Music OMH, June 2019:

The warm soup of Elgar’s Serenade was much grainier than usual, the buzzy quality of the gut strings adding more solidity and precision to the work. 19th-century Romanticism is Thierry Fischer’s heartland, and, directing with fluid-yet-precise gestures, he coaxed a perfect Elgar sound out of OAE, changing tempo and dynamic to achieve maximum effect. The slow build-up of the second movement was carefully controlled, and the varying timbres of each section allowed all the knitted underlay of the final movement to be clearly heard.