Markevitch

Rimsky-Korsakov: Scheherazade; Capriccio Espagnol Markevitch

Made by Philips engineers in London in October 1962, this album of the composer's best-loved orchestral works complements Markevitch's cycle of the Tchaikovsky symphonies, also recorded with the London Symphony Orchestra during the mid-1960s. They share many of the same qualities: super-charged tension, precise definition (in both performance and engineering) and refreshingly unusual articulation in repertoire that has often become stale by familiarity and lazy execution. Markevitch never made a lazy or conventional recording in his life, and he attended to the sweeping narrative of Scheherezade with the kind of detail that distinguishes his electrifying accounts of The Rite of Spring.

London Symphony Orchestra

Erich Gruenberg, solo violin (Scheherazade)

Igor Markevitch