What are you listening 2 now?

[AnotherSpin]

Kirnberger Chorales and Other Organ Works, Vol. 1

Wolfgang Rübsam

[Daverz]

Mahler: Symphony No. 2 - Mehta, Israel Philharmonic, Prague Philharmonic Choir in Mann Auditorium.



I was quite impressed with the playing and the choral singing.  And for once my mind didn't wander off in the finale.  The recording is lacking the low bass of the best digital recordings in the best halls (Mann Auditorium is a known for being a dry hall), but is otherwise excellent. 

There's also a Mahler 6 with the same team that I have in the listening queue.

[VonStupp]

Malcolm Arnold
Symphony for Strings, op. 13
Symphony 1, op. 22
Symphony 2, op. 40
BBC CO & Royal PO - Vernon Handley

I heard Arnold's first two symphonies from the Hickox recording on Chandos in the mid-90s. I don't remember why, but for some reason I never went back to the composer after hearing them. Too bad, since I have recently been enjoying Arnold's non-symphonic music very much.

I will give them a listen again later today, this time from Handley's Conifer recordings.

I actually remembered moments and sounds from these two symphonies proper, here 25-30 years later. I can understand my uncertainty with them, for stylistically, they turn on a dime, but not enough to ditch the composer altogether. I do enjoy Arnold's individual musical quirks and look forward to see how they develop.

VS

[JBS]

Kirnberger Chorales and Other Organ Works, Vol. 1

Wolfgang Rübsam

I have the Liepzig Chorales and the English Suites he recorded for Naxos.

TD

[AnotherSpin]

I have the Liepzig Chorales and the English Suites he recorded for Naxos.

[..]

Fortunately, Qobuz offers a wealth of recordings by Rübsam, including those you mentioned. I consider this one of the distinct pleasures of streaming. The Leipzig Chorales or the English Suites appear in dozens of interpretations by many performers, offering ample opportunity for prolonged enjoyment.

[JBS]

Fortunately, Qobuz offers a wealth of recordings by Rübsam, including those you mentioned. I consider this one of the distinct pleasures of streaming. The Leipzig Chorales or the English Suites appear in dozens of interpretations by many performers, offering ample opportunity for prolonged enjoyment.

You'd probably enjoy what I have playing now


There's 8 suites, ranging from 3 1/2 to 10 minutes in length, 61'09" total. Piano is a Steinway D.

[Que]

Usually it is the English that perform French Medieval music, here it is the other way around. 

Surprisingsly, no review to be found on the net of this recording issued in 2012.

[AnotherSpin]

Is Bach alone enough?

For many months now I've abstained from listening to Bach on the modern piano. Today, however, I returned for the sake of variety to Ivo Janssen, and I must say it was a most felicitous decision. Janssen remains impeccably self-effacing, never imposing himself upon the music with any flamboyant theatrics à la Sviatoslav Richter. Simply Bach, and the result is nothing short of pure musical bliss.

[AnotherSpin]

You'd probably enjoy what I have playing now


There's 8 suites, ranging from 3 1/2 to 10 minutes in length, 61'09" total. Piano is a Steinway D.

Thanks for the recommendation, sounds worth a listen.

[Irons]

Rubbra: Symphony No.6

Fairly sure a first listen of Rubbra's 6th. A work with a strong sense of spirituality.

[Mandryka]

You may like this, @Florestan It's basically Flaubert's text with some fairly anodine musique concrète.

[Florestan]

You may like this, @Florestan It's basically Flaubert's text with some fairly anodine musique concrète.

Tbh, the description doesn't sound particularly exciting. 

[Mandryka]

Tbh, the description doesn't sound particularly exciting. 

Shit, I was hoping to sell you my CD.

[Iota]

Stravinsky: Three Pieces for String Quartet
Stravinsky: Two Poems Of Konstantin Bal'mont
Stravinsky: Three Japanese Lyrics
Stravinsky: Ragtime (piano version)

Listening to some Stravinsky pieces I've not heard before. The first three unified by brevity, all very engaging and unmistakeably engraved by the diamond chisel-like Stravinsky mind.

[Harry]

Jean-Paul Paladin (fl. 1540-1560).
Tablature de Luth.
Eugène Ferré, plays on a  six-course renaissance lute, by Paul Thomson, and Stephen Barber.
Recorded 1993, église Notre-Dame, Clisson (France).
See back cover for details.
Cover picture: Simone Peterzano (attributed to), Venus playing the lute, with Cupid.
Streaming: 44.1kHz/16 bit.
Label: Arcana. PDF file attached.

An unknown name, at least to me once—Jean-Paul Paladin—but the disc itself is an old friend returned. I revisited it in search of a balm for the soul, and found it again just so: gentle, serene, and utterly disarming.

