What are you listening 2 now?

[AnotherSpin]

Drifter
by Linda Catlin Smith

Apartment House & Quatuor Bozzini

[Dry Brett Kavanaugh]

Khachaturian, piano concerto etc..

[Cato]

Whoa!

Reubke RAWKS!      Thanks for the recommendation!


And if the Whoa! was also meant for the picture of Alma Bettencourt, I agree!  Double WHOA!

A more classic-looking French woman would be hard to find!   

In recent days...

...and...From the Pieces/Blown You Away  topic...


Kalliwoda's Grosse Sonate (Oddly spread over 4 hard-to-find-and-assemble YouTube screens!)

[AnotherSpin]

[hopefullytrusting]

Amazing album: Pratt's Stillpoint

[Mister Sharpe]

Double-barrelled Ned Rorem morning here with two treasures, End of Summer (though hard to convince me that's the case: still overwarm here, droughty, and a pervasive feeling that the earth is in peril) and Winter Pages with a special treat, Paris Then, sadly and I suspect pointedly, ending all too quickly.

[Harry]

Resonance.
Chamber Music.
Louise Farrenc – Piano Quintet in C minor, Op.40
Robert Schumann – Piano Quartet in E-flat Major, Op.47
Lucien Durosoir – Prière à Marie; Chant élégiaque; Berceuse (for Violin and Piano, Cello and Piano)

Piatti Quartet.
Michael Trainor (Violin), Emily Holland (Violin), Miguel Sobrinho (Viola), Jessie Ann Richardson (Cello) With Zahra Benyounes (Viola, in Schumann) Emmanuel Despax (Piano)
Recorded: 2024 at All Saints Church, Durham Road, London
Streaming: 96kHz/24 bit. PDF file attached.

This disc bears a fitting title, Resonance, for it unites three composers whose voices echo across time with differing degrees of force. Schumann's Piano Quartet, the most familiar work here, is clearly present for commercial weight: an anchor piece to draw in a broader audience. The performance is accomplished and finely recorded, though the market holds stronger and more searching interpretations.

Of greater fascination is Louise Farrenc's Piano Quintet in C minor, a work that still needs the advocacy it richly deserves. Farrenc's music balances strength and elegance in equal measure, unfolding with a natural grace and a clarity of design that delights at every turn. From the first bars of the Allegro it becomes clear how assured her handling of form and texture is: themes are not merely introduced but set into dialogue, weaving through the ensemble with elegance and vigour. The Andante Sostenuto glows with a lyric intensity that recalls Schubert's gift for song, yet with a French clarity of line that is distinctly her own. And in the concluding Allegro Vivace one feels a composer delighting in rhythmic wit and contrapuntal sparkle, music that refuses to sit in anyone's shadow. Farrenc here stands shoulder to shoulder with her better-known contemporaries, and perhaps even outshines them in balance and craft. It is music that flows as if inevitability itself had found a voice — sparkling with invention and wholly her own. One listens with admiration not only for its beauty but for its unassuming assurance: art and imagination bound together in a sweep both noble and joyous.

The surprise is Lucien Durosoir, a name that may puzzle many. A soldier and composer, he left a handful of works that are still only sporadically encountered. The pieces here — Prière à Marie, Chant élégiaque, and Berceuse — are salon-like in character: finely wrought, tender in sentiment, immediately approachable. They may not expand the canon, yet they carry a certain charm, the kind of music that once filled intimate rooms with a quiet radiance.

The Piatti Quartet, well regarded for championing both familiar and neglected voices, shine brightest in the Farrenc and lend warmth to Durosoir. Their Schumann, while solid, never quite scales the heights of passion and inwardness that the greatest readings achieve. Still, as a programme, this album does what it promises: it resonates, it surprises, and it places before us the beauty of a voice like Farrenc's that must not fade again into the margins.

Durosoir (1878–1955) was a French violinist of considerable standing before the Great War. His career as a virtuoso was interrupted when he served on the front lines, where he famously played chamber music with comrades amid the devastation of the trenches. After the war, shaken but determined, he withdrew from public life and devoted himself to composition. His works, often marked by an elegiac intimacy, reflect both salon refinement and the shadows of wartime experience. They are not revolutionary, but they breathe sincerity, and in their way embody the survival of lyricism against the dissonance of history.

[Karl Henning]

Mendelssohn: The String Quintets
Doric String Quartet & Timothy Ridout

Been listening to rock and metal all day. I need some beautiful music.

