What are you listening to now?

[aligreto]

Martinu: Symphony No. 4 [Jarvi]....

[aligreto]

On a first play ~

[asin]B002ZZEDL0[/asin]

Thank you to the strong recommendation (though for vol. 1) for this, GMG music friends. 

Great that you enjoyed it 

[aligreto]

I just put this on. I love these symphonies.

Agreed; very fine works and enjoyable performances under Baudo.

[Mandryka]

Kristian Olsen at Roskilde, playing Sweelinck, Jacob Praetorius, Schildt, Buxtehude and Johan Lorentz. Without wishing to fall into clichés, this is sweet, serious, lyrical, noble . . .

[Spineur]

I am listening to an Offenbach opera that only came into existence in 1976. How did that happen, you may ask? Well the short story is that Offenbach was asked to write a comic opera when he was in America. And supposedly he did do a little writing. But the long and the short of it is that it was never written. To celebrate 200 years of independence, Opera Rara was invited to plan a concert for the Ulster Orchestra. What they did was to write the opera that Offenbach never did.
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So what they did, was start with the story of Christopher Columbus, the opera that came after his trip to the US (La Boite au Lait). Then they used parts of all sorts of Offenbach operas to create this 'opera'. This includes something from: Les Bavards, Maitre Petronilla, Les Braconniers, Boule de Neige, Docteur Ox, Belle Lurette, Le 66, Vert-Vert, La Creole, Voyage dans la Lune, Le Pont des Soupirs, Madame l'Archiduc, Les 3 Baisers du Diable, Les bergers, Les Boulangere a des Ecus, La Princesse de Trebizonde, Vent du Soir, Mesdames de la Halle, Dragonette, Fleurette, and Fantasio.

So it turns out that if you are interested in what some of his unrecorded works sound like, this will provide some pieces from them.

Great story Mc Ukrneal ! Sort of a "bestoff" for America .

[Que]

Q

[aligreto]

Locatelli: Concerti Grossi Op. 7 Nos. 5 & 6 [Haenchen]....





Terrific, vibrant performances with great energy and drive in a very good recording.

[aligreto]

Q

Interesting; what is on that Q?

[Que]

Interesting; what is on that Q?

http://www.allmusic.com/album/forgotten-pages-tchaikovsky-mw0002113333

http://www.musicweb-international.com/classrev/2011/May11/Tchaikovsky_MELCD1001736.htm

Q 

[Todd]

Skrowaczewski's Fourth.    Skrowaczewski lacks the ultimate drive of Gielen and the somewhat more buoyant feel of Young, but where Skrowaczewski excels are in the Andante and the very pastoral trio of the Scherzo.  The tempo is perfect in each case, and the music flows wonderfully.  I'd probably give the edge to Gielen, but it would partly be a mood thing.  This is world class.

[Karl Henning]

Another piece I played in band, back when:

http://www.youtube.com/v/KZMNHgrQyz0

[The new erato]

Wonderful version of a great work:

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[Kontrapunctus]

Guitarist Kazuhito Yamashita plays two insanely difficult concertos written for him by Takashi Yamatsu and Teruyuki Noda.

[André]

' 4th symphony under Skrowaczewski.

Splendid interpretation, majestic and surging, taut and buoyant depending on the music at hand. Superb execution (wonderful wwinds in I), excellent recording. This completes my survey of this Brahms series. Highly recommended (JPC.De still sells it for a song as I write).

[JRJoseph]

I watched Rach. 3 with Yefin Bronfman and Berlin Phil. with Rattle and Stravinsky's La Sacre du Printemps in an excellent performance.  This is part of the 20 DVD Waldbuhne box.  This is similar to our Tanglewood concerts in the summer but this place in the Berlin area holds 25,000 people who really have a lot  of fun with light classical with several serious works played.  They have a different conductor (mostly) for each year.

[The new erato]

Remembering Abbado:

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[Spineur]

Johann Christian Bach, JS Bach youngest son wrote some 30 operas but a large number of them have been lost.  To my (limited).knowledge, three of them have been recorded Adriano in Syria, La clemenza di Scipione and Amadis de Gaule, composed in french.  It was commissioned by France royal academy of music to clear the ongoing fight between Piccinists and Gluckist at the time.

The libretto, twice reworked was inspired by a spanish medieval book Amadis de Gaula, a complicated story about an abandonned child (Amadis) from a royal family.   The Gaule in this story isnt the one of Julius Cesar, but some imaginary land that could be Brittany or England.

This is a magnificent opera written in a pure classical style (reminiscent of Mozart Idomeneo, but better).  It sounds also like an Haendelian opera written in the classical style, and some scenes prefigure Berlioz Troyens




The production is very good: agile voices with perfect diction and a HIP oechestra.  There is also a recording led by Helmut Rilling in a german translation.

[aligreto]

Beethoven: Symphony No. 6 [Walter]....

[aligreto]

http://www.allmusic.com/album/forgotten-pages-tchaikovsky-mw0002113333

http://www.musicweb-international.com/classrev/2011/May11/Tchaikovsky_MELCD1001736.htm

Q 

Thank you for the links 

[ludwigii]

J.S.BACH
Keyboard Concertos
Andrei Gavrilov - ASMF, Sir Neville Marriner

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Overall it's a good interpretation, whose most striking feature is the vigor and momentum of the outer movements.
The problem are the slow ones, which lack depth and are overly languid. In this Gould is on another planet for expressiveness and depth.
For Amazon's reviewers instead all is always perfect