made the diptych’s knotty syncopation seem effortless.

They closed with Gyorgy Ligeti’s String Quartet No.1, subtitled “Metamorphoses Nocturnes.” The ensemble left no doubt that this heavily Bartokian 1953 piece was all about war, and its terror and lingering aftershock (Ligeti survived a Nazi death camp where two of his family were murdered). The similarities with Shostakovich’s harrowing String Quartet No. 8 – which it predated by six years – were crushingly vivid. If anything, Ligeti’s quartet is tonally even harsher. In the same vein as the Sierra premiere, these dozen movements required daunting extended technique. Which in this case meant shrieking intensity, frantic evasion of the gestapo, (musical and otherwise) and deadpan command of withering sarcasm and parodies of martial themes. All that, and a crushing, ever-present sense of absence.

The 2019 Momenta Festival winds up tonight, Oct 19 at 7 PM at the Tenri Institute, 43A W 13th St., with a playful program assembled by Shiozaki, including works by Mozart, toy pianist Phyllis Chen (who joins the ensemble), glass harmonica wizard Stefano Gervasoni and an excerpt from Griffin’s delightfully adult-friendly children’s suite, The Lost String Quartet. Admission is free but you should rsvp if you’re going.

The Aizuri Quartet Launch a New Season at a Favorite Upper West Side Classical Institution

It wouldn’t be fair to let the month go by without mentioning the Aizuri Quartet‘s eclectically entertaining, dynamic performance earlier this month at the popular Music Mondays series of free concerts on the Upper West Side.

The ensemble – violinists Emma Frucht and Miho Saegusa, violist Ayane Kozasa and cellist Karen Ouzounian – began with an arrangement of a Hildegard Von Bingen diptych, its somber, stately, plainchant shifting artfully between the high strings and the cello, following a lengthy, aptly otherworldly introduction. The group’s take on Haydn’s String Quartet in F Major, op. 77, no. 2 spotlighted those individual, intertwining voices in as high definition as anyone could have wanted, illuminating its innumerable (some might say interminable) moments of playful repartee.

Then they played Caroline Shaw‘s deviously Beethoven-influenced Blueprint, its tightly interwoven cellular motives eventually reaching a burst of quiet jubilation, in contrast with its airy, spacious accents. There was also an augmented Brahms work on the bill, after the intermission, but sometimes sticking around for an entire evening of music ia a luxury. The Aizuri Quartet’s next New York concert is. December 4 at 7:30 PM at Weill Hall at Carnegie Hall, with works by Komitas, Haydn and Paul Wiancko.; tix are $30 The Music Mondays series at Advent Church at the northeast corner of 93rd St. and Broadway continues on Nov 18 at 7:30 PM with the Brass Project playing works by Bach, Reena Ismail, Gabriella Smith and a New York premiere by Kinan Abou-Afach

Irresistible Avant Garde Punk Cello Fun with Okkyung Lee

Over the past year, impresarios Blank Forms have been booking some of the most interesting, individualistic improvisationally-inclined performers in town into some serendipitously unlikely spaces. One of the most entertaining ones, a solo performance by cellist Okkyung Lee, took place ast week, late in the series they’d staged at the James Cohan Gallery in Chinatown,  She tends to push the limits of tonality and uses a lot of extended technique, and this brief set – over in twenty-two minutes – was typical.

And especially funny. Setting up in the back of the gallery, she adjusted her chair. It was a heavy chair, and its metal coasters squeaked and shrieked on the stone floor. Was she going to make that part of her performance? Most definitely – but for just a playful twenty seconds or so, midway through.

She began with a furtive, muted, rustling exchange, a conversation that grew more animated and agitated and then gave way to calm, spacious, flitting motives. The only discernible melody was when she played subtly baroque-tinged if defiantly microtonal variations on a series of fifth intervals on open strings. Otherwise, the show was more about timbre and attack and rhythm – and playful narrative – rather than pitch.

She ended it with a very amusing, extended series of call-and-response riffs, pushing her cello on its stand directly into the crowd. By now, the gallery’s rear room was full, and everybody in the middle of the floor was sitting. Was she going to move around anyone? No way. She took her time, firing off bursts and snippets of sound in various audience members’ faces; a few people found this irresistibly funny, but if anyone else was in on the joke, they didn’t give anything away..

Lee didn’t stop going when she’d made her way all the way through the audience, continuing to the front door, then retracing her steps, walking backwards. She didn’t look over her shoulder once, completely deadpan, Moses in reverse as the crowd on the floor parted once more. And then she was done.

Blank Forms’ next concert, on Nov 23 at 7 PM features trumpeter Nate Wooley and ensemble playing his new suite Seven Storey Mountain at St Peter’s Church, 346 W 20th St.; cover is $10

Transcendent Rarities and World Premieres to Open The 2019 Momenta Festival

A few months ago at a panel discussion at a major cultural institution, a nice mature lady in the crowd asked a famous podcaster – such that a podcaster in the 21st century serious-music demimonde can be famous, anyway – what new composers she should be listening to. Given a prime opportunity to bigup her favorites, the podcaster completely dropped the ball. She hedged. But if she’d thought about the question, she could have said, with complete objectivity, “Just go see the Momenta Quartet. They have impeccable taste, and pretty much everything they do is a world premiere.”

This year marks the fifth anniversary of the annual Momenta Festival, and the fifteenth for the quartet themselves. There was some turnover in the early years, but the current lineup of violinists Emilie-Anne Gendron and Alex Shiozaki, violist Stephanie Griffin and cellist Michael Haas has solidified into one of the world’s major forces in new music. Opening night of the 2019 Momenta Festival was characteristically enlightening and often genuinely transcendent.