Though the album bears Paladin's name, it opens onto a broader garden of Renaissance voices—Claudin de Sermisy, Cipriano de Rore, Clément Janequin, Jacques Arcadelt, and the enigmatic Nollet—names still whispered in the quiet circles of those who love this repertoire. Each composed with a clarity and restraint now rare in the world, and through Eugène Ferré's fingers their music becomes a stillness unto itself, a contemplative grace rarely heard.

Ferré's six-course Renaissance lute speaks with soft authority. This instrument, modest in power but rich in colour, proves once again that intimacy, not volume, conveys the deepest emotion. In his hands, it becomes a spiritual anchor—an artefact of a time when the lute's resonance was understood as a form of devotion.

There is no need here for modern bombast or audio fireworks. The recorded acoustic—dark and hushed—is a quiet chamber of wonders, one where every string's murmur is perfectly preserved. Despite its modest resolution, the recording might as well be SOTA: for its sense of space, for its purity, for its emotional honesty.

This music does not strive to overwhelm; rather, it consoles. It evokes not the glory of courts but the inward light of it's time. A disc to keep close, to return to, to breathe with. For lovers of the lute, it is a firm recommendation. For those new to its world, a perfect place to begin.

Afterthought – A Devotion to Segnor Jean-Paul Paladin

Better than Orpheus with his golden lute,
Better than Apollo upon his lyre,
Better than Anion could ever say
On his honoured lute, his strings of fire—

A finer ornament than all of these I see in yours,
Which can revive a soul drawn low,
And breathe into the quiet death of thought
A hymn to life anew.

So if my time be spent before your final cadence ends,
I pray the heavens grant me grace
To learn the gifts you wove in sound—
And in a moment's hush, be raised again.

[vandermolen]

True grit overcome talent.

Very true!

[Harry]

Arcadia.
See for the works on this disc the back cover.

Leonor de Lera baroque violin & artistic direction violin by Marco Minnozzi, Ravenna 2021, bow middle 17th century Italian model by Nelly Poidevin & Leonor de Lera.
Nacho Laguna theorbo & baroque guitar 14 course theorbo by Jaume Bosser. Barcelona, 2003 5 course baroque guitar by José Miguel Moreno. Madrid, 2023.
Pablo FitzGerald archlute & baroque guitar 14 course archlute by Jaume Bosser & José Miguel Moreno. Madrid, 2014 5 course baroque guitar by Julio Castaños. Málaga, 2017.
Recorded at Estudio Torrelaguna, Torrelaguna (Spain) 2023.
PDF file attached.
Streaming: 96kHz/24bit. Sota recording.[/i]


"The world of reality has its limits; the world of imagination is boundless."

So wrote Rousseau — and here, in this luminous collection curated and led by Leonor de Lera, those boundaries truly dissolve. Arcadia is both a musical landscape and a poetic ideal, rooted in the pastoral imagination of the 16th and 17th centuries. At its heart lies the art of diminution: the florid, improvisational reworking of melody into expressive ornament — a practice once passed from master to student by ear and instinct, and here revived with uncommon subtlety.

The repertoire draws on madrigals and poetic songs by composers of the Italian Renaissance and early Baroque, inspired by the verses of Petrarch, Guarini, and Sannazaro. These are not grandiose works for court display, but rather intimate evocations of longing, transience, and beauty, filtered through the tender lens of memory. What Leonor de Lera achieves, alongside Nacho Laguna and Pablo FitzGerald, is nothing less than a modern pastoral dream — not nostalgic, but sensually alive.

De Lera's violin — an instrument by Marco Minnozzi, Ravenna 2021, played with a bow modelled on mid-17th-century Italian designs — sings with a human immediacy, at times caressing, at times weeping, always breathing the shape of the poetic line. Her ornamentation feels spontaneous yet never indulgent, faithful not only to the style but to the spirit of the words behind the notes.

The continuo instruments are chosen with great care: two theorbo and baroque guitars (from Jaume Bosser, José Miguel Moreno, and Julio Castaños), and a 14-course archlute of exceptional resonance. Laguna and FitzGerald accompany with exquisite sensitivity — never merely providing support, but shaping the musical space in which de Lera's lines can unfold, dissolve, and reform.

The recording, in high-resolution 96kHz/24bit, captures this interplay with transparency and depth. Estudio Torrelaguna proves an ideal acoustic: present, intimate, and clean — a room that listens as carefully as the musicians do. It is, without exaggeration, SOTA quality: no harshness, no veil, only air and presence.

This is not a disc for showing off a system or dazzling a room. It is for sitting still. For remembering the sweetness of vanished things. For finding, again, the soft voice of the inner world — where imagination knows no end.



"The world of reality has its limits; the world of imagination is boundless."

