ALBINONI: 8 CONCERTOS PETRI,

Complete Track List:

Disc 1:
1. Familiar Sound Of Baseball, The
2. Voice Of Babe Ruth, April, 1947, The
3. Bobby Thomson's Home Run To Win The Pennat For The Giants In The 1951 Playoff Game With Brooklyn
4. Ed Walsh, 40-Game Winner
5. Walter Johnson, Strike-Out Leader
6. Carl Hubbell Recounts Striking Out Ruth, Gehrig, Foxx, Simmons And Cronin
7. Bob Feller's 348 Strike-Outs In One Season
8. Carl Erskine Sets World Series' Strike-Out Record, 1953
9. Cy Young's First No-Hitter
10. Johnny Vander Meer Gets Two No-Hitters In Consecutive Starts
11. First No-Hitter In World Series Play, Piched By Don Larson
12. Babe Ruth Recalls The Three Goals He Set For Himself
13. George Sisler Remembers "The Babe"'s Strength
14. Senator Ford Recalls An Exceptional Hit By Ruth
15. Will Harridge On "The Babe"
16. Ruth Talks About The Importance Of Getting A Youngster Started In Baseball
17. Branch Rickey Estimates The Influence Of Ruth
18. Jim Farley Sums Up His Feelings About Ruth
19. Andy Coply Remembers Lou Gehrig As A Boy
20. Jimmy Foxx Remembers Gehrig's Feats
21. Charlie McCarthy (Edgar Bergen) Kids Gehrig
22. Gehrig's Farewell To The Fans
23. Rogers Hornsby His First Year In The Big Leagues
24. Ted Williams Hits One Out Of The Park
25. Stan Musial's 1955 All-Star Game-Winning Homer And 3,000th Hit
26. Paul Waner Goes Six For Six In 1926 Game
27. Tris Speaker Gives Views On Hitting
28. Ty Cobb Talks About How To Make Your Own Breaks
29. Budy Blattner On The Birth Of The Baseball Hall Of Fame
30. Hall Of Fame Ceremony, Cooperstown, New York, The
31. Eddie Collins
32. Grover Cleveland Alexander
33. Babe Ruth
34. Hank Greenberg
35. Paul Kerr
36. Ford Frick
37. Kenesaw Mountain Landis
38. Willie Mays Makes A Sensational Catch
39. Jackie Robinson Hits To Win The Sixth Game Of 1956 Wold Series
40. Robinson Recalls Troubles When First Entering The Major Leagues
41. Robert Heyland Jr., Talks About His Father
42. Connie Mack And His Long Managerial Career
43. Mickey Cochrane Remembers One Of Mack's Mistakes
44. Mack And His Eternal Hope For "Next Year"
45. Sid Keener Remembers Hornsby Claiming Alexander By Phone
46. Frankie Frisch Remebers The "Mud Cat Band"
47. Joe McCarthy Pays Tribute to His Great Players
48. Leo Durocher Admits He's A Genius
49. Fred Haney Gets A Testimonial Dinner
50. Chuck Tanner Hits A Four Bagger To Tie One Up
51. Eddie Matthews Gets A Homer
52. Joe Adcock Adds His
53. Henry Aaron Clinches The Pennant With A Homer
54. Braves Win The 1957 World Series, The
55. Prayer Of Thanks By Francis Cardinal Spellman, A

Disc 2: Bonus Disc:
1. Casey At The Bat - Vincent Price
2. Baseball March, The
3. They're All Good American Names
4. Home Run Quick Step
5. Our Orioles Two-Step March
6. Hurrah For Our National Game
7. Our Champions March
8. Slide, Kelly, Slide
9. Live Oak Polka
10. Baseball Fever
11. Spectator March And Two-Step, The
12. Umpire Is A Most Unhappy Man, The
13. Baseball Polka
14. One-A-Strike
15. Baseball Quadrille
16. Jake! Jake! The Yiddisher Ball-Player
17. Una Schottishe
18. Tiger Polka
19. That Baseball Rag
20. Ball Club March, The
21. Who Would Doubt That I'm A Man?
22. Baseball Cakewalk,The
23. Take Me Out To The Ball Game - D'Anna Fortunato/The Triskelion All-Stars

TAKE ME OUT TO THE BALL GAME is a collection of spoken vocal tracks by famous baseball players & celebrities and also includes a bonus disc of traditional baseball songs.

