*** This title is a reissue of a Japanese release with liner notes in Japanese. ***

Critical consensus never ranked this 1959 Gary Graffman/Charles Munch Brahms D minor concerto on par with its reference 1950s and '60s competitors (Fleisher/Szell, Serkin/Szell, Arrau/Giulini, Rubinstein/Reiner, and Katchen/Monteux), yet it's an exciting, inherently musical interpretation. You won't find Szell's gaunt, amazingly regimented orchestral image, Reiner's chamber-like dovetailing between winds and strings (the Rondo's fugato, for instance), Rubinstein's rounded, singing tone, Arrau's bottom-to-top technical finish, or the nuanced nervous energy with which Serkin and Fleisher hold your attention. Still, I can't think of any professional performer who wouldn't be glad to claim Graffman's tremendously solid, albeit simpler pianism. Indeed, Graffman's sense of forward sweep and sustaining power within long, introspective passages score over what Van Cliburn halfheartedly delivered in his own recording with the Boston Symphony a few years later.

Call Munch's subito fortes and frequent encouragement of the brass raw or just plain unsubtle if you have to, but at least credit him for bringing out details that other recordings rarely reveal. At measure 192, for example, how often do you hear the marcato motive that passes between the two horns, the violas, the second violins, and first violins so clearly projected--or similarly, the detail at measure 345, when the horns take up the main theme underneath the piano soloist's descending triplet sequence in the recapitulation? Furthermore, Munch achieves this despite the dynamically constricted and inconsistently balanced engineering. Reissued through Arkivmusic.com's "on demand" program, this disc is well worth hearing.

--Jed Distler, ClassicsToday.com

"Brahms, a splendid pianist, had a special diffidence regarding chamber music for strings alone. He fussed endlessly with the string quartet medium and said in later years that he had written twenty before producing one good enough to publish – and at that, he published only three. He was forty by the time he allowed the first two to see the light of day, and they had occupied him for some eight years.
Perhaps Beethoven’s shadow, of which he was acutely conscious, loomed too heavily in this area. Brahms felt less hesitant writing for a medium Beethoven had never touched: he turned out two string sextets in his late twenties and early thirties.

All this puts a special focus on the two String Quintets. By the time Brahms wrote them (Op. 88 in 1882 and Op. 111 in 1890) he was at the peak of his powers. Whatever internal dilemmas he had faced had been successfully resolved, and also he had learned that a string quintet with two cellos – so memorably employed by Schubert – was not to his liking. But Brahms was always partial to dark coloring, and it seems natural that he would be strongly drawn to the dark-hued viola quintet."

— Excerpt from the original liner notes from ARC1-4849 by Shirley Fleming

Instrumental concertos 1938-1940 After numerous large-scale symphonic productions Karl B�hm and the S�chsische Staatskapelle opened up a new genre in the fall of 1938 a new genre. From now on, more and more renowned instrumental instrumental soloists were brought to Dresden for recordings - an illustrious mix of world stars, some of whom who were guests in symphony concerts of the S�chsische Staatskapelle on several occasions, such as the pianists Wilhelm Backhaus, Edwin Fischer and Walter Gieseking, from newcomers such as the young violinist Wolfgang Schneiderhan and many more

The unsuspected summits of virtuosity Playing fast and loud... Letting the rapidity of your fingers go to your head... Is this really the definition of virtuosity? Virtuosity has it's origins in 'virtue'; a set of moral qualities, before evolving into something purely technical. By choosing works by Brahms, Mozart, and Liszt, Michel Dalberto will take us on the lengthy journey towards an increased understanding of these pieces. The difficulty of performing them is just one of the ways in which the texts take on their full meaning. So that the scores can reveal the full genius of their creator. Their humanity.

