0 Members and 1 Guest are viewing this topic.
Thoughts anyone?
Fray's good. Capucon's not bad.
This is my favorite recording of these pieces. I'm listening to this and thinking the baroque violin sounds infinitely better than recordings with modern violin.
Your comment sparked my interest, then I saw that on amazon it has only one review, which is disparaging in a way that tends to make be think the recording is very good. Alas, seems to be out-of-print and sporadically available an unattractive prices.
I can understand why people might prefer different Baroque recordings. I don’t agree with the Amazon comment about intonation. But, the violinist is a bit “atmospheric” I think. Maybe people prefer very muscular-sounding violin work. Mangoire is like a soft pillow surround song the harpsichord. But she’s not brittle the way the modern violinists are - to me - that brittle squeaky modern violin with the anxious sounding vibrato mars the rustic beauty of these works IMO. I guess there are some great alternatives with baroque violin that take these pieces in a different direction.
My favourite as well.... (Alongside the older, more introvert Kuiken/Leonhardt recording).Q
Musical sea-sickness pervades this curious recording of Bach’s mesmerising gamba sonatas. The opening bars augur well with the plangent reticence of the Adagio of the G major Sonata but after that Guido Balestracci enters into a musical rhetoric of striking incoherence. It revolves around a policy of pulling up – even stopping – at cadences, a mannerism which bafflingly truncates the phrasing and, at worst, does so when the musical logic suggests otherwise. Blandine Rannou soldiers on but the harpsichord is already so recessed as to establish her role as assuredly supporting.There are a few moments of relieving ordinariness (such as in the gentle sequencing of the Trio, BWV528) but the great G minor Sonata – a kind of implied concerto – continues to harness the wrong points of interest; rather as in a fine monologue, the sense is distorted by an actor who fails to distinguish between poetic moment and syntactical necessity. The first movement gets slower and more ponderous as the cadences again become the catalyst for needless fragmentation.The D major Sonata comes out least affected and there is the occasional moment of plausible phrasing, but throughout the gamba sounds decidedly short of the body, colour, bite and personality (odd, given how unrelentingly close is the sound) to convey these remarkable works with the eloquence they deserve. For all the natural facility, severe misjudgement underpins this disappointment.
Sorry I couldn't help but noticing Bach only has 29 pages on this thread. How is that possible?
If you like Malgoire be sure to try this, which for me was a bit of an eye opener
I've never heard this one and I'm hoping that someone will kindly upload it for me . . . however your comment made me think of this very nice recording which received a gloriously disparaging review in Gramaphone
Didn't you see what I was responding to? I was mainly offering an explanation why this thread is fairly "short". I don't think I ever bothered anyone by "moderating" and complaining that s/he was posting in the wrong thread (although I do think that it is a disservice to the usability of the forum).
I suspect that with Bach he is so well recorded that everyone has managed to find 'their' Bach. A lot of the threads here are lamenting the lack of recordings, or pointing out the flaws in the few recordings available, of one composer or another.
Maybe, my theory is the "classical music" as we know is dominated by Austrian/German composers of the Romantic and post-Romantic era. Look at how many pages in the Bruckner and Mahler threads.
