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Schumann - Rachmaninoff - Fantasiebilder
Ketevan Sepashvili, piano
via Qobuz

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Another album produced by Sven Boenicke (see my thread with his speakers).
16/44.1 can sound splendid!
 
Boris Tishchenko - Violin Concerto No. 2, Op. 84
Leningrad Philharmonic Orchestra, Vassily Sinaisky
Sergei Stadler, violin
via Tidal

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Fascinating work.
I've been listening to it a couple of times the last weeks.
It has to grow on you, like Weinstein and Shostakovich.
 
Jean de Sainte-Colombe - Une sélection de Concerts à deux violes esgales
Les Voix Humaines
via Qobuz

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You can consider this as a "best of".
These ladies from Québec recorded 8 CDs with works from the composer a bit more than a decade ago.
This album gives us the most well-known pieces.
Fabulous music that never bores me.
If you buy just one album with Sainte-Colombe's music, this could be the one.
I regard them as being on the same level as Bach or Beethoven classics.
 
Josquin Desprez - Josquin - Adieu Mes Amours
Dulces Exuviae
Qobuz 24/96

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Wow... what a beautiful, intimate album...

A composer admired by his contemporaries, Josquin Desprez (ca 1450-1521) was a solitary artist who sublimated in his chansons the melancholy character and the elegance emblematic of the Renaissance. For their first recording, Dulces Exuviae explore the intimacy of these chansons in a fresh light: the sweet melodies are embellished by ornaments and accompanied on the lute, leaving ample room for improvisation, and thus allowing music to come out all the more alive, delicate and filled with emotion. © Ricercar
 
Friedrich Gernsheim - String Quartets Vol. 1
Diogenes Quartett
via Qobuz

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A newly discovered composer for me.
He was also a talented musician.

On 5 May 1850 he gave his concert début in Frankfurt City Theatre at the age of eleven, playing Hummel’s A-minor Piano Concerto as a pianist and the Mendelssohn Concerto as a violinist, followed by the première of an overture from his own pen.

I read his biography in the CD booklet.
Wow!

These are nice pieces, that I'm going to revisit.
 
Yet another version of one of my favourite symphonies, but it seems like a good one.
First listen, this came out today.


Antonín Dvořák - Symphony No. 9 in E Minor, Op. 95, B. 178 "From the New World" & Other Works
Concerto Budapest, András Keller
Miklós Perényi, violoncello
via Qobuz

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Very sweet interpretation.
But it is lacking some highs.
For example the triangle sounds are a bit muffled.
The string section is very present indeed, like the Tacet comments tell us.

Dvořák’s 9th symphony paints the town red, for sure. But that’s not all! The strings of András Keller are able to blossom like flowers. They don’t play uniformly but with a seemingly congenital naturalness as if it were easy for 14 violins to sound as homogenously and at the same time as individually as a single violin. Also for the wind it is not the high performance that counts but the sensitivity and the flowing of the music, e. g. the English horn solo in the second movement. The brass: no power play but rich and gentle, always sensitive chords. – The tempi, the transitions, everything flows organically and invites you to go along. That is the great art of legato. Old-fashioned to some people, in fact timeless beautiful. No surprise that one role model for András Keller is Wilhelm Furtwängler. After that and without any showing off the loved by many cellist Miklós Perényi gently carries you off into the mysterious world of the rondo op 68/8 and “Klid” (silent wood) op. 95. Three slavonic dances from op. 46 round off the program. © Tacet
 
Natacha Kudritskaya - Rameau
via Qobuz

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While jogging this morning, I heard this on the radio.
The programmer of classical concerts of Gent was raving about it.
The piano player is coming to Belgium this season.

I liked her playing so much that I wanted to hear it over our living room system.
The performance is terrific, but Hewitt's album has the edge on sound quality.

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Gustav Mahler - Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen, Des Knaben Wunderhorn
Anton Bruckner - Vier Orchesterstücke
Orchestre national d'Île de France, Enrique Mazzola
Markus Werba, baryton
Qobuz 24/96

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Recommendation in "Stereoplay", a German magazine. Classical album of the month there.
It's every bit as good as they described it: performance and sound are really top notch!
 
The Ear of Christopher Columbus
Huelgas Ensemble, Paul van Nevel
Qobuz 24/96

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One of our favourite polyphony ensembles - we usually see them once a year.
They deliver once again a fine album.

