There are fine performances in this 2002 cycle of the Beethoven symphonies by Simon Rattle with the Vienna Philharmonic on EMI. His Fourth is delightful: gracious and lyrical from start to finish with superb playing by the V.P.O. His Fifth is dramatic: strong and direct with an unerring sense of structure. His Sixth is lovely: affectionately ...
Because the Symphony No. 2 in C minor, "Resurrection," is extremely varied in material, wide-ranging in expression, and subdivided to the point of seeming like a patchwork of interludes and symphonic fragments, it has often proved to be the most difficult of Gustav Mahler's symphonies to interpret with clarity and consistency. Many conductors and ...
Even if one always has doubts about Simon Rattle conducting Mahler -- doubts about his sincerity and his seriousness -- even if one has always questioned his radically wrong tempos in the Second and Fourth and his amazingly uncomprehending interpretations of the Sixth and Seventh -- one has to admit that Rattle has over time gradually been getting ...
If, in the 20 years spent recording Mahler's 10 symphonies plus his symphonic song cycle Das Lied von der Erde and symphonic oratorio Das Klagende Lied, Simon Rattle was at first determined to deliver performances contradicting accepted standards and at the end equally determined to deliver performances conforming to accepted standards, he ...
Though there are good points to all three sets, probably the best of the three volumes of the London Philharmonic's 75th Anniversary edition is the third. For one thing, the choice of repertoire is stronger: instead of the first volume's excerpts and shorter works or the second volume's predominantly English fare, the third volume features mostly ...
Schoenberg's ostensible reason for transcribing Mahler's symphonic song cycle Das Lied von der Erde for chamber orchestra was to make it playable at concerts of Schoenberg's private society for the performance of contemporary music. In the straitened years after the end of the First World War and the breakup of the Austrio-Hungarian Empire, ...
This 2004 survey of modern settings of the medieval sequence Stabat Mater Dolorosa is part of conductor Marcello Viotti's project to record the little-known but worthy sacred works of the twentieth century, in conjunction with the Munich Radio Orchestra and the Bavarian Radio Chorus for their concert series Paradisi gloria. The four works by ...
This three-CD set from Harmonia Mundi purports on the packaging to offer "the finest masses in musical history." Of course that's an impossible goal, and the liner notes back off from it with various disclaimers. The question to ask about a set like this, assembled from existing Harmonia Mundi releases going back to 1986, is whether it either ...
Leos Janácek: Lasské Tance -- Suita opus 3 is a collection of early works by the eminent Czech composer on the German label Orfeo conducted by Gerd Albrecht. Albrecht leads the WDR Sinfonie Orchester Köln in the Lachian Dances and in Janácek's Suita pro orchestr Op. 3, whereas he pilots a small group of singers, the NDR-Chor and the WDR ...
Apart from Mendelssohn's Elijah and Paulus, Brahms' German Requiem, and Beethoven's Missa Solemnis, the undisputed champ among nineteenth century oratorios is Franz Liszt's gigantic Christus. Composed in just four years between 1859 and 1863 on an unwieldy libretto by Princess Carolyne von Sayn-Wittgenstein, Christus may have been intended as ...
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