Benjamin Appl met Hungarian composer Gyorgy Kurtag in 2019 and has worked with him ever since. 'He has shaped me both as a musician and as a human being, perhaps more than anyone else,' says Appl. This album alternates Romantic German lieder by Schubert and Brahms with vocal pieces by Kurtag, five of which are world premiere recordings. Kurtag himself is at the piano for two of the songs by Schubert and Brahms; while the German baritone's old and trusted friends Pierre-Laurent Aimard and James Baillieu join him for the other works in this programme, all under the artistic direction of Kurtag, ending with a fascinating recorded interview with Gyuri bacsi ('Uncle George') by Benjamin Appl, who tells us: 'My aim in this album is to give listeners a glimpse into the infinite universe of Gyorgy Kurtag, a shy procrastinator, stern self-critic, hesitant researcher, introverted questioner, unpretentious intellectual, brilliant composer and an extraordinary human being.'

Classical Music

Classical Music

Classical Music

Clarinet Music - MOZART, W.A. / WEBER, C.M. von / SPOHR, L.

"Extraordinary strength and depth of feeling, superbly sung by the Robert Shaw Chorale." -- Gramophone

"Robert Shaw’s magnificent Chorale for Toscanini’s still-unmatched Gesang der Parzen from November 1948." -- MusicWeb International

THE HEIFETZ COLLECTION VOL 32

After Robert Holl’s outstanding recent disc of Brahms Lieder, Marjana Lipovsek, a singer of no less searching musical sense and sensibility, adds her own selection to the catalogue. Her strong and spirited Eastern European mezzo-soprano brings an appropriate inwardness and intensity to four of the five Op. 105 songs. Purposeful phrasing runs gently through the senses in ‘Wie Melodien zieht es’, like the song’s eponymous melody, and penetrates the very heart of the soul’s winter in ‘Immer leiser’. All, though, is not angst. Lipovsek and her accompanist Charles Spencer are sensitive to the rapidly shifting moods within a group of songs, so that the numb darkness of Heine’s cool night of death is recreated as evocatively as the light-filled morning of his ‘Es schauen die Blumen’. Later, a steely vocal strength for ‘Von ewiger Liebe’ can dissolve to the lunar evanescence of ‘Die Mainacht’. Lipovsek’s thrilling grasp of the regional idiom of the final three folksongs is in glaring contrast to the infelicitous English (American) translations in the accompanying text: I doubt that Brahms’s poets would own up to an ‘incalibrate glow’, a ‘cute little child’ or, still worse, ‘a together time’.

-- Hilary Finch, BBC Music Magazine

BRAHMS: PIANO CONCERTO NO 2, 5

It is quite a feat to undertake a recording of Brahms One in one's seventies. At eighty the task is Herculean. Rubinstein was eighty-nine. It was his final concerto recording, in May 1976, and followed his discs of the same work with Leinsdorf in Boston in 1964 and his earlier and most famous recording of the concerto with Reiner in Chicago in 1954... This is a predominantly slow reading, still moving, but not really comparable with the earlier recordings - and especially that with Reiner – in either vigour or finesse. After a dramatic but broad opening tutti Rubinstein enters at a much slower tempo, with very slightly choppy rhythm. Not all his trills are clean and he has obvious problems – as noted above – in those dramatic octave passages. Yet there is something quietly and nourishingly compelling about the playing in the slow movement - for all that the balance characteristically favoured the soloist to an unnatural degree. The finale is slow but full of clarity and playfulness. As throughout there are numerous finger slips – some minor, some not – and listen at 7’01 for a particular example. But be sure as well to listen at 10’00 to the insouciance and sheer cheekiness of his playing, with his spicy treble fillips. Even at 89 he was incorrigible, especially in the light of the immediately succeeding passage – very, very scrappy.

An uneven disc then; it’s probably better to remember Rubinstein’s Brahms One from his 1954 sessions than to persist with the imperfections of old age in this moving but flawed last testament.

-- Jonathan Woolf, MusicWeb International
reviewing this recording previously reissued as Eloquence 466724