What Classical Music Are You Listening To Tonight?

[PHC1]

Bart, listening to it now as the early morning album. Very nice. I like Viktoria Mullova as a violinist and we share a common background and came to the US a few years apart. She has been living in England most of her life since.

Quite an interesting story:


"During a tour of Finland in 1983, Mullova and her lover, Vakhtang Jordania, who posed as her accompanist so they could defect together, left the hotel in Kuusamo, after Jordania told the KGB officer who was watching them that Mullova was too sick from drinking to attend the afterparty. The Stradivari violin owned by the Soviet Union was left behind on the hotel bed. A YLE journalist Jyrki Koulumies,[21][22] accompanied by a photographer Caj Sundman, drove them in a rented car across the border via Haparanda to Luleå, Sweden where they flew to Stockholm.

At that time, the Swedish police treated the young, on-the-run musicians just like any other political defectors from the Eastern Bloc: they suggested that the couple stay in a safehouse over the weekend until the American Embassy opened so they could apply for political asylum upon relocation. So for two days they sat under pseudonyms in a safehouse not even daring to go outside, because their photographs were on the front page of every Swedish and international newspaper. Two days later they arrived in Washington, D.C. with American visas in their pockets."

[PHC1]

This is an enjoyable album. Viktoria Mullova with her son (jazz bassist) Misha Mullov-Abbado.

Compositions by the "George Gershwin of Brazil" Antonio Carlos Jobim

[Antonmb]

Dvorak & Martinu Piano Concertos
Ivo Kahanek, piano
Bamberger Symphoniker, Jakub Hrusa
Supraphon (2019), via Qobuz

My new favorite recording of the Dvorak.

[bart]

Originally Posted by Antonmb

Tartini: Violin Concertos
Evgeny Sviridov, Millenium Orchestra
Ricercar Music (2020), via Qobuz

Very enjoyable.

This is nice music to accompany some paper work.

[bart]

Originally Posted by Antonmb

Dvorak & Martinu Piano Concertos
Ivo Kahanek, piano
Bamberger Symphoniker, Jakub Hrusa
Supraphon (2019), via Qobuz

My new favorite recording of the Dvorak.

This is good.
The Dvořák piece is not often played during concerts, but I fell in love with it when the Budapest Festival Orchestra performed it a couple of years ago.
The Martinů concerto was unknown to me, and I'm glad that I got to know it.

[bart]

Couperin - Apothéoses
Gli Incogniti, Amandine Beyer
Qobuz 24/88.2




Wonderful album.
We own the CD, but the stream sounds better...

[bart]

Arvo Pärt - Lamentate
Onuté Gražinyté, piano
Lithuanian National Symphony Orchestra, Modestas Pitrénas
Qobuz 24/96




Very dynamic recording.
Gražinyté plays wonderfully.
I've heard better versions of 'Fratres', but the other pieces are well played.

He was "tremendously" impressed, Arvo Pärt recalls of the moment he stood in front of Anish Kapoor's Marsyas for the first time at London's Tate Modern. "Suddenly I found myself in a position from where I saw my life in a different light. At that moment, I had the strong feeling that I wasn't ready to die yet," said then-67-year-old Arvo Pärt. This was the creative impulse for Lamentate. Arvo Pärt, who celebrates his 85th birthday on September 11, 2020, seems to have often been inspired to compose by external circumstances. This is demonstrated in the selection of works for or with piano, which Onute Gražinyte chose for her first recording.
Für Alina is particularly important to the Lithuanian pianist. In 1976, Pärt dedicated it to a young woman who had decided to leave the Soviet Union for England. "I know Alina's mother personally and can sympathize with her indescribable pain", says Onute Gražinyte. The pianist was baffled by Pärt's simple musical notation. "First you ask yourself: What is this?" Her playing reveals: She understands". Arvo Pärt has reached the core. It's no coincidence that he dedicated many piano pieces to children and that he intended the Vater Unser to be sung by a boy soprano. It's the ideal, the purity that children are born with and the composer has found it again". © Accentus

[bart]

Jakob Lindberg - Lute Music from Scotland and France
via Qobuz




This a bit different from his other recordings.
More playful, less serious.
But always serene and breathing tranquillity.

[bart]

Originally Posted by bart

Finally listening to this jewel:

Rachel Podger - Guardian Angel
Works by Biber, Bach, Matteis, Tartini, Pisendel
Qobuz 24/192




Kal was lucky to be there when they recorded this:

https://www.stereophile.com/content/music-round-62


The 'Passacaglia', from the 'Rosenkranzsonaten' is one of the best pieces ever written for solo violin in music history.

This remains a top notch album.

[bart]

Staying with Podger:

Piisendel - Tartiini - Veracini - Vivaldi - Grandissima Gravita
Brecon Baroque
Rachel Podger
Qobuz 24/192




These Channel Classics are quite the treat!

Rachel Podger, “the queen of the baroque violin” (Sunday Times), has established herself as a leading interpreter of the Baroque and Classical music periods. A creative programmer, she is the founder and Artistic Director of Brecon Baroque Festival and her ensemble Brecon Baroque. This new album brings together the compositions by four violinist-composers, three Italians and one German, all born during the last quarter of the 17th Century and who all died (except Vivaldi, who died younger) around the 1760s. These works explore the imagination of the then revolutionary form that was the Sonata for violin and continuo. Weaving together stylised ancient dances and the more Germanic preludic tradition, these Sonatas transport us to a world of musical amazement. Rachel Podger says: “The four composers’ connections read like a popular comedy! Violin virtuosos Verachini and Pisendel had an argument which resulted in Veracini flying into a rage and throwing himself from first floor a balcony, damaging his foot and limping forever after. Verachini amazed Tartini with his astonishingly smooth bowing technique, whereupon Tartini locked himself away to practice. Pisendel studied with Tartini and Vivaldi...” Let us add that one of Vivaldi’s Sonatas here recorded is dedicated to Pisendel. Podger gives great unity to those works, composed all around Europe at a time when powerful musical influences were continuously changing styles and fashions.