...The Strauss and Respighi collections are also exceptionally fine. It is conceivable, with music as spectacular and as colourful as Respighi's, that some collectors will want stereo—nay, digital sound in these works. But in doing so will they get sharper-focused, more brilliantly coloured, or more decisively projected performances than these by Respighi's earliest and finest champion? I very much doubt it. Certainly, I have never heard a stronger case made out for what is allegedly the weakest of the three pieces, Feste romane. Toscanini's performance is sensational. Happily, the recordings were all made in the Carnegie Hall and are very fine. Collectors who already have an LP version of Fountains and Pines may find the CD a touch more strident and lacking in bass. That was RL's reaction in last November's "Quarterly Retrospect". But it was a minor quibble. As he said: "these are such stunning performances that they must be strongly recommended".

-- Gramophone [1/1991]

Music for Stage and Screen: The Red Pony, Born on the Fourth

The unique blend of Stephan Winkler's music and the images of the video artist Jesko Marx results in one of the first DualDiscs on the European continent! The DualDisc, an enhancement and improvement over the DVD plus, combines both audio CD and DVD on one disc. "I consider myself successful when I manage, despite my self-criticism, to write or record music that I myself love to hear." (Stephan Winkler) The present CD contains three works in which the diverse stylistic strands of Winkler's music are brought together in a different way each. "Gullinkambi" for 11 wind instruments forms a sort of habitat in which musical "creatures" collide to generate an evolutionary formal process. "Vom Durst nach Dasein" (Of the Thirst for Existence) for viola and instrumental ensemble is devoted to "attachment to the world," with a distancing commentary in the form of a concluding speech: a text by Robert Musil transformed into music. Finally, our CD rendition of the score of "Zigzag", for six saxophones, bursts the bounds of the medium: on the DVD side of this new DualDisc, the sextet unites with images from the video artist Jesko Marx to create "Zigzag: Pi mal R Quadrat" (Zigzag: π ∙ r²)- music which has really been written for DVD.

DVORAK: PIANO CONCERTO JANAC

Bernstein's lecture "What is Jazz?" was recorded in New York City in July 1956. (Timing: 42:49)
Originally broadcast on October 15, 1955 as part of CBS's "Omnibus" series, Leonard Bernstein's eloquent deconstruction of jazz attains the near impossible: it achieves an understanding and appreciation of the essence of jazz that is attractive and informative to both lay persons and more experienced listeners. Using interesting musical examples, Bernstein abandons the usual historical approach and gets inside the elements of jazz. The most delightful aspects of the first half of this CD are the terrific performances by Louis Armstrong, Teo Macero, Coleman Hawkins, Buster Bailey, Buck Clayton, and Bessie Smith, among others. And where else could you here a modernist rendition of "Sweet Sue" by Miles Davis and John Coltrane?
The disc is rounded out by a live recording of Alfredo Antonini's concerto grosso setting of W. C. Handy's "St. Louis Blues" featuring Louis Armstrong's Sextet backed by Bernstein and the Lewisohn Stadium Symphony Orchestra (the New York Philharmonic in its summer setting) and Howard Brubeck's "Dialogues for Jazz Combo and Orchestra." The former features Armstrong at the height of his powers in 1956, while the latter is a delightful piece of "third stream" jazz featuring the delicately swinging Brubeck Quartet.

This recording was nominated for the 2000 Grammy Award for "Best Small Ensemble Performance (with or without Conductor)."
There hasn't been a violist with as big a name as Yuri Bashmet since the days of William Primrose. Bashmet has taken the classical world by storm, and like Primrose, he has greatly expanded the repertoire for his instrument. Bashmet has commissioned many works from prominent composers and has also made some compelling arrangements which serve as vehicles for his ensemble, Moscow Soloists.
His arrangement of the Brahms Clarinet Quintet is quite original. Rather than simply playing the clarinet part on the viola, Bashmet pulls a solo part out of the five parts, thus re-arranging Brahms' original hierarchy of instrumentation. The result is almost a different piece, but no less compelling. The Moscow Soloists give a romantic yet distinctly Russian performance, utilizing rubato and sound color in a way that makes the piece even more rhapsodic.
In Alexander Tchaikovsky's arrangement of the Shostakovich 13th String Quartet, the solo viola is more integrated into the string texture. Shostakovich's late works have the hard edge of death written into them, and Bashmet masterfully enhances this effect by coaxing his orchestra to create brittle, uncompromising sounds. The movement is not without its beautiful sections, but the pervading emotion is that of painful grief.

