Conductors in a scattershot era of recording

However, the increasingly discussed Marcus Bosch seems not always to know what's best for him and his growing discography with the Aachen Symphony Orchestra (where Herbert von Karajan and Wolfgang Sawallisch got their starts). He has an inspired if conventional Bruckner Seventh on the Coviello Classics label, but also a pair of Brahms symphonies (Nos. 1 and 4) that hurry around with little to say. That's increasingly common: Conductors eager to make their mark record a major symphony, with startling insights in one movement, incoherent ones the next.

That's the case with the increasingly celebrated BBC Philharmonic principal conductor Gianandrea Noseda in the BBC Music Magazine free CDs, Prokofiev's Symphony No. 5 and Schumann's Symphony No. 2. But his growing Chandos-label discography, all lesser-known repertoire, is a completely different story. In Prokofiev's The Stone Flower and a disc of equally seldom-heard orchestra works by Respighi (including Rossiniana), Noseda's instincts are fired up and confident, finding the weight and shape of a phrase where the answer is far from obvious. Lovely discs, these, and they fill a gap that needed it.

It's here that you see how much healthier everybody might be with conductors off their major-label pedestals. What a notion: conductors who exist only to serve. Maybe even their huge salaries might come down.

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davidpatrickstearns.