What are you listening 2 now?

[classicalgeek]

Nice!! You couldn't have picked a better place to start with Sallinen than with that Ondine disc of choral/orchestral works and the 4th Symphony, which are some of his strongest works IMO. His Cello Concerto is also a fine work well worth hearing. The rest of his output is quite variable - in some of his other symphonies besides the 4th, he's more interested in creating atmosphere than creating memorable themes and developing them convincingly.

I do look forward to exploring his other symphonies, even if they're more variable, and eventually the operas! And I'll have to listen to the Cello Concerto as well. Definitely the works you mention (the choral works and the Fourth Symphony) were of the highest quality.

TD:

Bartok
Piano concertos nos. 1, 3
Peter Serkin, piano
Chicago Symphony Orchestra
Seiji Ozawa

my first foray into this 6-CD box:


Really exciting and fresh performances, both by P. Serkin (who's absolutely brilliant) and the team of Chicago and Ozawa. I love their Lutoslawski Concerto for Orchestra (which somehow I thought I was getting in this box, but it on EMI/Warner, not RCA) and they don't disappoint here.

[Papy Oli]

JS Bach
BWV 11
BWV 12
BWV 13

From the Harnoncourt/Leonhardt cantata cycle.

A standout Weinen, Klagen, Sorgen, Zagen.

[Tsaraslondon]

Pounds the table! One of the best albums ever released.

Thanks heavens it was recorded for posterity.

[Traverso]

Kagel

[Linz]

Bruckner Symphony no. 6 Klemperer

[Mandryka]

Enjoying the notations.

[Brian]

This looks scary! You shouldn't run in snow while holding priceless violins! What if you trip?? Maybe he was using a decoy plastic instrument or something. Wait...maybe it's Photoshopped in??

[JBS]

This looks scary! You shouldn't run in snow while holding priceless violins! What if you trip?? Maybe he was using a decoy plastic instrument or something. Wait...maybe it's Photoshopped in??

Maybe he was late for the concert?

How is the performance itself?

[JBS]

TD


CD 107
Elgar
Dream of Gerontius Part II
Live recording (mono) Manchester 23 March 1951
Barbirolli conducting Halle Orchestra and Chorus
Marjorie Thomas contralto
Parry Jones tenor

Tape hiss, a passage from which three bars are missing, audience noise, and the unexplained absence of Part I probably explain why it's never been released before.

This is effectively the last CD of the box: CD 108 is a collection of rehearsal excerpts, CD 109 audio "documentary" about Barbirolli, neither of which I am very interested in hearing.

I think the box is worth getting. If you don't want the whole shebang, I recommend getting the new remastered sets of Barbirolli conducting Sibelius, Mahler, & Elgar, plus the RVW recordings, the three operas (Dido & Aeneas, Madama Butterfly, Otello), the Brahms piano and double concerto, and the Janet Baker recordings of Mahler, Berlioz, and Ravel song cycles.
The remastering is sufficiently good enough to justify getting them even if you have previous issues.

[Of course, by the time you buy all that, you'd probably spending the price of the complete set anyway.]

[Brian]

Maybe he was late for the concert?

How is the performance itself?

Ironically given the running cover, the first word that comes to mind for the performances is "slow." The disc runs 73:32, compared to 69:05 for the exact same coupling from Lin/Salonen/CBS or 69:37 from Vengerov/Barenboim/Teldec. Most of that is in the Nielsen, particularly Nielsen's first movement, although I also do prefer my Sibelius faster (9:22 slow movement is really pushing it).

Having said that! Moving on to positives:
Dalene is a performer of real character and ideas. He's not a just-play-the-notes type but has ideas about phrases, accents, style, how to voice double-stops/chords, and his taste is very good. Freakily good for how young he is (20 at time of recording, 21 now). The last violinist I can remember having such interesting ideas and such a distinctive personal character at such a young age is Tianwa Yang. The ultra-slow beginning to the Nielsen is actually one of the best parts of the whole disc - it really feels folksy and comforting and charming, where Lin feels rather colder and more art-music-y. Dalene isn't afraid to fiddle a little bit around 4' and the effect is wonderful. For me it was like hearing the praeludium for the first time.

