What are you listening 2 now?

[Mandryka]

[Florestan]

Huh? Who is this Riszard Bakst? Relative of Leon Bakst, perhaps? This has really picqued my utmost interest. Please tell me more about it, Howard.

[Klavier1]

[SonicMan46]

New arrival: Bach, JS - WTC, Bks I & II w/ Colin Booth playing a harpsichord he made in 2016 (based on an instrument restored by him after Nicholas Celini, 1661) - currently selling, i.e. 4 CDs, on his WEBSITE for just £14 (shipping to me 'across the pond' was free) (a few reviews attached) - Dave

 

[Florestan]

Many moons ago I heard Anthony di Bonaventura live in Bucharest playing Beethoven's Kurfursten Sonatas. I remember liking both the performance and his persona.

[Que]

[Harry]

Arnold Bax.

Quintet for Harp and Strings.
Elegiac, Trio for Harp, viola & Flute.
Fantasy Sonata for Harp and Viola.
Sonata for Flute and Harp.

Mobius.

Another side of Bax, his chamber music. The compositional level is as high as his Symphonies. The works themselves are highly individual and well presented. The colours in the music are amazing, and there is a pattern of deeply felt emotion and elation following each other hard on the heels. The sound created by Andrew Lang on this Naxos CD can be a little tiring on the ear, it has a sharp ring on the top.

The Harp Quintet which was written in 1919, probably at much the same time that he made his first visit to Ireland after the War. Again in a single movement, the sound of the harp is important in creating the music's character and impact. Here again the overall mood is sorrowful. However, the boldly, even dramatically, lyrical opening by the string quartet (the harp only accompanying and adding occasional touches of colour) sets the mood, but with the arrival of the sustained second subject the harp is now boldly accompanying. Bax seems to be telling au unwritten story, with spectral interludes and a dramatic faster episode with dissonant string accompaniment. Inevitably none of them last; the harpist muses again and again on some private grief. Towards the end Bax writes sonorously for the strings, the bold harp accompaniment suggesting some bardic recounting of legends of long ago. Eventually the music fades in a long-drawn twilight evocation.
In the mid-1920s a new musical influence entered Bax's life, when another harpist, Maria Korchinska, became active on the London concert platform, encouraging him to write more virtuosically for the instrument. The first musical outcome of this was Bax's four movement Fantasy Sonata, which is dated April 1927 and was first performed at a concert of his chamber music at the Grotrian Hall on 10th June that year. Bax takes the harp and viola and treats them as the perfect romantic medium, writing for the two with great resource, always alert for an original instrumental timbre. Although the music plays continuously (with a brief break between the third and fourth movements) this is, unusually for Bax, in four movements.

[prémont]

Huh? Who is this Riszard Bakst? Relative of Leon Bakst, perhaps?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ryszard_Bakst

[Florestan]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ryszard_Bakst

Thanks, I was too lazy to "do my own research".   

I do hope you are all right and bettering. 

[Mirror Image]

In honor of the Ukrainian lives lost in this senseless war:

Górecki
...songs are sung, Op. 67
Royal String Quartet

From this outstanding, but now OOP 2-CD set -

[JBS]

+1

Make that +2...although I have a different recording, which features the flautist for whom Vasks wrote the concerto

[listener]

Matthias WECKMANN (ca.1616-1674)  vol. 1 of the organ works on Naxos
Wolfgang Zehrer on the Arp Schnitger organ of the Hamburg Jakobkirche
BIBER (1644-1706): Requiem à 15 in A      Agosto STEFFANI (1654-1728):  Stabat Mater
Chorus and Baroque Orchestra of the Nioederlander Bachvereniging
Gustav Leonhardt, cond.
J.S. BACH (1685-1790)  Harpsichord Concertos
BWV1054 in D, BWV1058 in g,
Concerto for harpsichord, 2 recorders & strings in F BWV1057, Concerto for 2 Harpsichords in c BWV1062
English Chamber Orch.   Raymond Leppard cond. and harpsichord

[Mandryka]

Huh? Who is this Riszard Bakst? Relative of Leon Bakst, perhaps? This has really picqued my utmost interest. Please tell me more about it, Howard.

Ryszard Bakst was big in my home town of Manchester. He taught at Chethams School, which is a specialist music school there, and at the Royal Northern College of Music. I think he was indeed related in some way to Leon Bakst. The style of the mazurkas graceful, ornamental, colourful -- all this to the point of being showy gaudy melodramas.  Not soulful, psychological studies like I like.

[André]

Nagano, the orchestra and choruses go for maximum clarity and transparence. Even the soloists - women in particular - have voices that project easily but clearly. Tempi tend to be on the moderate side of things but never unduly so. The recorded sound is suitably spacious and translucent. Harps, organ and timpani for example are superbly caught and their specific location in space made perfectly clear. In this chosen interpretative perspective (rather similar to that of Haitink and the Philips engineers 35 years before them) this is a truly magnificent achievement.

[Bachtoven]

[bhodges]

Nagano, the orchestra and choruses go for maximum clarity and transparence. Even the soloists - women in particular - have voices that project easily but clearly. Tempi tend to be on the moderate side of things but never unduly so. The recorded sound is suitably spacious and translucent. Harps, organ and timpani for example are superbly caught and their specific location in space made perfectly clear. In this chosen interpretative perspective (rather similar to that of Haitink and the Philips engineers 35 years before them) this is a truly magnificent achievement.

OK, you got my attention. Going to try to hear this soon. I'm hearing the Eighth live in June with the Minnesota Orchestra and Osmo Vänskä, in his final concerts with the group before he leaves.

--Bruce

[JBS]

From the Barbirolli box

[SonicMan46]

Another new arrival: Haydn, Joseph from the Haydn2032 Project - the first 10 CDs w/ Giovanni Antonini; contains 30 of Papa's Symphonies w/ other composers' works added on occasion.  Just through the first 2 discs and enjoying.  Dave

 

[Artem]

Pleasant disk

[Karl Henning]

Another new arrival: Haydn, Joseph from the Haydn2032 Project - the first 10 CDs w/ Giovanni Antonini; contains 30 of Papa's Symphonies w/ other composers' works added on occasion.  Just through the first 2 discs and enjoying.  Dave

 

Excellent!

TD:

CD 23

"Wolferl"
Fantasia in c minor, K. 475
Pf Sonata in c minor, K.457
Pf Sonata in a minor, K. 310