Stravinsky, I.: Rite of Spring / Strauss, R.: Don Juan / Til

Can a performer make a composition sound better than it really is? Peter Serkin is one who surely can. He’s a marvellous pianist, and plays everything on this disc with an uncanny sensitivity to tone, nuance and overall shaping. He is also an enthusiastic champion of living composers. All these nine works were written for Serkin, seven for a 1989-90 recital tour consisting entirely of specially commissioned compositions. Other pieces by Peter Lieberson frame the present collection, while the work he wrote for the tour occupies the central position; this American composer has long been the pianist’s close friend. Breeze of Delight, from Lieberson’s Fantasy Pieces, works minor miracles with the sorts of gestures and harmonic language familiar from John Ireland. Other compositions – including some of Lieberson’s – still end up seeming more the result of craft and occasionally remarkable ingenuity exacted on tired, if generally dissonant, materials and borrowed forms than the product of compulsive invention: Oliver Knussen’s Variations, for example, or Alexander Goehr’s … in real time I, which gives the disc its title. Leon Kirchner’s often turbulent, cunning Interlude suggests the hand of an underrated master. But even in this case, the responsibility for turning prose into poetry could, as elsewhere, have really been Serkin’s astonishing talent.

Performance: 5 (out of 5), Sound: 4 (out of 5)

-- Keith Potter, BBC Music Magazine

This disc received the 1997 Gramophone award for "Best Orchestral Recording."

This disc received the 1997 Grammy Award for "Best Classical Engineered Recording." It was also nominated for the Award for "Best Classical Album."
This disk presents a vivid picture of Aaron Copland's growth in the decade from his arrival to the creation of his early masterpieces. The 1924 'Organ Symphony' shows the enfant terrible throwing crashing dissonance and jazzy accents around with such high spirits that conductor Walter Damrosch told the premiere audience "if a young man can write like that at twenty-three within five years he will be ready to commit murder." The 1929 'Dance Symphony' recycles music from a never-staged ballet, which accounts for its somewhat episodic nature, while the 'Short Symphony' of 1933, modest in dimension and taut in structure, reveals a dramatic increase in the composer's powers, a development first signaled by the 1930 'Piano Variations,' arranged by Copland in 1957 as the 'Orchestral Variations.'
Leonard Slatkin and the Saint Louis Symphony are old and trusted hands with Copland's music, having recorded nearly all of the major orchestral works for RCA and EMI. These performances are right on, full of energy catching the young composer's heady mix of French color and American attitude. The recording is excellent, having both atmosphere and punch, with the featured organ captured impactfully in Christ Church Cathedral, Saint Louis.

Serge Baudo, a very find and under-appreciated conductor of the French repertoire, led a studio recording from 1978 with Claude Dormoy, Michèle Command and Gabriel Bacquier... [It] was highly praised at the time of its release and should be re-released. It is the only commercial recording of the wonderful Bacquier as Golaud, and Michèle Command was a beguiling as Mélisande.

-- Jeffrey Sarver, MusicWeb International

The comparison here is between two very mature artists, always taking the broader view, and two very young artists out to extract the maximum from every detail. When reviewing the Barenboims (on HMV) way back in 1968, I remember being enchanted by the sheer beauty and speaking quality of so much in their playing, especially in the F major Sonata, yet sometimes worried by quite so much elasticity in phrasing. Jacqueline du Pré uses more vibrato than Piatigorsky in the interests of expression and her cantabile often comes across with more radiance as a result. Balance is finely judged by the acutely sensitive Barenboim: never does the piano dominate the low-voiced cello. Listening to them anew I felt that this is how Brahms might have liked to hear both sonatas played on one of his several visits to sunny Italy. Piatigorsky and Rubinstein are by no means tied to the metronome either, but because less concerned with detailed nuance, they convey more of the underlying solidarity of backbone—and perhaps the composer's North German seriousness, too. In the E minor work their slightly faster tempo for the first and last movements helps to suggest a stronger sense of direction. Piatigorsky's tone is very mellow even though less luminous than Jacqueline du Pré's. Rubinstein is marvellously sturdy for one considerably more than double Barenboim's age, but at this point I come to the crux of the matter. I sometimes wondered if he was fully aware of his own sturdiness, since the balance so often goes against the cello. It would make dull reading to cite chapter and verse, though nearly every movement in both works includes an example save the finale of the E minor work, where the counterpoint is finely matched. As so often, it's a roundabouts and swings situation when it comes to making a clear-cut recommendation. The best way out, of course, is to buy both versions.

