Three new releases that show the classical recording industry is alive and well

Rachmaninov’s First Symphony begins with a snarl, and gets angrier. A menacing skirl from the woodwinds, a triple-fortissimo blast from the brass, and then the full weight of the strings, hammering out one of those doomy Russian motto-melodies like lead boots dragging you to the bottom of the Neva. ‘Vengeance is mine; I shall repay’ glowers the epigraph that Rachmaninov inscribed at the top of the score, and you’d better believe it. The symphony’s première in 1897 was a disaster that stunned the 23-year-old composer into near-silence. And no question, when the gong roars out at the climax of the finale — on the way to one of the most savage endings in the 19th-century repertoire — it’s easy to imagine the bronze portals of the Inferno swinging open beneath the whole of Russian music.

There’s a new recording out by the Philadelphia Orchestra under its hipsterish music director Yannick Nézet-Séguin, and if any orchestra has what you might call a Rachmaninov tradition, it’s the Philadelphia. This is the ensemble that the composer himself conducted during his long exile, and for which he wrote his last major work, the Symphonic Dances, in 1940. ‘Years ago I composed for the great Chaliapin,’ he told them. ‘Now he is dead and so I compose for a new kind of artist, the Philadelphia Orchestra’ — a line which, had Deutsche Grammophon’s PR department been a bit more on the ball, would surely have been plastered all over this new release.

But anyway, the remarkable thing is that it’s happening at all. This sort of recording, I mean: blockbuster symphonies by Dead White European Males, conducted by superstar maestros on major labels. The classical recording industry is basically kaput, or so we’ve been hearing since at least the mid-1990s.