What are you listening 2 now?

[Der lächelnde Schatten]

Now playing this Alwyn recording in its entirety:

[Harry]

D. GIO. ANTONIO PANDOLFI MEALLI.
Sonate à Violino solo.
Opera quarta.
Gunar Letzbor, Violin.
ARS ANTIQUA AUSTRIA.
Recorded: 2010, at Ivanka Pri Dunaji Castle, Slovakia.

One could say that Letzbor plays this music as if his life depends on it. Passionate with a hefty dose of mystery, almost improvising a whole scala of emotions on fire. There is not a boring moment I promise you. The music ignites easily your imagination and wanders into unknown territory, almost an adventure. As always his ensemble gives him thorough backup, supporting the gyropractics of Letzbor in the most positive way. He is certainly artist in his own right. A fine and atmospheric recording.

[Dry Brett Kavanaugh]

Debussy: Le Martyre de Saint Sébastien. New York Philharmonic/Kurt Masur.

[Karl Henning]

[Karl Henning]

A first listen:

[Harry]

Feuer und Bravour.
THE VIOLA DA GAMBA AT THE COURT OF FREDERICK THE GREAT.
See back cover for details.
Recorded in August 2007 at the Chapel of the Vojenská Nemocnice Hospital in Brno, Czech Republic.

Beautiful! Excellent performances and superb sound. A recording that gives the utmost in expression, and dish up a lot of musical details. Both the Gamba players are top musicians and display all the wealth of the music. I enjoyed this a lot.

[Dry Brett Kavanaugh]

Ali Arango, Guitar Recital.

[Traverso]

Stravinsky

Le Sacre du Printemps

[Der lächelnde Schatten]

Now playing a few Arnold overtures from this recording:



So much fun. I love Arnold's overtures. This Arnold-led recording is excellent, but I like the one with Ramon Gamba on Chandos, too (even if I'm not the greatest fan of his conducting in general).

[DavidW]

I started with Dvorak SQ 13 performed by the Pavel Haas Quartet. I cannot tell you how much I hated their performance. They overly emphasized polyphonic textures that makes the works barely sound recognizable. They emphasize the wrong things and don't even hit the main melodies well.

I quickly became disgusted and switched to Panocha for a fantastic performance of both the 13th and 14th!


After that, I listened to one of the finest SQs of the 20th century! Schnittke's SQ #3

[Spotted Horses]

I started with Dvorak SQ 13 performed by the Pavel Haas Quartet. I cannot tell you how much I hated their performance. They overly emphasized polyphonic textures that makes the works barely sound recognizable. They emphasize the wrong things and don't even hit the main melodies well.

I quickly became disgusted and switched to Panocha for a fantastic performance of both the 13th and 14th!

Sounds like I need to find those Pavel Haas Quartet recordings.

[Linz]

Anton Bruckner Sympphony No. 4 in E Flat Minor, 1888 Third Version - Ed. Benjamin Korstvedt [2004]
Cleveland Orchestra, Franz Welser-Möst

[71 dB]

TV/YLE TEEMA/Finnish Radio Symphony Orchestra concert

Helen Grime: Fanfares
Sebastian Hilli: 1977 - a Violin Concerto (premiere)
Anton Bruckner: Symphony No. 4 in E Flat Major 'Romantic'

Finnish Radio Symphony Orchestra
Pekka Kuusisto, violin
Nicholas Collon, conductor


Synopsis for Hilli's Violin Concerto:

January - Snow falls in Miami
January 19: Snow falls in Miami for the first and only time.

February - Show me the way to go home
February 4: Battling with late-stage breast cancer, Grace Frick longs for  one  last  trip,  a  train  ride  through  wintery  Canada  with  her  life-long partner French author Marguerite Yourcenar. In her postcard to Marguerite, she writes: "Show me the way to go home, but let it be through snow, like this".

March - Tenerife disaster
March  27:  A  collision  between  KLM  and  Pan  Am  Boeing  747  at  Tenerife,  Canary  Islands,  kills  583  people,  becoming  the  deadliest  accident in aviation history.

April - The Mothers
April 30: Azucena Villaflor and thirteen other mothers walk to the Plaza de Mayo in Buenos Aires to demand answers on their children who had been "disappeared" during the military dictatorship. They begin to gather every Thursday, wearing white scarves embroidered with the names of their offspring, the color white symbolizing the diapers of their lost children and thus life, hope and refusal to go into mourning. The Mothers posed a simple question: Where are they, our sons and daughters? Azucena never got an answer, as later in 1977, she joined her son on the list of up to 30,000 people who "disappeared" between 1976 and 1983.

