What Classical Music Are You Listening To Tonight?

[Antonmb]

Originally Posted by audioguy3107

This is one of my favorite sets of Beethoven sonatas. If you like this, try his recordings of John Field’s nocturnes and sonatas.
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[Antonmb]

Originally Posted by Antonmb

Beethoven: Complete Works for Cello and Piano
Pierre Fournier, cello; Friedrich Gulda, piano
Deutsche Grammophon (2019/1992), vinyl

These works were recorded in 1959 and released in various separate recordings in 1960 and beyond. The complete collection was first issued in 1992, and remastered/reissued here on 180g vinyl in 2019. The sound is very good. While the playing may seem dated to some, I find these performances still very beautiful and worth having in the collection.

Playing some of this again and enjoying it immensely.

[bart]

From today's fresh releases:

Cappella Amsterdam - In Umbra Mortis
Qobuz 24/96




While cooking, we listened to 'In The Shadow Of Death'.
It sounded much less macabre than one might think from the title of the album.
I liked the combination of these 2 composers.
Had never heard works from Giaches de Wert, even though he's also Flemish.

Cappella Amsterdam and its artistic leader Daniel Reuss make their Pentatone debut with "In umbra mortis". The album brings together Wolfgang Rihm’s contemporary Sieben Passions-Stücke and Passion-related Motets by the Flemish 16th-century polyphonist Giaches de Wert, revealing unexpected kinship between two composers four centuries apart. By entwining the old and new, the listener is invited on a chromatic journey of astonishing beauty.

Since its foundation in 1970, Cappella Amsterdam has shown an exceptional mastery of contemporary and early vocal music, with acclaimed excurses to Romantic repertoire as well. Daniel Reuss has been Artistic Leader of Cappella Amsterdam for over three decades now, and has worked with several renowned choirs and ensembles. © Pentatone

[bart]

While dining it was the next new release:

Händel - Claviorganum - Concertos & Sonatas
Il Gardellino
Bart Naessens
Qobuz 24/88.2




I know these works quite good, have the 4 SACDs with the Organ Concertos by Chorzempa.
And I know the ensemble well, have also attended a concert with this instrument.
Naessens is a delicate, meticulous player.
Il Gardellino is simply top!
These versions are very enjoyable.


As the name suggests, a claviorganum is a keyboard instrument with a harpsichord and an organ section, which can be played individually or together on one or two manuals. While this instrument may seem like a curiosity today, many sources confirm that “curiosities” were rather the norm on the European continent from the 15th to the 17th century.
There was a variety of different keyboard instruments at this time, but which instrument should be used for a particular work is usually not specified. Therefore, it is extremely interesting to try to establish the connection between an instrument and a particular repertoire. That is the task Il Gardellino and Bart Naessens have set themselves with this recording.

Handel’s Organ Concertos, Op. 7 were written at a time when the composer was more than ever in search of the perfect instrument. While there is no evidence that Handel knew the claviorganum, it is very likely that he did. The present recording shows that the claviorganum sounds absolutely exquisite in the selected repertoire, both as a solo and as a continuo instrument. © Passacaille


Edit: this recording was done in '15. That's when we saw them.

[bart]

Third new release:

Oxalys
Nonetto: Works by Nino Rota, Hanns Eisler & Bohuslav Martinů
Qobuz 24/96




So far so good!
Three out of three very worthy of our time.

Oxalys is another of our favourite (and of our 'own') ensembles.
They play chamber music from the classical period till the 20th century.
These pieces are beautiful, and not so well known.

In 1959, two composers wrote nonets: Nino Rota’s melodic Nonetto, on which he would continue to work for almost twenty years, and Bohuslav Martinů’s farewell chamber music piece, a Nonet, which he composed as a last piece to satisfy his longing for his homeland.
Eisler did not compose his nonet in his native country either, but arrived in Mexico in 1941 as a refugee from the Nazis. There he wrote the music for John Steinbeck’s documentary film The Forgotten Village, which served as the inspiration for his Nonet No. 2. With this recording, the ensemble Oxalys presents us with the opportunity to rediscover these three nonets - three masterpieces by key protagonists of 20th century music history. © Passacaille

[bart]

4th newcomer:

P.H. Erlebach - Lieder
Le Banquet Céleste, Damien Guillon
Qobuz 24/96




Another enjoyable release!
Guillon is not the best countertenor on earth, but he very well manages to convey the musical message here, and his ensemble is brilliant.