There are two very, very brief moments in the Sibelius where Dalene's vibrato produces a slightly sour/off-tune sound, but he is otherwise attention-grabbing from first to last. His sound is on the smaller side, but agile and warmly romantic. I have his previous albums (Tchaikovsky/Barber concertos and a "Nordic" chamber recital of Grieg, Rautavaara, etc.) and they do seem to match his personality a little better. The Tchaikovsky/Barber are unusual but successful interpretations, warm and intimate and chamber-like violin playing rather than big extroverted virtuoso stuff. The Nordic disc is very charming music to put on while reading or driving or whatever.

Storgards and the orchestra do great work, there is lots of interesting detail in the basses, cellos, and French horns captured with unusual clarity and I heard French horn bits in the Sibelius I'd never heard before anywhere. Not yet sure whether this will move from "stream" to "buy" for me, as the slower tempos really work in Nielsen but less so in Sibelius, but there is a lot of merit. And for people who like the Sibelius concerto to have timings of 17/9/7, rather than 15/8/7, this should be a real contender.

[Linz]

Bruckner Symphony no. 4 Bohm

[André]

The conductor here is the composer's son.

[DavidW]

[Symphonic Addict]

The conductor here is the composer's son.

A very fine disc!

[Karl Henning]

What do you think, Davey?

[aligreto]

Gerald Barry:





Swinging Tripes and Trillibubkins
Triochic Blues
"_______"
Sextet

[JBS]

Ironically given the running cover, the first word that comes to mind for the performances is "slow." The disc runs 73:32, compared to 69:05 for the exact same coupling from Lin/Salonen/CBS or 69:37 from Vengerov/Barenboim/Teldec. Most of that is in the Nielsen, particularly Nielsen's first movement, although I also do prefer my Sibelius faster (9:22 slow movement is really pushing it).

Having said that! Moving on to positives:
Dalene is a performer of real character and ideas. He's not a just-play-the-notes type but has ideas about phrases, accents, style, how to voice double-stops/chords, and his taste is very good. Freakily good for how young he is (20 at time of recording, 21 now). The last violinist I can remember having such interesting ideas and such a distinctive personal character at such a young age is Tianwa Yang. The ultra-slow beginning to the Nielsen is actually one of the best parts of the whole disc - it really feels folksy and comforting and charming, where Lin feels rather colder and more art-music-y. Dalene isn't afraid to fiddle a little bit around 4' and the effect is wonderful. For me it was like hearing the praeludium for the first time.

There are two very, very brief moments in the Sibelius where Dalene's vibrato produces a slightly sour/off-tune sound, but he is otherwise attention-grabbing from first to last. His sound is on the smaller side, but agile and warmly romantic. I have his previous albums (Tchaikovsky/Barber concertos and a "Nordic" chamber recital of Grieg, Rautavaara, etc.) and they do seem to match his personality a little better. The Tchaikovsky/Barber are unusual but successful interpretations, warm and intimate and chamber-like violin playing rather than big extroverted virtuoso stuff. The Nordic disc is very charming music to put on while reading or driving or whatever.

Storgards and the orchestra do great work, there is lots of interesting detail in the basses, cellos, and French horns captured with unusual clarity and I heard French horn bits in the Sibelius I'd never heard before anywhere. Not yet sure whether this will move from "stream" to "buy" for me, as the slower tempos really work in Nielsen but less so in Sibelius, but there is a lot of merit. And for people who like the Sibelius concerto to have timings of 17/9/7, rather than 15/8/7, this should be a real contender.

Thanks. This will probably go in my shopping cart.

[Brian]

I feel really uncomfortable about the fact that the music director of the Oslo Philharmonic and Orchestre de Paris is 7 years younger than I am.

[Mirror Image]

I feel really uncomfortable about the fact that the music director of the Oslo Philharmonic and Orchestre de Paris is 7 years younger than I am.

A strange statement, but what's even stranger is you didn't tell us what symphony you're listening to.

[Mirror Image]

C E S A R      A L E R T!!!!

And now we move onto some Chung conducting Nielsen:






It's a shame that Chung didn't complete his Nielsen series. I love all of these recordings and rate them rather highly. They're all uniformly excellent.