Without the help of blaring drums or castanets, culture-filled aesthete Paul van Nevel gives the opportunity to hear the music that Christopher Columbus heard during his travels and adventurous life. This has resulted in a rigorous selection of (many unknown) a capella works, by Italian and Spanish composers from the late 15th and early 16th centuries. Beginning with childhood memories of Christopher Columbus (a carnival song evoking an erotic joke about chimney sweeps), the album ends with pieces by Agricola most likely heard by the navigator at the end of his final voyage in 1506. This virtual musical journey begins in 15th century Venice and reaches the court of Ferdinand and Isabella in Madrid, Seville, Cordoba and Valladolid. This offers an exciting programme benefitting from the exceptional quality of singers of the Huelgas Ensemble, specialised in medieval and Renaissance polyphony and founded in 1971 by Paul van Nevel. © François Hudry/Qobuz
 
Last one for today:

Anna Gourari - Elusive Affinity
Qobuz 24/96

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Yet another recommendation by "Stereo".
Intriguing.
I'll need a second listen to further evaluate.

“Water equals time and provides beauty with its double.”
Anna Gourari, a pianist with a completely individual naturalness and authority, chooses these words from Joseph Brodsky’s essay on Venice as epigraph to her third recording for ECM. Her programme is typically wide-ranging but tightly focussed, with exquisitely alive performances of slow movements by Bach framing a choice selection of pieces from our own time. A span of three centuries is thus traversed, with magical and moving ease. We find memories of Bach reappearing in the regularly repeating notes of diary entries for piano set down in 2002 by the senior Russian composer Rodion Shchedrin, in a work written for Gourari. And we find in the late Five Aphorisms by Alfred Schnittke strange and beautiful chords that seem to condense whole swathes of Bach’s harmony. This is the “Elusive Affinity” of which the album’s title speaks.
The two Bach slow movements are from his transcriptions of concertos by Antonio Vivaldi and Alessandro Marcello, arrangements in which he retraced these orchestral concertos for his own fingers, bringing to them an intimate privacy that Gourari also conveys throughout this recording. Vivaldi and Marcello were both Venetians, and Venice provides, by elusive affinity, the recording’s imaginary location. Photographs by Luca d’Agostino, reproduced in the booklet, follow Gourari through a Venetian archway, beside an ancient wall, on the edge of the lagoon. Water circulates in the city, enveloping past and present, old and new. So in our awareness, as we listen, Bach’s images of a Venice he never visited swim with others from nearer at hand.
These others remind us that Venice, the Mediterranean mirror-image of St. Petersburg, has long been important to Russian artists. Schnittke’s dark pieces sound like shadows cutting across sunlit paving, though there is wit in this music, too. Arvo Pärt, represented by a crucial but largely overlooked early example of his luminous style, evokes bell sounds common to both Venice and the Baltic. Also here are two haunting miniatures by Giya Kancheli and a sequence of memorials to friends by Wolfgang Rihm, where sombreness joins with light, in what is again a Venetian conjunction. © ECM Records
 
Isabel I
Reina de Castilla
La Capella Reial de Catalunya
Hesperion XXI
, Jordi Savall

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This is one of the many fascinating musical journeys Savall undertook.

Listening to the SACD, but liked this comment on Qobuz:

For fans of the pomp and majesty of royalty, here's a collection of music for Isabel I, the Queen of Castilla (1454 -- 1504). Conceived, compiled, and conducted by Jordi Savall and performed by La Capella Reial de Catalunya with Hesperion XXI, the music is an impressive mixture of hymns and marches, songs and dances, strength and sensitivity. Grouped into five sets of works ranging across Isabel's entire reign from the hymn performed at her ascension to the requiem performed at her funeral. Each set is nicely balanced between public and private music and the progression of sets is meaningful and moving. The performances are as magisterial as the music: Savall and his forces have been bringing music to life for decades and the superb quality of their singing and playing is matched by the depth of their affection and enthusiasm. The sound is lush and voluptuous and the packaging is rich and luxuriant. This collection represents the classical music industry at its best.
 
i became inspired to investigate the Alia Vox catalogue... some really nice ancient music -- well recorded and mastered.

i quite like this one:

musica nova
harmonie dss nations
1500 - 1700

jordi savall + hesperion xxi

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Gorgeous music.
The soprano Claire Lefilliâtre is marvelous, as we could testify when we say this excellent ensemble live a couple of years ago.


CD 1: Estienne Moulinié - L'Humaine Comédie

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I'm so glad we'll see this ensemble again this season. :)
 
Jordi comes to Berkeley every year. He is now in his late 70's. He usually varies the cast of musicians he brings with him, depending on the program he has devised. One advantage to his many recordings is that one can hear his late wife soprano Montserrat Figeuras who died in 2011 (after being married to Savall for over 40 years.)

Larry

i became inspired to investigate the Alia Vox catalogue... some really nice ancient music -- well recorded and mastered.

i quite like this one:

musica nova
harmonie dss nations
1500 - 1700

jordi savall + hesperion xxi

attachment.php
 
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