It is not that
José Serebrier and the
Royal Scottish National Orchestra's Glazunov's Symphony No. 5 is either a poor performance or a poor recording. The brass do tend to bray at climaxes, the strings tend to fray in long legato lines, the winds tend to squeak in solos, and the whole ensemble tends to go off the road in tempo changes. And
Serebrier, as he has for decades, still tends to accelerando in crescendos, to ritardando in decrescendos, and to over-emphasize the upper end of the orchestra at climaxes. And Warner's 2004 digital sound does tend to sound a bit too withdrawn in pianissimos and a tad too shrill in climaxes. But the real problem is neither the performance nor the recording, but the competition. Glazunov's mighty and majestic Symphony No. 5 is his most popular symphony and while there is the usual mediocre recording by
Neeme Järvi, there is also a muscular recording by
Vladimir Fedoseyev and an altogether magnificent recording by
Yevgeny Mravinsky and, despite antique stereo sound, either is preferable to
Serebrier's. And to make matters worse,
Serebrier and the
Scottish Orchestra's recording of Glazunov's ballet The Seasons, which fills up the disc, is deeply annoying and profoundly superficial in a work that is the epitome of ephemeral evanescence.