Classical CDs
graham.rickson
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 ...
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There’s still a market for classical music, whether you stream, download or get your fix from your local classical CD shop. Universal’s acquisition of the independent Hyperion label worried many listeners early in 2023, but the fact that Hyperion’s entire catalogue will be made available for streaming has to be a good thing. We’re also seeing more and more big boxes of reissued material, and I’ve chosen three of them as particular favourites. Two celebrate conductors: Warner Classics’ breezeblock-sized compendium of Otto Klemperer’s orchestral recordings contains some of the best Read more ...
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Thomas Adès: Alchymia Mark Simpson, Quatuor Diotima (Orchid Classics)Thomas Adès continues to hit new heights of inventiveness in this new mini-album, a digital release of a mere 24 minutes. But there is no danger of feeling short-changed: Alchymia’s music is intense and dense, but also fluent and engrossing, demanding and rewarding multiple hearings. A four-movement piece for string quartet with basset-clarinet (an instrument usually only heard in Mozart’s Requiem) which, like his early string quartet Arcadiana examines a cultural idea from a range of perspectives, Alchymia is a Read more ...
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Winter Breviary St Martin’s Voices/Andrew Earis (Resonus)The music at the St Martin-in-the-Fields in London has been reinvigorated in the last couple of years by new Director of Music, Andrew Earis, and St Martin’s Voices, the resident chamber choir of young professional singers, has been at the heart of that. Their Christmas offering is a selection of premiere recordings by predominantly women composers, a debut collaboration with the Resonus label: I hope there will be more. Olivia Sparkhall’s “All and Some” has a springy medieval feel, all drone textures and modal melodies, and is a Read more ...
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Beethoven: Piano Concertos 1-5 Garrick Ohlsson (piano), Grand Teton Music Festival Orchestra/Sir Donald Runnicles (Reference Recordings)This set would be an artistic treat had it been captured onto a couple of C90 cassettes with a boombox. Instead, Garrick Ohlsson’s Beethoven concerto cycle was taped over a week in July 2022 in Walk Festival Hall, a medium-sized wooden venue in a small Wyoming village, Sir Donald Runnicles conducting a festival orchestra drawing its members from elite ensembles in the US and Europe. There’s an interesting booklet essay from producer Vic Muenzer Read more ...
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Dvořák: Symphony No. 9 Bamberger Symphoniker/Jakub Hrůša (Accentus)The technical aspects of this release run the risk of overwhelming its musical qualities: this version of Dvořák’s "New World" symphony is spread over six 45rpm LP sides and is, remarkably, a wholly analogue affair. As with this label’s direct-to-disc box set of Smetana’s Ma Vlast, Jakub Hrůša’s Bamberg players recorded the symphony in single takes, the performance captured over two days in April 2023 via three well-placed microphones sending the signal straight to the cutting stylus. There’s no download available – we’ Read more ...
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Kabeláč: Eight Preludes, Motifs from Exotic Lands, Smetana: Dreams Jan Bartoš (piano) (Supraphon)Anyone interested in 20th century music should investigate Supraphon’s box set of Miloslav Kabeláč’s eight symphonies. when you've done that, get hold of pianist Jan Bartoš's engrossing recital disc. Kabeláč’s relationship with the communist regime in post-war Czechoslovakia was often strained, though things improved after Stalin’s death. He was fascinated by cosmology (“…everything in the world and the universe has a centre around which it revolves…”) and his music, though often Read more ...