Reger: Orchestral Works Box

I do understand that many find Reger’s music difficult. If not properly played, good balanced by conductor and recording team, listened to in a somewhat dry acoustics (much reverberation can give the impression the music only piles up – that’s why it doesn’t sound very great in our Concertgebouw), it only makes the impression that it intends to blow you over or that Reger couldn’t find a good tune. It can sound like an organ trying to play the roof off leaving you tired and bored. Fugue after fugue is piled up. I really don’t understand why Reger, who died tragically young – not a guarantee for success like nowadays – doesn’t have the same stature as say Mahler or Bruckner. I know he’s more welcome in the Teutonic countries but not over here (in Holland).Happily more and more artists find time and ways to interpret his art and there’re even some new recordings of his hour long and fiendishly difficult violin concerto. And there’s a flush of recordings of the magnificent piano concerto (included in this 3CD set: a great and flamboyant interpretations by Love Derwinger).In the 1990s BIS started recording Reger with the Norrkoping Symphony under Leif Segerstam: a very happy combination. They did some fine Pettersson discs too! Leif takes his time with Reger and never makes the mistake to go too fast or too slow. The music can develop and doesn’t sound pedestrian. It has a miraculous flow I’ve never heard before in this music. Pity the project? ended after 3 discs, but what discs!!!! We’ve to do with these three which are now reissued. They sound fantastic with a very dynamic potency. Listen to the sweep and gulf at the start of the piano concerto or the schmaltzy violin solo in the Bocklin pictures. Great! This is after all, the only available GREAT recording of one of Reger’s masterpieces, the Symphonic Prologue to a Tragedy. What a sweep, grandeur and expressionistic power gives Segerstam and the Norrkoping players this magnificent piece (or is it a symphonic poem, a blown-up overture?). There’s a – very cheap – 7cd set of Reger recordings on the Berlin Classics label with very idiomatic recordings with some East-German orchestras. For those times (1970s/1980s) they’re very good, but BIS eclipses them all (although the Berlin set can claims to be nearly complete). This BIS set isn’t still cheap but if you love late late late Romanticism this is for you.