Gramaphone: SAINT-SAËNS Symphony No 3 (Fischer)

Thierry Fischer leads a superb, thoroughly enjoyable reading of Saint-Saëns’s Organ Symphony. While he doesn’t generate quite as much heat as Charles Munch’s classic account with the Boston Symphony (RCA, 4/93), his sense of pacing and architecture is masterly. Transitions are deftly manoeuvered, for example, as in the join between exposition and development in the opening Allegro moderato (start around 4’50”), and the naturalness with which that part eventually dissolves into the radiant Poco adagio. I was impressed, too, by the way Fischer shapes the Allegro so it seems to surge ever so gradually to its fortississimo climax at 7’44”.

Continue at gramophone.co.uk