What were you listening to? (CLOSED)

[KeithW]

So, now listening to this:

And oh my, within the first bar you can hear it! It is less irritating than humming, but is audible throughout (though only periodically, not every breath). When the instrument is loud, it is not noticeable. But the groaning in ecstasy heavy breathing audible breathing seems to appear most often right before some intense moments (even more noticeable in the third movement before the variations start to kick into high gear). The performance is pretty strong, if that matters to you!  

Have you seen her performance of the Emperor concerto?  The second movement illustrates this wonderfully - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kN51a6Hs6X0

[Karl Henning]

Again:

JS Bach
English Suite № 3 in g minor, BWV808
Christiane Jaccottet

Although there is some dross in this 40-CD Cascade box, it is chock full of  Jaccottet's wonderful recordings . . . so, perhaps the best $20 I ever spent.

[Karl Henning]

JS Bach
Toccata in d minor, BWV913
Toccata in e minor, BWV914
Toccata in G, BWV916
Christiane Jaccottet

[KeithW]

Festive Bach:

[asin]B0000DJEOI[/asin]

I own a number of recordings of this work - the quality of recording and of singing in this version is superb.  Merry Christmas!

[mc ukrneal]

Have you seen her performance of the Emperor concerto?  The second movement illustrates this wonderfully - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kN51a6Hs6X0

Interesting. I had not heard this. Thanks!

[Willoughby earl of Itacarius]

Piano Trio in E flat major, No. 1.

[KeithW]

Interesting. I had not heard this. Thanks!

Available on CD
[asin]B000RP4LEO[/asin]

[kishnevi]

Later on he says "He was a bishop in the 4th century in what's now Turkey". Love the logic. From now on I will call Trajan a Spanish emperor and Constantin the Great a Serbian one. 

MERRY CHRISTMAS EVERYONE!

Wasn't Diocletian the Serbian* emperor and Constantine the British emperor?  (You know what I mean.)

Thread duty:  Britten: Four Sea Interludes   Bernstein conducting the Boston Symphony Orchestra--from the DG budget box with contains his Sibelius and Elgar-Enigma Variations recordings--the Britten was recorded at his very last concert (Tanglewood, 8/1990), but no sign of debility in the conducting.

*Or was it Croatian?   Much simpler in the bad old days  when you could simply lump it all together as Yugoslavian.

[Willoughby earl of Itacarius]

CD 1 from this twofar. Galuppi is a composer to reckon with. He writes very fine music, melodious and ingenious. His scoring is unusual too, and I like that very much. Performance and sound is excellent. The booklet is quite good done, the cover art is trash!

[Opus106]

Available on CD

Can't be the same performance.

[kishnevi]

Humming is assumed with him. But how noticeable is it on #30. Average? Louder than usual? If you don;t have this particular sonata in the box, maybe someone who does can comment.

Sarge has commented.  It's been a while, as always, since I listened, but the humming was horrible on Sonatas 5-7, but closer to normal Gouldian levels in the rest.   The box does contain Nos. 30-32.

I am glad I have the box, vocalises or not, because it has Gould's recordings of the concertos;  buying them as a separate set would cost more than the budget box including the sonatas.

[Karl Henning]

Thread duty:  Britten: Four Sea Interludes   Bernstein conducting the Boston Symphony Orchestra--from the DG budget box with contains his Sibelius and Elgar-Enigma Variations recordings--the Britten was recorded at his very last concert (Tanglewood, 8/1990), but no sign of debility in the conducting.

Hmm, you remind me that I've not yet finished that box-let . . . .

[Jared]

[TheGSMoeller]

This truly is fantastic piece of music, very festive and emotional. Compared to some other of Rouse's music, Karolju is very tonal and easily places itself among great Christmas music. The final Italian carol will make you weep it's so beautiful. I added some of Rouse's original notes from the piece.

. [asin]B000W1V4AC[/asin]

Karolju
Program Note by the Composer

Two paths led to the composition of Karolju. The first was the great body of Christmas carols written over the centuries, a collection I value as highly for its spiritual meaning as for its glorious music. The second was Carl Orff's Carmina Burana, which made an unforgettable impression upon me when I first heard it in March of 1963.

In the early 1980s, I conceived of a plan to compose a collection of Christmas carols couched in an overall form similar to that of Carmina Burana, but it was not until 1989, when the work was commissioned by the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra, that I was able to begin serious work on it, though I had composed several of the carols in my mind over the preceding years.

As I wished to compose the music first, the problem of texts presented itself. Finding appropriate existing texts to fit already composed music would have been virtually impossible, and as I did not trust my own ability to devise a poetically satisfying text, I decided to compose my own texts in a variety of languages (Latin, Swedish, French, Spanish, Russian, Czech, German, and Italian) which, although making reference to words and phrases appropriate to the Christmas season, would not be intelligibly translatable as complete entities. It was rather my intent to match the sound of the language to the musical style of the carol to which it was applied. I resultantly selected words often more for the quality of their sound and the extent to which such sound typified the language of their origin than for their cognitive "meaning" per se.

I also elected to compose music which was direct and simple in its tonal orientation, music which would not seem out of place in a medley of traditional Christmas carols. Those who know other of my works may be surprised -- some even distressed -- by Karolju. While I can assert with assurance that this score does not represent a wholesale "change of direction" for me and thus constitutes an isolated example among my compositions, Karolju is nevertheless a piece which I "mean" with the most profound sincerity, one which I hope will help instill in listeners the same special joy which I feel for the season it celebrates.

It has been my decision to eschew complexity or oversubtlety of utterance, preferring instead to compose music as straightforward in terms of melody, harmony, rhythm, and orchestration. Except for a paraphrase of the coda to the "O Fortuna" movements of Carmina Burana (which I have used in Nos. 1 and 10 of Karolju and which constitutes a small homage to Orff) and for a four-measure phrase in No. 3 which I borrowed from The Nutcracker -- a phrase which Tchaikovsky himself had cribbed from an eighteenth-century minuet -- all of the music in Karolju

[Karl Henning]

Quite likely first listens . . . .

JS Bach
Toccata in f# minor, BWV910
Toccata in c minor, BWV911
Christiane Jaccottet

[Jared]

call me a cliche if you will, but it was Bach's Christmas Oratorio this morning...

[KeithW]

Can't be the same performance.

A brilliant Paavo Järvi impersonation by Vladimir Jurowski, don't you think   

Indeed, not the same performance... indeed, I don't think Jarvi and Grimaud have released anything together.

[listener]

GLAZUNOV: Symphony no. 5 in Bb     Suite "From the Middle Ages"
Moscow Radio & Television Orch.    / Vladimir Fedoseyev, cond.
BALAKIREV: Symphony 1 in C
Royal Philharmonic Orch.,  / Beecham
and trumpet concertos: TELEMANN - in D, ALBINONI in C, FASCH in D, & HERTEL Concerto a Cinque
John Wilbraham, trumpet      ASMF / Marriner

[Conor71]

Schubert: Piano Sonata No. 19 In D Minor, D 958


Just finished listening to Kleiber's Unfinished Symphony - now listening to the first Disc in this set of the late Piano Sonatas.
First listen of this performance!

[Jared]

so here I was thinking this had been a Gurn recommendation... but it wasn't. Someone recently recommended this purchase, for which I heartily thank them...