Each of the quartet’s members takes a turn programming one of the festival’s four nights; Griffin, the only remaining member from the original trio that quickly grew into a fearsome foursome, took charge of the opening festivities. Each festival has a theme: this year’s is a retrospective, some of the ensemble’s greatest hits.

In a nod to their trio origins, Shiozaki, Griffin and Haas opened with Mario Davidovsky’s 1982 String Trio. Its central dynamic contrasted sharp, short figures with lingering ambience, the three musicians digging into its incessant, sometimes striking, sometimes subtle changes in timbre and attack.

The night’s piece de resistance was Julian Carrillo’s phantasmagorical, microtonal 1959 String Quartet No. 10, a piece the Momentas basically rescued from oblivion. Alternate tunings, whispery harmonics and a strange symmetric logic pervaded the music’s slowly glissandoing rises and falls, sometimes with a wry, almost parodic sensibility. But at other times it was rivetingly haunting, lowlit with echo effects, elegaic washes underpinned by belltone cello and a raptly hushed final movement with resonant, ambered, mournfully austere close harmonies.

In typical Momenta fashion, they played a world premiere, Alvin Singleton‘s Hallelujah Anyhow. Intriguing variations on slowly rising wave-motion phrases gave way to stricken, shivering pedal notes from individual voices in contrast with hazy sustain, then the waves returned, artfully transformed. Haas’ otherworldly, tremoloing cello shortly before the coy, sudden pizzicato ending was one of the concert’s high points.

After a fond slideshow including shots of seemingly all of the violinists who filtered through the group in their early years, conductor David Bloom and baritone Nathaniel Sullivan joined them for another world premiere commission, Matthew Greenbaum’s Crossing Brooklyn Ferry, a setting of Walt Whitman poetry. The program notes mentioned that the text has special resonance for the composer, considering that he grew up close to where the old ferry left Manhattan, and now resides across the river near the Brooklyn landing. Brain drain out of Manhattan much?

It took awhile to gel. At first, the music didn’t seem to have much connection to the text, and the quartet and the vocals seemed to be in alternate rhythmic universes – until about the time Sullivan got to the part cautioning that it is not “You alone who know what it is to be evil.” At that point, the acerbic, steady exchange of voices latched onto a tritone or two and some grimly familiar, macabre riffage, which fell away for longer, rainy-day sustained lines.

The Momenta Festival continues tonight, Oct 16 at 7 PM at the Americas Society, 680 Park Ave at 70th St. with works by Harry Partch, Mario Lavista, Roberto Sierra, Gyorgy Ligeti and Erwin Schulhoff programmed by Gendron. How much does this fantastic group charge for tickets? Fifty bucks? A hundred? Nope. Admission is free but a rsvp is very highly advisable.

Celebrating a Halloween Classic and Its Enigmatic Composer

Today’s Halloween month installment revisits an iconic piece from the creepy classical repertoire: French early Romantic composer Camille Saint-Saens’ Danse Macabre. It’s been recorded to death (ouch, sorry), and strangely, it doesn’t seem to be represented in concert here in New York this month. But there’s a Utah Symphony recording worth hearing, if 19th century phantasmagoria is your thing – and if this album ever makes it to the web. For the moment, here’s a 1951 New York Philharmonic performance with maestro Dmitri Mitropoulos.

Conductor Thierry Fischer leads the Salt Lake City ensemble through a colorful, careening, deliciously inspired take. Madeline Adkins’ solo violin is jagged, almost haphazard, the simmer underneath is mutedly evil and the group are obviously having a great time with the gleeful grimness of this quasi-tarantella.

The rest of the record holds up robustly. The composer’s Symphony No. 2 in A Minor, Op. 55 opens with a series of spot-on, momentary solos from oboe, violin, bassoon and clarinet, introducing a slashing chromatic theme. The riffs are short, sharp, Mozartean, the orchestra pulsing tightly underneath. Saint-Saens was a prickly guy and didn’t do himself any favors for the sake of posterity, but this isn’t shalllow music, and the orchestra completely get that. It’s a clinic in classical composition.

The concise, contrapuntal phrasing of the second movement is more warmly crepuscular and early 19th century, closer to, say, Beethoven’s Sixth. Fischer lets the dogs out to leap and waltz around the wry, momentary solo passages of the third, then the orchestra go racing, lickety-split through the jaunty concentric circles of the finale. Still, conceptually, wouldn’t it have been a whole lot more interesting if Saint-Saens had rolled with the menace inherent in the opening movement? Maybe eschewing that was a commercial move, figuring that there’s only so much macabre an audience can take.

The opening of the other symphony here, No. 2 in F, “Urbs Roma” has been ripped off for plenty of pop songs over the years. It’s surprising that the tumbling pageantry of the second movement and the troubled Mitteleuroepean gothic of the third haven’t also been plundered. The album’s liner notes witheringly quote Claude Debussy as saying that Saint-Saens – who’d trashed the debut of Debussy’s Prelude to the Afternoon of a Fawn – once showed promise of becoming a great composer. Whatever you think of his music – his endless volleys of orchestral counterpoint, his grandiose, Lisztian piano concertos, his irresistible Organ Symphony and perhaps shockingly poignant solo organ works – you can’t deny his gift for pure entertainment. Once again, Fischer gets that, and so does this orchestra.