What are you listening 2 now?

[JBS]

Starting this set


Each CD wallet is illustrated with an facsimile of music in the original publications, although the individual piece depicted may turn out to be on a different CD (thus the Tombeau de M St Colombe appears on the jacket of CD 8, but is performed on CD 7).

[Mapman]

Mendelssohn: Symphony #3 "Scottish"
Muti: Philharmonia

Great symphony. Unfortunately, this is not a particularly great performance. The opening is beautiful, but many passages lack crispness. The Muti box has been pretty good so far, I guess this is one of the (inevitable in a box this size) duds.

[AnotherSpin]

Dufay: Missa Puisque je vis & Other Works

The Binchois Consort


A bit of Osho to start the day:

Beauty is natural, ugliness is unnatural. Beauty is your self-nature and ugliness is something foreign.

Beauty is something inner. Once it is there, discovered, it starts radiating from your body, from your mind, from everything that you consist of. Once your inner beauty is there, everything is beautified.

[steve ridgway]

Berio - Epifanie

[AnotherSpin]

[Toni Bernet]

George Frideric Handel: Ode for St Cecilia's Day (HWV 76)

In London at the time of Haendel, there was an established tradition of holding a festive concert on the feast of St Cecilia on 22 November. Purcell and others had already composed works for this celebration of St Cecilia. In addition to his composition Alexander's Feast, Haendel provided the setting of an ode for St Cecilia's Day in 1739. The author of this poem was the English poet John Dryden (1631 - 1700). In his ode, in honour of music and its patron saint Cecilia, he draws a wide arc from the original harmony of the spheres of the universe to the last things of heaven and earth. In keeping with a composer's idiom of his time, Handel took a number of musical themes from a collection of suites by the Viennese composer Gottlieb Muffat and incorporated them into his composition.

You can find an listening companion on this webside:

https://www.discoveringsacredmusic.ch/18th-century/handel-cecilia


Mozart greatly appreciated this ode and created his own orchestration for the imperial court librarian Baron Gottlieb van Swieten.

Handel's ode is written for soprano and tenor solo, choir and orchestra and is a tribute to the power of music and especially to the singing and musical instruments that enumerate Dryden's verses (cello, trumpet, drum, flute, lute, violin, organ), all of which were given their own obbligato part.

[Que]

[Que]

It is odd that only the Flanders Recorder Quartet is mentioned on the cover, while this is a collaboration with Capilla Flamenca and the recording includes many songs  - accompanied by recorders (and/or lute).

https://www.medieval.org/emfaq/cds/op1-239.htm

PS On the cover a fragment from the Birth of Venus by Botticelli.

[AnotherSpin]

Just this morning, I marked it for listening on Qobuz.

[AnotherSpin]

As the Middle Ages faded, the soaring Gothic vertical flattened and spilled into a shallow horizontal plane. Man ceased to address God; instead, he turned to his fellow man, losing thereby the very spine that had once held him upright.

Hierarchy dissolved, giving way to the marketplace. Dark times dawned for a culture endlessly replicated and made for sale.

War, once a protracted affair marked by rare flare-ups and relatively modest casualties, became an industry of slaughter. The world quickened and hardened.

Music shed its God-like anonymity; celebrities arose, and a chasm opened between creator and consumer. The farther one drifted, the farther one strayed from contemplation and prayer. Lower, ever lower.

Yet not all was lost: the light of the Middle Ages did not fully gutter out; a slender thread of it still reached us.

[Que]

Giving this recording a go with its focus on trio sonatas of the Bologna School, that developed the da chiesa style. Funky performances, with the dubious use of a guitar as continuo.

https://www.musica-dei-donum.org/cd_reviews/dhm_88875174822_Passacaille_1101_Stradivarius_Str33937.html
(Also of interest due to the other recordings reviewed.)

[Que]

Just this morning, I marked it for listening on Qobuz.

Nice! As for music from the Notre Dame School, I can heartily recommend this (reissue of two recordings on Harmonic Records):

[Wanderer]

[SonicMan46]

Telemann, GP - Concertos Mixed Instruments w/ Michael Schneider & La Stagione Frankfurt (also have his box of the 'Wind Concertos'), both an easy way to get a lot of GP -    Dave

 

[Que]

Simone Pierini here plays music by a mystery composer, who was inspired by his contemporaries François Couperin, Jean-François Dandrieu, Bernard De Bury, Philippe-François Véras and Christophe Moyreau.

[Todd]

K333.

[Traverso]

Bach

[pjme]

An old favorite in a fresh performance:

[hopefullytrusting]

I was given a choice between Brahms or Bruckner. Lol, as if that was even a choice.

Brahms's Hungarian Dances 5 & 6:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O192eo9zbT4

[Linz]

Anton Bruckner Symphony No. 4 in E Flat Major, 1880 (aka 1878/80) - Ed. Robert Haas
Columbia Symphony Orchestra, Bruno Walter