What Classical Music Are You Listening To Tonight?

[bart]

Staying with the same forces:




Perhaps there is not that last bit of detail as in the recording above (it was recorded in '98), but there's still enough intimacy to enjoy it thoroughly.

[bart]

Mr. de Sainte-Colombe le Fils - Pièces de Viole
Jordi Savall




Will I ever get tired of hearing these works?
I doubt it.
I play them through my iPhone when I'm travelling, in my practice, and like now through our living room system. They keep thrilling me.

[bart]

Khachaturian - Prokofiev - Glazunov - Russian Violin Concertos
Russian National Orchestra, Yakov Kreizberg
Julia Fischer, violin




Fantastic album, with terrific performances of these masterpieces.
Great 5.0 sound.

[bart]

Earlier today, I played this in my practice.
(Yes I know Julian, he's not your favourite pianist! )




A patient asked me: "Is this Scarlatti, I mean, not the father, Alessandro, but the son, Domenico?".
I do have music lovers amongst my patients.

This is a very nice album by the way.

[bart]

David Oistrakh - The Complete EMI Recordings




CD 1

Beethoven - Triple Concerto in C
Lev Oborin, piano
Sviatoslav Knushevitsky, cello
Philharmonia Orchestra, Sir Malcolm Sargent

Beethoven - Piano Trio No. 7 'Archduke'
Same soloists

These 2 works were recorded in '58.

[Antonmb]

Reger: Suites for Viola, Viola Sonata, Romance for Viola and Piano
Nobuko Imai, Ronald Brautigan
BIS 2003, 16/44 via Qobuz

Hauntingly beautiful music, well played and recorded.

[Antonmb]

Originally Posted by bart

David Oistrakh



Beethoven - Triple Concerto in C

Lev Oborin, piano

Sviatoslav Knushevitsky, cello

Philharmonia Orchestra, Sir Malcolm Sargent



Beethoven - Piano Trio No. 7 'Archduke'

Same soloists



These 2 works were recorded in '58.

This is a beautiful recording, I have always had a soft spot for David Oistrakh since childhood when my father would play the Bach concertos. I still have his original album.

[cma29]

Going back to this disc...

Vaughan Williams: Symphony No. 2 'A London Symphony' original 1913 version
London Symphony Orchestra, Richard Hickox



I played it several times and this music is growing on me. The score has a brooding mood with beautiful passages. The performance is excellent and the recorded sound is top-notch (I have the SACD version).

This won Gramophone magazine's Record of the Year award for 2001.

[cma29]

More Vaughan Williams...

Vaughan Williams:
Symphony No. 5 in D major
Valiant for Truth
The Pilgrim Pavement
Hymn-tune Prelude on Song 13 by Orlando Gibbons
(arr. for string orchestra by Helen Glatz)
The Twenty-third Psalm
Carys Lane (soprano)
Prelude and Fugue in C minor
Richard Hickox Singers, London Symphony Orchestra, Richard Hickox



Here is the professional overview from Gramophone:

This is an exceptionally powerful yet deeply moving account of the Fifth. Aided by glowing, wide-ranging engineering, Hickox's is an urgently communicative reading. The first and third movements in particular emerge with an effortless architectural splendour and rapt authority, the climaxes built and resolved with mastery.

The Scherzo is as good a place as any to sample the lustrous refinement of the LSO's response. Hickox ensures that the symphony's concluding bars positively glow with gentle ecstasy: here's a Fifth that can surely hold its own in the most exalted company.

Material from The Pilgrim's Progress made its way into the Fifth Symphony and two of the five enterprising couplings here provide further links with John Bunyan's timeless allegory: the 1940 motet for mixed voices with organ, Valiant-for-truth and John Churchill's 1953 arrangement for soprano and mixed chorus of Psalm 23 (originally sung by The Voice of a Bird in Act 4 of The Pilgrim's Progress). The latter receives its finely prepared recorded début on this occasion, as do both The Pilgrim Pavement (a 1934 processional for soprano, chorus and organ) and Helen Glatz's string-orchestra arrangement of the solo-piano Hymn-tune Prelude on 'Song 13' by Gibbons. Which just leaves the Prelude and Fugue, originally written for organ in 1921, but heard here in a sumptuous orchestration.

The recorded sound is excellent.

[Toccata]