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

This 1958 Brahms 2nd, the third of four Artur Rubinstein recorded in the studio, might well be considered a summation of his “romantic“ view of the work—a better integrated, more controlled account than those he produced with Albert Coates (the very first recording of the work, made in 1930) and Charles Munch in 1953. Rubinstein went on to record still another version, I believe in 1971, with Eugene Ormandy, which may well be his finest. Still, in its somewhat unstylish, at times even Chopinized way, this 1958 reading proves a refreshing alternative to other, better integrated approaches, and the digital remastering of the early stereo sound is astonishing, with splendid clarity and impact and virtually no audible hiss. The three solo piano pieces are also superbly remastered and a welcome bonus.

-- Mortimer H. Frank, FANFARE [9/1987]

The famous Salome Closing Scene here is still the best of all in many ways: tone bright, defined and sustained like a laser beam, timbre womanly-strong and girlish-fresh, energy inexhaustible, with resources (sparingly exploited) of wilful shrewishness and devouring sensuality. There have been subtler versions, and perhaps we are now spoilt by recordings where the splendours of orchestration overwhelm as they cannot really do here: a fine orchestral performance under Reiner, none the less, and no apologies needed. As Philip Hope-Wallace felt, however, reviewing this selection in 1969, admirers of Welitsch -in the flesh" might well feel apologetic about the "Vissi d'arte", shallow in feeling, short-breathed in phrasing. Better is her Donna Anna, better still, perhaps, her Zigeunerbaron solo. But the Salome is what matters: "singing with her nerves," as PH-W said, "at a tension which is not in the slightest danger of snapping".

-- Gramophone [5/1984]

Rubinstein Collection, Vol 22: Brahms: Concerto No. 2; Grieg

ZUCKERMAN, HORNE - BRAHMS: VIO

BRAHMS: PIANO CONCERTO NO 2, E

BRAHMS: PIANO CONCERTO NO 1 A