Album: CBSO, Tchaikovsky: Symphony No 5/ Hamlet Overture (Orfeo)

Andris Nelsons' first recording as musical director of the City of Birmingham Symphony is an intriguing pairing of Tchaikovsky pieces written just a year apart, and offering a distinct impression of the composer's emotional state at the end of the 1880s.

Where the more turbulent 4th Symphony had found him wrestling with his troubled destiny, the 5th is marked by a sense of fatalistic resignation. The European temperament that his Russian peers claimed to hear in Tchaikovsky's work is discernible is the fateful, Germanic cast of the horns – just one of several benefits of Nelsons' unashamedly emotional involvement with the music.

Download this: 'Symphony No 5 in E minor'