What are you listening to now?

[Traverso]

Hans Werner Henze

[pi2000]

Honegger Jeanne d'Arc au Bucher
Serge Baudo coductor
[asin]B000003552[/asin]

[Traverso]

Honegger Jeanne d'Arc au Bucher
Serge Baudo coductor
[asin]B000003552[/asin]

This is an impressive work and a fine recording.

[aligreto]

Mozart: Requiem [Bruggen]





There is a wonderful "open" acoustic on this live performance and recording which is very appealing. The textures of the period instruments are naturally lighter and it is also light in tone but the music still has plenty of weight with the brass section really standing out in the relevant sections. It is quite a sensitive yet powerful performance and an appealing one to my ear. I feel that the music moves along freely here and sounds alive. This version includes over eight minutes of plainchant in the appropriate places for a Mass for the Dead.

[Draško]

[Traverso]

I love this recording

[milk]

Good stuff!

[aligreto]

Messiaen: Quatuor Pour la Fin du Temps [Tashi]





I find this to be a very powerful performance infused with intensity and emotion.

[pi2000]

This is an impressive work and a fine recording.

Indeed !

[Daverz]

Messiaen: Quatuor Pour la Fin du Temps [Tashi]





I find this to be a very powerful performance infused with intensity and emotion.

There have been good recent recordings, like the Shaham, but Tashi is still my touchstone.  I do miss some of the original artwork of the Lp (click to embiggen).

[André]

Symphony no 7



The complete set does not appear to be available anymore. Anyhow, this shares the same visual as that box I have.

Kempe's 7th is as good as the Schmidt-Isserstedt, with very characterful wind and brass playing. Altogether less polished and certainly less well recorded than that Decca recording. As Traverso mentions, the Sofiensaal recording nears perfection soundwise (special mention for the timpani, too). Interpretively, this Munich performance is just as good, but on a lower level technically. It was recorded in 1974 and was designed to be played in quadraphony, which probably explains the lack of clarity. Anyhow, Kempe's finale takes the breath away as no other does.

[Irons]

I wonder if that is the same Kempe set that appeared on vinyl for "Classics for Pleasure". If it is then an outstanding 2nd Symphony.

My Beethoven listening experience today has not been so good. In fact pretty awful! I picked up yesterday a CD if Beethoven's violin concerto - a work I love - with Gidon Kremer and Harnoncourt conducting the Chamber Orchestra of Europe. The first movement was uninspired and dull which takes some doing with such a great work. With the arrival of the cadenza I was unable to believe my ears! Kremer arranged this for violin, piano and timpani. A travesty! 

[Todd]

On the evidence of this recording, Andrzej Wiercinski is another young pianist with notable potential.  He breezes through the music on the disc, never seeming to struggle in the slightest.  He needs to add a bit more weight to some of the music, but he was all of 19 when he recorded this disc a few years ago, so the 2020s may see some great things from him.

[Traverso]

I wonder if that is the same Kempe set that appeared on vinyl for "Classics for Pleasure". If it is then an outstanding 2nd Symphony.

My Beethoven listening experience today has not been so good. In fact pretty awful! I picked up yesterday a CD if Beethoven's violin concerto - a work I love - with Gidon Kremer and Harnoncourt conducting the Chamber Orchestra of Europe. The first movement was uninspired and dull which takes some doing with such a great work. With the arrival of the cadenza I was unable to believe my ears! Kremer arranged this for violin, piano and timpani. A travesty!

Kremer also made a recording with the Academy of st. Martin in the Fields with Alfred Schnittke cadences.

[Ken B]

Fantastic recordings, this Fayrax cycle.

[Que]

 

Q

[Todd]

Another spin, this time through cans.  This is one of the most satisfying sounding orchestral recordings I've heard in a long time listening thusly.

[aligreto]

Strauss: Also sprach Zarathustra [von Karajan]





This is a strong, powerful, assertive performance balanced with luscious, singing strings in the requisite places. There is a rich and wide tonal palette on display here also.

[Ghost of Baron Scarpia]

Beethoven String Quarte Op 74, Endellion Quartet



After going through Op 18 and Op 59, which had their flashes of brilliance, this is the first Beethoven quartet which strikes me as displaying absolute mastery from beginning to end. The recorded performance is very fine.

[ritter]

First listen to this rarity:

[asin]B00H87JYS2[/asin]

Walter Braunfels's Verkündigung is a setting (in German translation) of Paul Claudel's mystery play L'annonce faite à Marie, and thus can be seen as a reflection of i) the composer's fervent Catholicism  after his conversion  from Protestantism, ii) the allure Claudel's verse had for composers (cf. Honegger and Milhaud), and iii) the to me rather surprising positive reaction to Claudel's oeuvre in Germany (I remember once seeing a huge tome dealing with "Paul Claudel and the German Stage" in a bookstore in Berlin, but the subject matter was really too specialised for me to look into it any further).

This opera was completed in "internal exile" in 1935, but only premiered in 1948 (performances under the Nazi regime were out of the question  ,  as Braunfels was partly of Jewish descent). To be honest, I don't find Claudel's (early) play very alluring (a medieval story of self-renunciation, involving leprosy and the resurrection of a dead child), and Braunfel's late-romantic style, with a declamated singing line, becomes rather tedious. The best bits IMHO are some orchestral passages and accompaniments, but these are unfortunately few and far between. One reviewer of another, more recent recording, points out that the work is almost entirely uninfluenced by Wagner, but I can't help but thinking that long stretches of it do remind me of Wagner (Siegfried, that is, not Richard  ). Wagner junior's usually pagan medievalism sounds uncannily similar to Braunfel's Christian one...