Diminuitions the practice of virtuoso ornamentation in the Renaissance and early Baroque periods. Lera applies this practice to pastoral madrigals and songs from the 16th and 17th centuries, which are based on texts by poets such as Giovanni Battista Guarini, Jacopo Sannazaro and Francesco Petrarca.
A wonderful CD and well recorded.

[Traverso]

Bach

CD 1

[Harry]

Lustiges Feld Music
Lingua Franca ·
Benoît Laurent, Oboe.
Recorded October 2009 at Église Saint-Jean l'Évangéliste, Beaufays · Streaming format not specified (reference-level sound)
Cover illustration: Paul Joseph Delcloche (1716–1759), Concert at the Court of the Prince-Bishop of Liège in the Château de Seraing.

The title is deceptive in its cheer — Lustiges Feld Music may conjure rustic merriment or a scene of soldiers at ease, but what we find here is something both richer and rarer: a gathering of chamber works drawn from the often-overlooked corners of the 18th-century Holy Roman Empire, performed with insight, elegance, and a welcome dash of spirit.

Benoît Laurent and the ensemble Lingua Franca are no strangers to the poetry of the oboe, and here they explore it fully: not just as a pastoral voice, but as a courtly narrator, capable of wit, sorrow, and subtle invention. The programme moves nimbly between dances, sonatas, and instrumental tableaux, much as a court concert might have — mingling formal structure with an undercurrent of improvisational charm.

What elevates this recording beyond the usual is the palpable joy in the ensemble's phrasing. The dialogue between instruments is taut yet unforced, rhythmically alive, and never cluttered. The continuo breathes, the ornamentation sparkles without fuss, and the oboe sings — not merely as a soloist, but as a companion among equals.

One feels, too, the care taken with sonority. The recording, made in the clear and reverberant space of Saint-Jean l'Évangéliste in Beaufays, is a model of balance. It avoids both the dryness of studio confinement and the murk of ecclesiastical excess. Every gesture is heard in proportion, every line etched without harshness. By any standard — historical or audiophile — this is state-of-the-art sound.

The cover image, a painting by Paul Joseph Delcloche, reminds us that this music once lived in rooms of gilded restraint, performed before bishops, nobles, and diplomats in settings where politics and pleasure mingled under the sign of art. That this world has vanished makes it no less vivid here. Lingua Franca does not reconstruct a court — they resurrect a mood, a sound, a sensibility.

There are albums one listens to for repertoire, others for interpretation. Lustiges Feld Music offers both. It is at once refined and enlivening — a reminder that joy, when properly voiced, is not a matter of noise but of balance, of line, of shared breath.

[Harry]

Psalms from Geneva.
Organ works by Jan Pieterszoon Sweelinck.
Masaaki Suzuki, 2002 Marc Garnier organ, Shinko-Kyokai, Kobe.
Label: BIS-CD-1614.
Streaming: FLAC 44.1kHz/16 bit. Recorded 2005.

There are certain discs that, upon hearing, do not immediately dazzle with flamboyance, nor call attention to themselves with showy grandeur. Instead, they work from within, patiently weaving a thread of light through your inner chamber. This is such a disc. Psalms from Geneva is not a programme of surface charm, but one of profound stillness, inwardness, and clear, structured beauty—a portrait of a man who shaped the course of Northern keyboard music and did so without ever leaving the city of Amsterdam.

Jan Pieterszoon Sweelinck (1562–1621), the so-called "Orpheus of Amsterdam," stands as the towering figure bridging the golden age of Franco-Flemish polyphony and the stylus fantasticus of North German organists. That he never wrote liturgical music for the Calvinist service—despite being organist at the Oude Kerk—is no obstacle here, for his settings of the Genevan Psalms were for domestic devotion and artistic refinement alike. Polyphonic elaborations on psalms such as 140, 23, 116, and 36 offer us variation technique of astonishing complexity, far surpassing mere ornamentation. Each voice moves with purpose, the counterpoint transparent, the affect luminous.

In Suzuki's hands—on the beautiful 2002 Marc Garnier organ of Shinko-Kyokai, Kobe—the textures never blur, the rhythmic verve never slackens. There is architectural weight to the Toccatas, rhetorical drama in the Fantasia Chromatica, and radiant echo effects in the Echo Fantasia in C that recall the grandeur of Gabrieli and point ahead to Scheidemann. The chorales at the end—Allein Gott in der Höh sei Ehr and Puer nobis nascitur—serve as luminous epilogues, glints of candlelight on polished brass, closing the programme in quiet exaltation.

The organ itself is beautifully voiced: full, finely balanced, with a clarity that serves this music ideally. The recording quality is BIS through and through—superb depth, clean articulation, and an acoustic that allows the sound to breathe without veiling it in artificial reverb.

A noble disc, both spiritually and musically. No need for grand gestures—just listen, and Sweelinck will lead you down the long nave of his musical cathedral, bathed in Psalmic light.