What are you listening 2 now?

[Karl Henning]

So, this wasn't the Requiem, but I trust Karl, and boy was this a lovely piece. Quite lush, rich, romantic. I don't believe I had heard this piece prior, so many thanks for that recommendation. :-)

Right you are! I trusted so much to my keywords, I failed to notice it was actually Roméo et Juliette. Yes, a beauty! Glad you enjoyed it!

[Mandryka]

A particularly beautiful, delicate op 106 from John Lill. Calm and collected, expressive. I don't think I've heard a more satisfying modern piano performance.  It may be one sided and iconoclastic in its way - a good way IMO.

[Todd]

Disc one.  As much as I enjoy Pienaar's LvB, I dislike his Mozart.  Or at least that's what I remembered.  I figured I might as well revisit some.  The playing is fast and way too intense for Mozart.  Think crude, brutalized Bartok or perhaps Kovacevich's most intense EMI LvB or maybe some gnarly Prokofiev stylings applied to Mozart, and played more speedily than even Gulda attempts, and there you go.  As far as listening goes, it's quite exhausting.  That written, K281 comes across almost like an LvB parody of Mozart, sounding like an extended Scherzo. 

[steve ridgway]

I definitely found the Davis recording booming and impressive.

Berlioz: Requiem



I found 2 vinyl rips of this on archive.org, one more crackly at the start than the other so I've downloaded the MP3s of both in case picking and mixing is needed. The first few minutes sound good .

Also enjoyed the rest of the Munch recording and have downloaded the MP3s rather than the sizeable 24 bit FLACs with their extended audiophile recordings of lock grooves .

[Roasted Swan]

A particularly beautiful, delicate op 106 from John Lill. Calm and collected, expressive. I don't think I've heard a more satisfying modern piano performance.  It may be one sided and iconoclastic in its way - a good way IMO.

In his day John Lill's Beethoven was widely admired - concerti and sonatas.  I suspect these days his quite 'serious' style will attract fewer fans but I have to say I have always enjoyed it like you.

[Bachtoven]

I'm pretty sure he's the first person to transcribe and play Liszt's Piano Sonata on guitar. Even Caballero can't completely mask the horrendous technical difficulties at times, but overall I think it works pretty well. Coupling it with "Pictures at an Exhibition"? Madness!

[Traverso]

Bach

CD 2







Die Canonischen Veränderungen über ein Weihnachtslied  The main reason to choose this CD now.

[Henk]

Fire

[Todd]

In his day John Lill's Beethoven was widely admired - concerti and sonatas.

By whom?  Lill's cycle was recorded in the late 70s, when artists like Barenboim, Ashkenazy, Brendel, and Buchbinder had either recorded or were recording cycles for major labels, and Kempff and Backhaus had long been on the market.  There were other contenders as well.

I'm not sure what is meant by serious, nor, by implication, what might be considered unserious Beethoven.

[Mandryka]

By whom?  Lill's cycle was recorded in the late 70s, when artists like Barenboim, Ashkenazy, Brendel, and Buchbinder had either recorded or were recording cycles for major labels, and Kempff and Backhaus had long been on the market.  There were other contenders as well.

Here's RO in Gramophone - Richard Osborne maybe

https://reader.exacteditions.com/issues/33170/page/87


And re seriousness, Jed Distler writes "Those who gravitate toward Teutonic Beethoven playing of the sober, conscientious variety [that's me!] will relate to Lill's even-handed temperament."

https://www.classicstoday.com/review/review-10765/#:~:text=Those%2520who%2520gravitate%2520toward%2520Teutonic,%E2%80%9CHammerklavier%E2%80%9D%252C%2520and%2520Op.

Unserious Beethoven sonatas, that may be Glenn Gould,

[Cato]

What a performance!  What a classic!  I played that record again and again!  (It had only the excerpts from Der Ring.)

Right after it came out, reviewers were calling for a complete Ring cycle from George Szell and The Cleveland Orchestra, but nothing ever happened.

And not too long after this record appeared, Szell died in 1970.

