It was hard to know what to make of this programme as an assemblage of music - I thought of it as a concert of two diverse halves, the first an exploration of cool, bracing sounds and ambiences from both the planet's hemispheres, and the second an exposition of one of the greatest of all romantic symphonies. I would have preferred to have heard Leif Segerstam conduct more Scandinavian or perhaps some Russian music, following his and the orchestra's magically-wrought first-half evocations of music associated with Arctic and Antarctic regions. It's not that I wasn't interested in how he would...  Read More »