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Mirga Grazinyte-Tyla w/City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra - The British Project makes The New York Times - 5 Classical Albums to Hear Right Now

The New York Times - DAVID ALLEN writes.....A British rarity, experimental voices and a Beethoven quartet are among the highlights of recent releases. Whether the cause is Brexit, or the coronavirus, or the rearranging of priorities that has arrived in their wake, there has been a small but significant recent exodus of musicians from Britain's shores. The most-talked-about defector has been Simon Rattle, but perhaps the most heartbreaking is another conductor, Mirga Grazinyte-Tyla, 34, who announced in January that she will leave the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra in 2022, after six years as its music director.

It's a pity: The partnership was thriving both in concert and on record, with a 2019 release of Mieczyslaw Weinberg symphonies drawing admiration. There's more to admire on this new album, the second in a project devoted to British music - and unusual British music at that. William Walton's opera "Troilus and Cressida" has been mostly ignored since its debut in London in 1954, and the suite (arranged by Christopher Palmer) heard here has fared little better.

But Grazinyte-Tyla and the orchestra demonstrate, in this live recording, that it deserves a listen: a sumptuous, dramatic and harmonically adventurous piece of post-post-Romanticism that brings Strauss, Schreker and Korngold to mind while remaining distinctively English. What playing! And what a shame.