[NumberSix]

Now streaming on Apple Music:



Mozart: Symphony Nos. 38, 41
Freiburger Barockorchester & René Jacobs

Have not done a Symphony Saturday for a minute, so here we go.

[Todd]

Here's RO in Gramophone - Richard Osborne maybe

A British critic in Gramophone gives a good review to a pellucid recording of a British artist.  That's unusual.  At least it possesses sober, conscientious Teutonic-style playing.  I'm not sure that constitutes being widely admired. 

Unserious Beethoven sonatas, that may be Glenn Gould

Riccardo Schwartz epitomizes unserious, but I doubt most people have heard him or will, and I wish to discourage anyone from listening to him.

[Karl Henning]

@Madiel may be interested:

[Roasted Swan]

What a performance!  What a classic!  I played that record again and again!  (It had only the excerpts from Der Ring.)

Right after it came out, reviewers were calling for a complete Ring cycle from George Szell and The Cleveland Orchestra, but nothing ever happened.

And not too long after this record appeared, Szell died in 1970.

You beat me to praising this disc - just remarkable.....

[pjme]

I've heard a few live performances of Maw's music and never really enjoyed it. Maybe I should try again.

I think that "Scenes and arias" may just be beyond your taste...but one never knows. I find this workalmost operatic - the premiere must hve been something quite extraordinary:  Heather Harper, sop / Janet Baker, mezzo / Josephine Veasey, calt / BBC Symphony Orchestra / Norman Del Mar !

From The Independent in 1994:

Certainly, part of Maw's intention as he composed the work was restorative: to counter the post- Webern norm of fragmented lines and functional scoring with a re- animation in his own terms of the florid, long-breathed lyricism he loved in the operas of Richard Strauss and Britten (the women's ensembles in Der Rosenkavalier and Peter Grimes especially), and by a revival of what he felt to be the almost lost, late-Romantic art of elaborate orchestral blendings. But even such backward glances seemed less a matter of nostalgia than a means of reculler pour mieux sauter, for behind the more dissolved, dream-like textures of Maw's orchestral interludes and the violent gestures of his more blatantly amorous settings is to be detected the influence not just of Strauss at his most advanced, but of Schoenberg's fiercely innovatory Five Orchestral Pieces.And in the harmonic dimension of his score, Maw achieved a post- tonal, post-serial synthesis that has to be hailed as something essentially new. This is the aspect first- time listeners are liable to find most challenging, so dense with notes are many of Maw's chordal progressions. Yet his method of layering the total chromatic in strata produces a pan-tonal luminosity quite distinct from the grey porridge of so much modern harmony. Even in the work's elaborately constructed culminating passacaglia - with its subject, itself comprising a three-part canon, being passed through 11 transpositions - the harmony continues to feel not just schematically, but intuitively right. And when the climax finally reveals the pair of alternating chords from which the work began, the sense of return, of completion, all passion spent, is as overwhelming as in any work cast in the old tonal system.
The Lyrita recording is excellent!

[NumberSix]

Now streaming on Presto:



Mahler: Des Knaben Wunderhorn (1901 version)
Elisabeth Schwarzkopf (soprano) & Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau (baritone)
London Symphony Orchestra, George Szell

[Linz]

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart Dance and Marches, Wiener Mozart Ensemble, Willi Boskovsk

[André]

Max Reger



CD 7

I have another integral set of Reger's organ music, by Rosalind Haas (MDG). 14 discs averaging 75 mins. Thats' 1050 minutes. A 16-disc set by various organists on Naxos exceeds 1140 minutes ('Over 19 hours of music', claims the back cover). The Marini set is made up of 17 discs for a total of some 1500 minutes. I wonder what the difference in timings amounts to in terms of the works performed. It can't be speeds: that would mean Marini is 50% faster than Haas. All these sets claim to be the 'complete organ works of Reger' plus his arrangements of organ works by Bach. I didn't check what works are included (a monk's labour since there is no consistency in the way the works are arranged on the cds).

In any case, how do you like it, Jan ? I absolutely loved the Haas set. Great music.. His piano music is of the same quality.

[Bachtoven]

A spectacular new release.