Originally posted by Goon525
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..). but, stunning in themselves, the fabulous CSO is far too mighty for this music to my present ears heart and brain, and I find little wrong with the Finnish winds (the CSO are sweeter more espressivo, but after KA/Willens and OWA/Haselbock etc, I prefer a different tonal purity) ... ...when the FRSO come in in the finale, they are far more agile and flexible...you don't mention the slow movement, which is a marvel of tenderness and beauty from all the Hyperion performers (true of all the Hough concertos)...But that's the problem with such comparisons (especially with old, large symphony-orchestra favourites or older much-reissued official great conductors...): leading away from, rather than toward, a deep appreciation of a fresh recording... yes, comparisons are inescapable; but we have to consider what we are doing when we make them...to our own musical responses and our heavily edited and emotionally- often nostalgically-biased memories. "Nothing like Klemps, Haitink or Solti" etc....
I guess I just find it a dated, uninteresting approach. Something closer to like-with-like is more interesting...so Brautigam and Wallisch say; but Hough and Lintu aren't so far from those as to make a comparison uninteresting...
My own approach is always to sink into, saturate myself with, any given new release... live with it on its own sonic&musical terms, for days or weeks on end, avoiding anything else (apart perhaps from some Gesualdan ambience...)...
I did this with Wallisch and Hough... still going back to them now.....)
The FRSO is in any case chamber-orchestrally sized, which makes such a comparison even more problematic...
What do you think of RO's comments on the 1st (dim., and espressivo, etc).....see the blog for my own detailed comments on the whole set...after three times through at least...)
I said.....
"If you take RO's critique of the initial 4-note phrase in 1 (i).... the diminuendo isn't "dabbed" on the last note, it flows through the whole phrase; and it isn't played that way throughout the movement, far from it.... so there is a thought-through "method-in-the-madness"...which is a surely (merely!) very subtle freedom in the interpretive approach....putting this on earlier to check this detail, I had to continue through the whole movement: it would have been a self-abnegation of musical hedonism not to....
(...and complaining of "unmarked espressivo phrasing" is surely taking reverence into the realms of pedantry).
Again, just to pick out a supposedly unwritten silence in 4 (ii) cause by the piano's "etiolation" (a delicately sustained fade, a moment, and a movement, I marvelled at, breath bated, never hearing anything overextended), is to overlook the many beauties in the whole performance, not least that continuously responsive exchange between soloist/orchesta (i.e. conductor)....the very fact that Lintu isn't a "well-schooled kapellmeister" let alone a Klemperer or a Haitink, is a main reason why this cycle is so fresh and revitalising... all the performers are coming to the music with a sense of excitement and discovery..."....
LOL! 
... still at £20 the set is supposed to be a 3 for 2! 
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