Nicolai Rimsky-Korsakov's Scheherazade is a wonderful, colourful orchestral suite in four movements. To be heard at its best, it needs a first-class orchestra and either a first-class concert hall, or a first-class recording. Recording a full symphony orchestra is a tricky business, with no surrounding concert hall reverberation and audience to round-off the sound, and no visual clues as to who is playing what. Some sound engineers go for multi-channel spotlighting to bring out individual instruments; others rely on just a few microphones to give a “natural” balanced sound. Both techniques are open to miscalculation.
As an admirer of Vasily
Petrenko, and of Rimsky-Korsakov's Scheherazade,
I bought a new CD where Petrenko conducts the excellent Oslo
Philharmonic in the work. The sound is “natural”, with little
spotlighting, so that the work comes over in pastel colours rather
than bright oriental. To listen to Scheherazade (the solo violin) the
sultan would at times have needed a hearing aid. Heaven forbid that
Rimsky-Korsakov's Scheherazade could ever be just a little bit boring
and monochrome; but it is here. We need a little more colour!
No
shortage of competitors: I have Beecham and the RPO (1957), Gergiev
and the Kirov Orchestra (2001), Kletzki and the Philharmonia (circa
1958), Markevitch and the LSO (1962), plus a few others. The next
company to record Scheherazade needs to think carefully about
orchestral balance, spotlighting, and recording craft. In this work,
an inspirational conductor is not the primary asset; the composer,
the orchestra, and the sound take priority, for once.The conductor just needs to make sure that things work.
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