Awards 2009: Orchestral

Haydn: The Complete Overtures
Haydn Sinfonietta Wien/Manfred Huss
BIS

Yes, this is a reissued recording from the nineties, so technically a case can be made for excluding it, but it's on a different label, and remastered. Hey, my game, my rules. Go hold your own awards if you don't like it. But you should like it: it's Haydn! As Dominy Clements explains on MusicWeb, "The advantage of collecting the 22 extant overtures by Joseph Haydn in one place is that the pieces chart the course of the composer's creative career from its beginnings in the late baroque, via high classicism to the tender beginnings of that wholly new musical idiom, the 'romantic'". David Hurwitz on Classics Today goes further: "It is the greatest stylistic evolution in the history of music because Haydn was not just a passive observer, but its prime mover". He calls this album "sensational", while Carl Bauman of ARG highlights the "truly exciting" conducting and Richard Wigmore in Gramophone the "brilliant period band".

Runners-up:
Grainger: "Lincolnshire Posy". Dallas Wind Symphony/Jerry Junkin [Reference]
Shostakovich: The Girlfriends, etc. Polish National Radio Symphony Orchestra/Mark Fitz-Gerald [Naxos]
Stokowski: Bach transcriptions volume 2. Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra/José Serebrier [Naxos]
Szymanowski: Harnasie; Mandragora. Warsaw Philharmonic Orchestra/Antoni Wit [Naxos]