Sweet!

TD:
As I watch, the Youtube algorithm often follows Henningmusick with a Shostakovich quartet, and I have no complaint:

[SonicMan46]

Mozart, WA - Wind Serenades, KV375/388 & Gran Partita KV361 w/ Nicolas Baldeyrou and friends on period instruments - listening on Spotify - this is Vol. 1 so not sure what else is to come; now I own these works in the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra 7-disc box below BUT on modern instruments - attached are the English notes from the Alpha website - instruments are listed but no details are given - might do a $9+ USD DL from Presto and burn to CD-R?  Dave

 

[Karl Henning]

[Karl Henning]

[Karl Henning]

[AnotherSpin]

17th Century Violin Music

Lina Tur Bonet 
Musica Alchemica

[JBS]

Amazing album: Pratt's Stillpoint

....and apparently OOP even though it was only issued two years ago (well, two years and one week ago, if you want to be precise--25 August 2023]
😳

TD
Jennifer Higdon
Concerto for Orchestra
CityScape

Robert Spano conducting the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra

[Todd]

Schuch plays Brahms.  Expected greatness.  Got greatness.

[Wanderer]

[Harry]

Josef Suk.
Orchestral Works.
A Summer's Tale, Op.29 (1907–09) Pohádka léta
Prague, Op.26 (1904)
BBC Symphony Orchestra, Jiří Bělohlávek
Recorded: Watford Colosseum, 2012
Streaming: FLAC 96kHz/24 bit. SACD
Chandos, PDF file attached.

Whatever your opinion of this composer, he is one of the few that never writes a note without purpose, every one of them is necessary to let the music bloom in a dreamlike wave, for this is the remarkable essence of Suk's orchestral works. You easily sink into the almost sleeplike state yet stay fully awake. Well that's my impression anyway. Every movement in both works is a constant repetition of a wave rushing up to the shore and then retreating hastily, repeating this across 80 minutes, and I willingly sink into this enchanted world of magic and slumbering fully awake.

A Summer's Tale is perhaps Suk's most poetic orchestral canvas, written in the years after the death of Dvořák, his father-in-law and mentor. In its five movements the music oscillates between luminous serenity and darker undercurrents, as if nature itself were mirroring a man wrestling with grief and renewal. There are echoes of Strauss's vast orchestration, but where Strauss aims for drama, Suk's voice is inward, almost confessional — the tide of thought and feeling breaking gently upon itself.

Prague, by contrast, is an outward gesture: a hymn to a beloved city, but coloured by the melancholy of history and the shadow of personal loss. Its grandeur never tips into bombast; instead, Suk gives us something closer to a meditation in stone and water, music that breathes the spirit of a place while still bearing the human pulse.

Jiří Bělohlávek, long a champion of Czech repertoire, proves an ideal guide. He shapes Suk's long paragraphs with patient hands, never pushing, never letting them collapse, always allowing the wave to rise and fall in its natural rhythm. Under his baton, the BBC Symphony Orchestra sounds both burnished and transparent, lending Suk's orchestration the glow it deserves.

The Chandos recording, spacious and clear, captures this ebb and flow with fidelity: strings shimmer without losing weight, winds cut through yet remain warm, the whole anchored in a balanced perspective. It is not merely a document but an invitation — to enter Suk's dream-world, to follow the tide, and to discover that in his music, even slumber is fully awake.

[Karl Henning]

....and apparently OOP even though it was only issued two years ago (well, two years and one week ago, if you want to be precise--25 August 2023]
😳

TD
Jennifer Higdon
Concerto for Orchestra
CityScape

Robert Spano conducting the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra

What's your read on Higdon?

TD:

[JBS]

What's your read on Higdon?

Determinedly tonal (to the point of sometimes being nothing more than tonal honking), with a focus on achieving effects through rhythm, timbre, and orchestral color.

Checking the liner notes, I see their author (his name is Nick Jones) says a similar thing.

...Higdon tends to think in terms of melody and color when she composes, rather than thematically. The listener's ear is not drawn to themes and their development, but to bright patches of color, exuberant rhythms, and fascinating shifts of color.

[Karl Henning]

Determinedly tonal (to the point of sometimes being nothing more than tonal honking), with a focus on achieving effects through rhythm, timbre, and orchestral color.

Checking the liner notes, I see their author (his name is Nick Jones) says a similar thing.

Thanks!