Emil Tabakov: Complete Symphonies, Vol. 5

The music of the Bulgarian composer-conductor Emil Tabakov (b. 1947) explores the darker side of the human spirit in epic scores as austere as they are powerful. The Second Symphony is a diptych where the wild, stamping, manic whirl of the second movement releases the store of energy pent up by the grief-stricken first. The four-movement Sixth Symphony is a tragic utterance in the monumental manner of the middle-period Shostakovich symphonies, bleak and gripping in equal measure.