Colorful Music, Well Played
08/29/2003
(4 out of 5 stars)
"Most of the overtures on this CD show up as fillers on other discs (such as Yondoni Butt's enjoyable recording of "The Rustic Wedding Symphony" and the Chang/Conlon rendition of the Violin Concerto), but it's nice to have them all in one convenient package. Even when Goldmark is at his most serious, as in "Prometheus," he's really not very profound, and indeed the best music here comes in the lighthearted "Im Fruhling" and "In Italien." Most attractive of all is the latter, a kind of Hungarian "Carnival Overture" with a (very) slight Italian accent. The Budapest percussion section has fun with this one, and they are accorded understandable prominence by the engineers in a mostly very good recording.Conductor Korodi is sympathetic his countryman's cause, and his orchestra plays well for him, catching the pathos of "Prometheus," the tenderness of "Sakuntala" (both of which ramble a bit, though this is not the performers' fault!).In short, not great music certainly, but it's quite entertaining, a pleasant way to spend an hour."