Boston Symphony Chamber Players – The Deutsche Grammophon Recordings (9CD Box Set)

A portrait of the Boston Symphony Chamber Players through the 1970s, through their complete recordings for Deutsche Grammophon and Philips. This diverse range of repertoire receives luxury treatment from the musicians, always centered in beauty of tone and with the kind of joyful freedom of phrasing which world-class orchestral musicians produce when liberated from the authority of a baton. The Boston Symphony Chamber Players were created in 1964, to play at the Tanglewood Festival before the ‘main event’ of the Boston Symphony’s concerts. Before long, the BSCP became the main event themselves, with a programme of concerts throughout the year, and a busy recording schedule. When the Boston Symphony Orchestra began to record with DG in 1970, so did the Chamber Players.

Violinist Joseph Silverstein, cellist Jules Eskin and flautist Doriot Anthony Dwyer all take starring roles on an album of late chamber music by Claude Debussy, and a new booklet essay by Peter Quantrill outlines the importance of these three superb musicians to the profile and the identity of the BSCP. As led by Silverstein, the repertoire of the BSCP also reflects the inclusive nature of the main orchestra’s programming. There is high modernism, in an album of modern American chamber music by Ives, Carter and Porter. There is classic modernism, in immaculately prepared accounts of landmark works by Stravinsky and Schoenberg. There are core Romantic classics such as a Dvořák string quintet and the Clarinet Quintet by Brahms. Then there are delicious rarities such as chamber-scale arrangements of Johann Strauss waltzes.

This diverse range of repertoire receives luxury treatment from the musicians of the Boston Symphony Chamber Players, always centred in beauty of tone and the kind of joyful freedom of phrasing which world-class orchestral musicians produce when liberated from the authority of a baton. Coming to a close with a glorious pairing of the clarinet quintets of Mozart and Brahms from 1993, led on Philips by the veteran clarinettist Harold Wright, this collection of ‘Original Jacket’ albums rewards lovers of chamber music with playing of consistent vitality and refinement.