After the past 18 months, we could all be forgiven for forgetting that our generation doesn't have the monopoly on sitting in mortal peril at the mercy of a powerful and uncontrollable natural force. However we don't. Humankind has of course both been here before, and bequeathed us the art by which to remember it – including many of the texts set by German Baroque composer Philipp Heinrich Erlebach in his Harmonische Freude musikalischer Freunde.
Published in Nuremberg respectively in 1697 and 1710, these two vocal collections contain respectively 50 and 25 arias for one to four solo voices accompanied by instrumental ensemble and basso continuo, setting poems that flit between the moralistic and secular spheres; and while ultimately this is conjecture, they do at least appear to hint at their contemporary context of an era lived against the backdrop of natural disasters including Bubonic Plague, and the superstitious fear provoked in 1680 by the appearance of Europe's largest comet of the seventeenth century – an event perhaps referenced in the line, “Today bloody comets shine, Tomorrow we are free of distress”.

As for Erlebach himself, he was born in 1657 in Essens, and spent almost the entirety of his life and career as one of the stars of the Thuringian court of Rudolstadt, which at that point was an aristocratic capital whose vibrant musical life kept fully abreast of European musical trends. Having been appointed Rudolstadt's Kapelldirektor as young as 24, Erlebach went on to be described by the influential music theorist Wolfgang Caspar Printz in 1696 as a musician “who among German composers gives the most satisfaction and acquits himself with great distinction”. So it's tragic that the vast majority of the huge collection of music he left behind at his death in 1714 was lost to a fire just twenty years later. Especially when what is left is so tantalisingly good, as is demonstrated by this superbly performed, sensitively engineered programme from countertenor Damien Guillon and his ensemble Le Banquet Céleste (consisting of two violins, two viola da gamba, violone, archlute and alternating harpsichord and organ).

As advertised, the main meat here is Lieder from those aforementioned vocal collections: seven in total, opening with with the sombre lament, Seine Not recht uberlegen wird manch Tränen-Bad erregen – over which the poet mourns his distress before drawing comfort on the thought that heaven sees him – whose gently sighing lines are a lovely fit for Guillon's softly warm, otherworldly yet clean-edged, penetrating tones. Le Banquet Céleste is no less immediately beguiling either, as its piano violins weave searchingly around Guillon, alive to his every inflection. Onwards, and while the Lieder's atmosphere of intimate, sober reflection remains the constant, the individual flavours vary. For instance, next up is Des Tadlers stich verlache ich, a feisty, up-tempo repost to the poet's mockers, where Guillon brings fabulously crisp definition and en pointe technical control to its fast passagework – something you're also constantly appreciating over his embellishments.

Plus there's more, because punctuating the Lieder are two of Erlebach's trio sonatas, published a few years before the arias. Consisting of a three-section (slow-fast-slow) sonata movement appended by a dance suite, these serve as the perfect complements and palate cleansers to the Lieder's intense emotions, all adding up to an album you're likely to find yourself making repeat visits to for some time to come. © Charlotte Gardner/Qobuz
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Accompanied by his ensemble Le Banquet Céleste, the countertenor Damien Guillon places his voice at the service of a programme of vocal pieces by the German Baroque composer Philipp Heinrich Erlebach, a large part of whose output was destroyed in a fire at Rudolstadt Castle in 1735. Among the works that have come down to us are the two collections Harmonische Freude musikalischer Freunde, containing respectively fifty and twenty-five arias for one to four solo voices, instrumental ensemble and basso continuo. Most of the German texts of these pieces depict humankind at the mercy of an unpredictable and volatile destiny.
Alongside natural phenomena such as storms, dark clouds and withered leaves, the poet also chooses the expression "bloody comets" as a metaphor for torment and ‘the distress of the heart’. In fact, the biggest comet of the seventeenth century appeared in Europe in 1680: contemporaries feared these celestial bodies, seeing them as bad omens. © Alpha Classics

[bart]

Shostakovich - Symphonies Nos. 14 & 15
Gürzenich-Orchester Köln, Dmitrij Kitajenko
Marina Shaguch
Arutjun Kotchinian
SACD




From my cherished box.
These remain amongst my favourite renditions of these symphonies.

[bart]

Originally Posted by bart

C.P.E. Bach - Hugo Distler - J.S. Bach
Anne Galowich, Jos Van Immerseel, harpsichord
Anima Eterna




Not one, no TWO harpsichords!
And mind you, this was a recommendation by Julian, a notorious addict of the instrument.

Great album.
Good surround sound from this 2004 recording.

[bart]

Originally Posted by bart

Biber - Missa Salisburgensis
La Stagione Armonica, Sergio Balestracci



I already had this majestic work on SACD when the 2 new interpretations came.
I wonder how they compare.
Anyhow, I find this a very good version.
It has the force this work deserves, and the sound is good.

This finishes a good afternoon of multichannel classical.

[jimtranr]

Carpenter's evocation of skyscrapers is a pile-driving trip.