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These recordings all merited the highest score awarded by ClassicsToday.com; 10 for Artistic Quality and 10 for Sound Quality. Representing a variety of labels, repertoire and performers from around the world, the common denominator is excellence.
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Why transcribe Vivaldi's ubiquitous Four Seasons for solo piano when a gazillion recordings of the orchestral original can be had? That's a question pianist and transcriber Jeffrey Biegel eloquently addresses in the booklet notes he provides for his own performance. In essence, Biegel elaborates upon and embellishes the unaccredited solo-piano Four Seasons arrangement published by Ricordi with a keen sense of style and keyboard deployment. His vivacious, gorgeously detailed, thoroughly committed, and beautifully engineered piano playing constantly delights. Read more…
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Michael Daugherty is a wonderful composer, and these three pieces make splendid listening. Fire and Blood is a violin concerto, and a damn fine one. Violin concertos are exceptionally difficult to write, especially in balancing the soloist against a large modern orchestra. Daugherty handles the challenge with aplomb. In the first movement, for example, he keeps the accompaniment light but colorful. Sounds that come across as hackneyed in the hands of other composers, such as harp glissandos or little glockenspiel accents, here sound freshly imagined, while the solo writing offers much that is genuinely lyrical and beautiful. Ida Kavafian puts plenty of heart into her playing, really digging into the tunes while making light of the technical difficulties. Read more…
8/12/2009 |
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Yes, there are still wonderful pieces by composers we think we know by heart, including these delightful variations sets by Beethoven. Of course, the "Eroica" Variations are well known, but the variations on Righini's Veni Amore are hardly less extensive and every bit as enjoyable. Yes, some of the music is just "fun"--the Rule Britannia and God Save the King variations, and the very slight variations on a Swiss Song; but Beethoven's powers of invention never flag, and the alternation of small and large works makes this program splendidly listenable at a sitting. Read more…
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Leonard Bernstein's own version bettered? Yes, indeed! This is, handily, the best sung, best played, most intelligently interpreted recording of Mass currently available. Of course, Bernstein's rendition always will have sterling qualities, including some wonderful solo singers with really characterful "pop" and Broadway voices, but for its sheer musical integrity combined with the advantage of the composer's final revisions to the score, this version is unbeatable. Jubilant Sykes, as the Celebrant, easily outclasses Alan Titus' very fine premiere recording of the role. His voice has more edge; he's more at ease with the various pop idioms; he sounds radiant at the work's opening and grows increasingly desperate as it proceeds. This only serves to make his climactic breakdown tragically believable. Read more…
8/4/2009 |
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Projects like this "East meets West" hybrid will either reek of kitsch or become a delectable, guilty pleasure. Happily, Sharon Bezaly's amazing technique and the sensitive accompaniments of the Taipei Chinese Orchestra under Yiu-Kwong Chung ensure that this release falls squarely in the latter category. In fact, you don't even have to feel guilty to feel the pleasure in Chung's exuberant Whirling Dance, or in his skillfully-wrought Flute Concerto. The latter certainly could become a repertory piece if recast for Western symphony orchestra, and in fact its lucid textures for strings and harp, with winds and percussion skillfully touched in, should work perfectly. Tuneful but never tacky, it's just plain beautiful, and (it goes without saying) Bezaly plays with impeccable tone and bewitching grace. Read more…
6/5/2009 |
Happily Thomas Fey dispenses with the useless and irritating harpsichord continuo that plagues so many early- to middle-period Haydn recordings these days (even the best ones, such as Fey's). So nothing gets in the way of Haydn's colorful scoring and ceaselessly inventive orchestral textures. This is particularly important in "Il distratto", a six-movement extravaganza originally written as incidental music. Musically the work reveals an absolutely Mahlerian extravagance, from the Hungarian folk music in the minuet's trio and the ensuing presto, to the very funny retuning of the violins in the finale. Fey's performance is stunning: bold, brilliant, with big contrasts and terrific playing from every department, particularly the horns (e.g. those brash interruptions in the adagio). It's just terrific. Read more…
4/22/2009 |
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A new recording by John Rutter and his Cambridge Singers is always welcome, and this one features 20 works drawn from the sacred choral repertoire of the Renaissance and Baroque. Most of these are motets and many are familiar (Palestrina's Sicut cervus and Exsultate Deo, Gabrieli's Jubilate Deo, Lassus' Timor et tremor, Josquin's Ave Maria) and all are included in Rutter's published anthology, European Sacred Music (Oxford). As Rutter states, the program's theme is to focus on the "wealth of sacred music...created in continental Europe out of the ferment of the age of Reformation", and while Rutter has chosen primarily works resulting from the "extraordinary flowering" of musical activity in the Catholic church during this period, we also are treated to a motet by Bach (O Jesu Christ, meins Lebens Licht BWV 118/231, often mis-classified as a cantata), a Magnificat (presumably) by Buxtehude, and a psalm (100) by Schütz. Read more…
5/1/2009 |
What can you say except that Philippe Herreweghe and his Collegium Vocale Gent are the defining interpreters of Bach's vocal and choral works for our time? This is not just a function of skillful exploitation of modern recording techniques and technology or judicious application of recent scholarship, but largely owes to a particular quality of sound and a unique interpretive sensibility that pervades each performance, informed by this conductor and ensemble's nearly 40-year collaboration focused predominantly on Bach. Read more…
3/16/2009 |
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Any fan of lieder knows that there are at least a zillion Schubert recitals on disc, performed by all manner of singers, from "golden era" opera stars to today's most refined song specialists. Without question--and among her several other strengths--mezzo-soprano Bernarda Fink deserves a place among the top-tier interpreters of German song, and even though most of this program consists of very well-traveled Schubert "standards", she makes a distinct and individual enough impression that we shouldn't be surprised to find these among the more enduring renditions. Read more…
2/24/2009 |
This is the first totally non-Czech recording of Suk's tragic masterpiece, and it's brilliant. In case you don't already know the story, Suk wrote this harrowing, five-movement symphony to expiate the pain and grief of the double loss of his wife and father-in-law (who happened to be Dvorák), both of whom died within about a year of each other. Asrael is the angel of death, and the music refers directly to Dvorák's Requiem (in its second movement) and seemingly to Slavonic church music as well. While often dark in tone, it is by no means lacking in color or contrast. The third movement reveals Suk as a master of the creepy scherzo to rival the Mahler of the Seventh Symphony, while the transfigured major-key ending is anything but facile, and achieves precisely the catharsis that Suk intended. Read more…
1/21/2009 |
| Bach | • | Beethoven | • | Handel | • | Mozart | • | Tchaikovsky | • | Vivaldi |
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