Andris Nelsons has made no secret of the help he received in the early years of his conducting career from Mariss Jansons, and he now appears regularly as a guest with Jansons' current orchestras, the Royal Concertgebouw in Amsterdam and the Bavarian Radio Symphony in Munich. This pairing of Dvořák's best-known symphony with the least-often heard of his symphonic poems, composed four years later, is taken from concerts in Munich in 2010 and 2012. Both performances convey a great deal of what is so special about Nelsons as an interpreter, and of the excitement he can generate on the podium.
It's quite something to bring such freshness to the New World Symphony, whether it's in the sense of wonder with which he phrases the first movement's second subject, or the edge-of-seat drama he brings to the finale. A Hero's Song lacks a detailed literary programme, though it follows the outline of a symphony, with a funeral march as its slow movement. Musically, it's not as striking as Dvořák's other four symphonic poems, either, but it is superbly well played by one of Europe's great orchestras, and Nelsons makes sure its coda generates just the right kind of triumphant peroration.
