What Classical Music Are You Listening To Tonight?

[ehoove]

Time for some Mono Vinyl:
1812 Overture
Tchaikovsky
Chicago Symphony Orchestra
Fritz Reiner Conductor
Fabulous, and a super clean copy
RCA Victor LM-1999 (Shaded Dog)
Regards,
Jim

[ehoove]

Continuing in Mono:
A Night on Bald Mountain
Moussorgsky
Amazing piece of powerful Mono Vinyl!
Leopold Stokowski and his Orchestra
RCA Victor LM-1816 (1954)
Regards,
Jim

[ehoove]

Last Mono before grilling:
Symphonies No. 94 and 99
Haydn
The Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra
Josef Kreps Conductor
Excellent!
London Records FFrr CM 9222
Regards,
Jim

[bart]

Mahler - Das Lied von der Erde
Budapest Festival Orchestra, Iván Fischer
Gerhild Romberger, alto
Robert Dean Smith, tenor
Qobuz 24/192




First listen. Recorded in March '17, but only released this weekend.
Seems like a very solid performance.
I want to hear it in multichannel!

[bart]

Originally Posted by Still-One

Peaceful Choir - New Sound of Choral Music
by Lavinia Meijer & World Choir for Peace

Jim, thank you for the recommendation.
Quite a journey.
Has (quite) some touching moments.

[bart]

Last week, there was another new release of Mahler's most personal work as they say:

Mahler - Das Lied von der Erde
Rundfunk-Sinfonieorchester Berlin, Vladimir Jurowski
Dame Sarah Connolly, mezzo-soprano
Robert Dean Smith, tenor
Qobuz 24/96




My wife said after the first part: "I don't hear a lot of difference"... we realised that we were listening to the same wonderful tenor!
Sarah Connolly is of course a terrific singer, but I tend to prefer Fischer's version, for the female voice as well as the orchestration.
Detail, both booklets are very interesting, but again Channel Records wins.

[bart]

Dmitri Shostakovich - Piano Quintet* in G minor op. 57 - Seven Romances on Poems by Aleksandr Blok**
Trio Wanderer
Jean-Marc Phillips-Varjabédian, violin
Raphaël Pidoux, cello
Vincent Coq, piano
Catherine Montier*, violin
Christophe Gaugué*, viola
Ekaterina Semenchuk**, mezzo-soprano
Qobuz 24/96




I liked this new release.
Shostakovich's chamber works are less 'heavy' to digest than his orchestral works (which I have to listen to when I'm not with boss girl).
The vocal-instrumental suite for soprano, piano, violin and cello was unknown to me until now. Very interesting, and Semenchuk does a brilliant job.

When Shostakovich wrote his Piano Quintet in 1940, most of his chamber music had yet to be composed. Combining formal purity and freedom of tone, the quintet was hailed as a masterly creation and has remained his most successful chamber work. In the last years of a long and productive life, he composed a cycle of songs with piano trio, innovative in both form and structure, a hymn to art, friendship and nature possessing extraordinary evocative power. To tackle these major works of the twentieth century, the Trio Wanderer has chosen partners of the calibre of Catherine Montier, Christophe Gaugué, and an expert in Russian vocal music, Ekaterina Semenchuk. © harmonia mundi

[bart]

Debussy - Complete Piano Works Volume 2: Préludes, Book II -Images, II - Suite Bergamasque
Alessandra Ammara
Qobuz 24/96




Very good piano playing here.

The second volume of a Debussy series attracting critical superlatives and comparisons with the likes of Cortot and Gieseking.
In 2016 Alessandra Ammara won high praise for an album of Mendelssohn duets with her husband Roberto Prosseda. The following year her Piano Classics debut of Debussy inspired no less glowing reviews. The sequel elegantly completes her recordings of the Préludes and Images with their second volumes, coupled with the more innocent pleasures of the Suite bergamasque.
Thus the album spans Debussy’s first and punultimate published piano cycles, for while the Suite appeared in print only in 1905, it was composed back in 1890. In their titles, three of the four movements – a Prelude, Minuet and Passepied – invoke the formal elegance of a Baroque dance suite, but the elusive character and freedom of the music owes more to the poetry of Verlaine, who used the archaic ‘bergamasque’ term in his poem Clair de lune, which as the suite’s third movement became Debussy’s single greatest hit.

In both the Images and Préludes, Debussy invested their second volumes (composed in 1907 and 1912-13 respectively) with darker, gloomier tone-colours and higher contrasts with wild outbursts and even manic humour. The portraits of individual characters and landscapes are more sharply drawn, more charged with private intensity. They make accordingly greater demands upon the interpreter, nowhere more so than in the dark, wild magic of the Feux d’artifice which close out the Préludes.
The three Images in Book 2 are linked by their association with the Debussy’s friend Louis Laloy, and by extension with their mutual fascination with China and the alien world of East-Asian culture. The bells in Cloches à travers les feuilles ring from the church in Laloy’s home-town; the title of Et la lune descend sur le temple qui fut was proposed by Laloy himself, and the goldfish – Poissons d’or of the triptych’s final panel – swim and shimmer through much Chinese lacquer artwork. © Piano Classics

[Antonmb]

Beethoven: Sonatas for Violin and Piano Volume 1
Vladimir Ashkenazy, piano
Itzhak Perlman, violin
London Records (1975), vinyl

I picked this up years ago from a library sale. The cover is a mess, but the vinyl is in near-mint condition. The performances, of course, are legendary.

[bart]

We decided to stay with the same piano player:

Debussy - Préludes book I - Images I - Nocturne
Alessandra Ammara
via Qobuz