-- Gramophone [7/1977, comparing the Brahms Cello Sonatas as played by Piatigorsky and Rubinstein with the recording by Du Pré and Barenboim]

Strauss: Don Quixote - Don Juan

Selections recorded July 2, 1997 and June 30, 1998.
For this 100th-birthday collection of the music of George Gershwin, conductor Michael Tilson Thomas combined Gershwin's own "Catfish Row" suite from 'Porgy and Bess'--rather than the better-known suite from the opera by Robert Russell Bennett--with four songs. It was this assemblage which Thomas performed at the 1998 gala opening concert of Carnegie Hall. With him on that evening, and in recording this program, were singers Audra McDonald and Brian Stokes Mitchell, stars of the original production of the musical 'Ragtime' on Broadway.
The remainder of the collection provides an ample, well-performed selection of Gershwin's non-'Rhapsody in Blue' orchestral music. (For that 'Rhapsody' from Thomas, you'll need the album NEW WORLD JAZZ with the New World Symphony, also on RCA Victor.) Thomas and Garrick Ohlsson provide sparkling pianism for the 'Second Rhapsody' and 'Concerto in F' respectively, and the San Francisco Symphony is in fine form throughout.

PERGOLESI: STABAT MATER, SALVE

Import Hybrid-SACD pressing.

Classical Music

MOZART: SYMPHONIES NO 36 & 39

Rachmaninov: Symphony No. 2 - Vocalise

The fact that these works have, until now, remained unrecorded perhaps bears witness to the fact that the discrimination confronted by Alice Mary Smith over a hundred years ago has still not been entirely eradicated. Smith wrote by far the greatest number of orchestral works of any ninteenth-century British woman composer and the success of her orchestral and choral works gave rise to a heated discussion as to whether a woman could ever compose a work of greatness. Her finely crafted and inventive music is the story of a wife and mother battling against prejudice and, in the eyes of her contemporaries at least, succeeding.

This portrait CD provides insight into the sensitive and exciting sound aesthetics of the composer Malika Kishino. Nature and beauty constitute the main points of reference of her oeuvre. Japanese culture and it's aesthetics leave a mark on Kishino's music, yet it is futile to look for anything reminiscent of the traditional music of her home country. Nature, especially optical and visual phenomena or physical states, are an inspiration for the structure and character of her works which she herself describes as "sound organisms". "Rayons Cr�pusculaires", for example, refers to a radial light phenomenon that shows particularly in the spatial arrangement of this composition. Three groups of musicians stand facing loudspeakers which reverberate the sounds modified by live electronics back into the room. The work which was recorded specifically for this CD is a "complex acoustic event which not only sets the space in motion but also sharpens one's hearing with regard to special tonal qualities" (Michael Struck-Schloen). Meanwhile the currents of the water and it's changing states of matter are the starting points for "Sensitive Chaos". This examination becomes more or less audible in the form of dripping sounds which later turn into more flowing structures. Another topic is the menace to nature: Kishino dedicated the choral piece "Prayer / Inori" to the memory of the catastrophe of Fukushima.

WERGO publishes the live recording of the concert given at the occasion of Dieter Schnebel's 70th birthday on 14 March 2000 in the Universitat der Kunste Berlin. The composer himself appreciates this recording very much: "This performance was very carefully rehearsed, very much in the spirit of the piece, and took place in an impressive and poetic staging in the Hochschule’s modern theater. Every time I hear the very fine recording again, I am overcome again and filled with special gratitude." "Orchestra", a symphonic score for mobile musicians, expects an improvisation-like playing that is nonetheless sensitive to sound and imaginatively shaped – but also resistance, withdrawal, assertion, and agreement.

Michaels Reise Um Die Erde (Michael's Journey Around the World) is the second act of the opera Donnerstag (Thursday) from the seven-part opera cycle Licht (Light) by Karlheinz Stockhausen. It is a cosmic world theatre in which three protagonists set the tone: Michael as Prince of Angels who appears in human shape to lead mankind to God; Eva as Power of Love and Life; Lucifer as a fallen angel and adversary. To each of these three figures has been assigned a characterizing melody (a musical "formula"), which unfolds through the musical action of the entire opera cycle. In 2008, the ensemble musikFabrik performed Michaels Reise Um Die Erde twice at the The�tre Bobigny in Paris to great acclaim from the press and public alike. Wergo captured these live performances for release in the label's edition musikFabrik series.