Classical CDs
graham.rickson
Allan Pettersson: Complete Edition Various artists (BIS)That this hefty anthology (17 CDs and 4 DVDs) has been with me for several months shouldn’t surprise anyone who’s encountered the work of Swedish composer Allan Pettersson (1911-1980); this is music that can’t be, mustn’t be rushed. Sample an early piece, like 1934’s Two Elegies for violin and piano, or the witty Four Improvisations for String Trio (1936), then leap forward to Petterson’s last completed symphony, his 16th (1979) and you’ll wonder what on earth happened to him? BIS’s handsome Complete Edition contains four bonus Read more ...
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ECHOES: Duets by Schumann Brahms, Saint-Saëns et al Katharina Konradi (soprano), Catriona Morison (mezzo), Ammiel Bushakevitz (piano)(CAvi/SWR/DG)For my first taste of this new disc of soprano/mezzo duets, I couldn't resist skipping the first few songs and heading straight for Brahms's “Die Schwestern” Op. 61/1. It is the composer's (and Mörike’s) glorious Demoiselles de Rochefort moment. The two singers express their sheer delight in sisterhood, a feeling which remains completely unalloyed... until a twist comes in the last stanza when they confess that they’ve both fallen in love with Read more ...
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Britten: Spring Symphony, Sinfonia da Requiem, Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra London Symphony Orchestra/Sir Simon Rattle (LSO Live)Here’s as good a Britten sampler as you’ll find, opening with a truly terrifying account of the early Sinfonia da Requiem. Commissioned by the Japanese government in 1939 to mark 2,600 years since the founding of the Japanese dynasty, the young Britten delivered an uncompromisingly dark showpiece, “a short symphony” nominally paying tribute to his late parents but all-too-audibly a response to global events. The Japanese authorities deemed the work Read more ...
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Sir Neville Marriner: The Complete Warner Classics Recordings (Warner)Assembling Sir Neville Marriner’s complete discography would probably require a crate; this weighty but compact box (80 CDs), released to celebrate his centenary, collects just the discs he recorded for EMI between 1970 and 2000 (he also worked extensively with Decca and Philips). Marriner rivalled Herbert Von Karajan as one of the classical industry’s most-recorded conductors and the majority of these performances were made with his own Academy of St Martin-in-the-Fields. The group began life in the late 1950s as a Read more ...
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Chopin: Études op.10 & op.25 Yunchan Lim (Decca)Chopin Nicolas van Poucke (Night Dreamer)I’m reviewing these two Chopin discs by a pair of young men together, even though there are lots of differences between their playing, and the way the albums have been put together. Yunchan Lim is just 20, the youngest ever winner of the Van Cliburn competition, in 2022. His first album, on Decca, is of Chopin’s Études (the op.10 and op.25 sets), which are favourites of mine, and perfect “young man’s music” in their unashamed show-offiness and heart-on-sleeve emotionalism. That they are Read more ...
graham.rickson
Beethoven: Symphonies 1-9 National Symphony Orchestra/Gianandrea Noseda (NSO)I’m old enough to remember the BBC offering free downloads of the complete Beethoven Symphonies under their then Principal Conductor Gianandrea Noseda. Back in 2005, downloading was still a bit of a black art and I think I managed to hear just a couple of the recordings, in decent if thin sound. Wikipedia states that the files were downloaded 1.5 million times. Presumably those performances are languishing on a CD-ROM in a locked BBC vault. Noseda’s new Beethoven set, taken from live performances given in Read more ...
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Brahms arr. Reger: Song Transcriptions Rudolf Buchbinder (piano) (Deutsche Grammophon)Max Reger said that, for him, “the Brahms fog will remain – I prefer it to the blazing heat of Wagner.” This collection of twenty-eight song transcriptions for solo piano played by 77-year old Austrian national monument Rudolf Buchbinder, is indeed a quiet, gentle way into that “Brahms fog”, quite the opposite approach route that one might remember from the pianist’s big-boned, large-scale recordings of the two Piano Concertos. Reger wrote four books of song transcriptions between 1906 and Read more ...
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Bloch: Schelomo, Bruch: Kol Nidrei, Dohnányi: Konzertstück Tim Posner (cello), Berner Symphonieorchester/Katharina Müllner (Claves)You know that some releases will be good within just seconds of pressing play. Here, the seductive, rich tone of Katharina Müllner’s Berner Symphonieorchester draws you in like a magnet, the string harmonics heard two minutes into Bloch’s Schelemo hitting you like a sharp poke in the ribs. And cellist Tim Posner sits so comfortably in the mix, sound engineer Johannes Kammann deserving a shout out – this is one of those rare recordings that sounds fabulous at Read more ...
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William Steinberg: Complete Command Classics Recordings (DG)It’s hard to find a bad word said against conductor William Steinberg, cited by one critic as combining the best attributes of Toscanini and Klemperer. Born in Cologne in 1899, Steinberg served briefly as Klemperer’s assistant, his burgeoning operatic career halted when the Nazis took power in 1933; one anecdote describes brownshirts marching into a Steinberg rehearsal and snatching the baton from his hands before evicting him. Emigration in 1936 took Steinberg to Palestine to help establish the Palestine Symphony Orchestra, Read more ...
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Paavo Berglund: The Warner Edition (Warner Classics)Jean Sibelius’s presence looms over this box like a friendly giant. Paavo Berglund (interestingly, one of the few left-handed conductors to have achieved international fame) recorded the seven symphonies three times and revisited the tone poems at various points in his career, and Warner Classics’ acquisition of the old Finlandia catalogue means that almost all of the conductor’s Sibelius is here, filling around half the box. It’s a mark of Berglund’s musical intelligence that there’s never any sense of going through the motions, of Read more ...
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Leif Ove Andsnes: The Warner Classics Edition 1990-2010 (Warner Classics)It’s good to review a compendious box set celebrating a musician who’s very much still around. The 36 discs in this set certainly aren’t what you’d call historical recordings, though the 20-year period during which they were first released feels an age away. Norwegian pianist Leif Ove Andsnes signed his first contract with Virgin Classics (remember them?) aged just 20, and, in his words, “the possibilities seemed endless… people craved CDs and the record companies needed to make recordings of all the repertory, Read more ...
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LICHT: 800 Years of German Lieder Anna Lucia Richter (mezzo-soprano), Ammiel Bushakevitz (hurdy gurdy, harpsichord, clavichord, fortepiano, piano) (SWR2/Challenge Classics)LICHT, 800 Years of German Lieder, from Anna Lucia Richter and Ammiel Bushakevitz does exactly what it says on the tin. Chronologically, the album’s eclectic programme takes us all the way from early 11th century Gregorian chant (it’s actually the final track, to make the story “run full circle”) to a song by Wolfgang Rihm published as recently as 2008. And on the way, it stops off to pay visits to (...wait for it Read more ...