May - A New Hope
May 25: Star Wars opens in cinemas. Filmgoers line up for hours to see it.

June - Seventh Lightning
June 25: Park ranger Roy Sullivan is hit by lightning for the seventh time while fishing in Virginia. He survives, again.

July - I Feel Love
July 2: Donna Summer releases her disco hit I Feel Love. On the streets of Kokkola, Finland, 19-year-old Tarja Ojamies and 21-ye-ar-old Peter Hilli run into each other, falling in love. Later, they marry each other and have two children, Jonathan and Sebastian.

August - Can't Help Falling in Love
August 16: Elvis Presley dies in his home in Graceland at age 42. 75,000 fans line the streets of Memphis for his funeral, which occurred on August 18.

September - Guillotine
September  10:  At  dawn,  in  Marseilles,  France,  Hamida  Djandoubi  becomes the last person to be executed by guillotine.

October - Love! Love! Love!
October 1: Brazilian footballer Pele plays his last game. Delivering a message to the audience prior to the start of the game: "Pay attention to the young of the world, the children, the kids. We need them too much." Pele pleaded: "Love is more important than what we can take in life" and made the 77,691-member crowd at the Giants Stadium shout after him: "Love! Love! Love!".
October 7: On a gray and chilly day in Espoo, Finland, Pekka Kuusisto celebrates his first birthday.

November - The spark that lit a veld fire
November  14:  Shortly  after  anti-apartheid  activist  and  founder  of  Black  Consciousness  Movement  Steve  Biko's  brutal  murder  in  police custody, the routine inquest into unnatural deaths begins in Pretoria, South Africa. The three-week inquest results in the police being cleared of any offense or responsibility for the murder of Biko, who Nelson Mandela called "the spark that lit a veld fire across South Africa".

December - Staying Alive
December  13:  Stayin'  Alive  is  released  as  a  single  from  the  Saturday Night Fever soundtrack. The Bee Gees talk about the song: "It's about survival in the big city-any big city-but especially in the streets of New York. People crying out for help. Desperate songs. Stayin'Alive is the epitome of that. Everybody struggles against the world, fighting all the bullshit and things that can drag you down. And it really is a victory just to survive. But when you climb back on top and win bigger than ever before, well that's something."
December 22: After spending a week in New York with little money and sleeping in subways, 26-year-old Hawaiian artist Thomas Helms climbs  to  the  edge  of  the  observation  deck  on  the  86th floor of the Empire State Building and leaps. He only falls twenty feet before landing on a narrow ledge on the 85th floor. Helms lies stunned for a half-hour before he regains consciousness, opens the window and crawls inside.

[Der lächelnde Schatten]

Now playing Beethoven Piano Sonata No. 27 In E minor, Op. 90

[Symphonic Addict]

A first listen:

A peach of a piece!

[Spotted Horses]

I'm up to Weinberg Quartet No 8 (out of 17) in the Arcadia series.



Eventually the next quartet will be unavailable, since they have one volume to go in their cycle. No 8 is one of the strongest so far. A wonderfully intense slow introductory movement, a quick, sarcastic middle movement and a brief slow finale. I think I detect some scales or modes familiar from Jewish music. In any case, satisfying work and performance.

(And I did listen to a brief excerpt of that Pavel Haas Dvorak Quartet No 13. Suits me very well. Maybe I will appreciate Dvorak String Quartets after all!)

[Der lächelnde Schatten]

Now playing Berg Lulu Suite

[Karl Henning]

H/t to @VonStupp
"Papa"
Symphony № 42 in D
Academy of Ancient Music
Christopher Hogwood

Lenny
Dybbuk
The composer conducting

[Karl Henning]

I started with Dvorak SQ 13 performed by the Pavel Haas Quartet. I cannot tell you how much I hated their performance. They overly emphasized polyphonic textures that makes the works barely sound recognizable. They emphasize the wrong things and don't even hit the main melodies well.

You've cued me to listen to the Stamitz Quartet in this 'un.

[Karl Henning]

A peach of a piece!

Tangentially, I have been passively enjoying your survey of the Holmboe quartets, which I need to revisit myself soon.