MOZART: COMPLETE STRING QUINTE

HOLST: THE PLANETS ORMANDY

KAZUHITO YAMASHITA - MUSIC OF

MOZART: COMPLETE VIOLA QUINTET

FANFARE FOR THE MILLENIUM

Includes work(s) by Engelbert Humperdinck, Alexander Borodin, Franz Schubert. Ensemble: Boston Pops.

Rubinstein Collection, Vol. 76: Schubert Piano Trio No. 1 -

Few things are as much fun as big orchestral favorites performed by the Boston Pops Orchestra under the direction of the legendary Arthur Fiedler. This program, part of the RCA Living Stereo series, features splashy orchestral showpieces by Prokofiev, Liszt and Chopin.
Prokofiev's suite from his opera 'Love for Three Oranges' gets things off to a rousing start. Fiedler and his orchestra revel in the color and grotesque wit of Prokofiev's colorful score. Special note should be paid to the orchestra's sensitive playing in "Le prince et la princesse." Chopin's 'Les sylphides' is one of the most popular scores in the classical dance repertoire. On this recording, the delicate orchestrations of Leroy Anderson and Peter Bodge give the orchestra an opportunity to shine. Each dance is skillfully rendered and Fiedler gives the music ample room to breath. Two grand tone poems by Franz Liszt, 'Les préludes' and 'Mazeppa' round out the program. Fiedler and company are brilliant in 'Les préludes,' grasping the work's heroic soul without resorting to bombast. The RCA engineers provide startlingly vivid sound that is still of audiophile quality nearly forty years later.

This CD contains both DDD and ADD recordings.

CHADWICK: Melpomene / Rip van Winkle / Symphonic Sketches /

What does America sound like? To many ears it sounds like Aaron Copland, and the three ballet scores featured on this CD are why. What now seems like a mainstream national style was quite original when 'Billy the Kid' arrived, a music educated in Paris but bursting with New York energy and chutzpah and hankering to go west. The integration of American folk tunes into a modernist palette, alive with polytonality and vigorous rhythmic displacement, had never been achieved so successfully before, nor has it since. Of course 'Appalachian Spring' followed the same formula down a somewhat more genial path and became the most beloved of all American ballet scores.
Since the 1960s the performances of Leonard Bernstein have had no rival in this repertoire, but now they do. Even among Michael Tilson Thomas' many fine discs of American music, COPLAND THE POPULIST stands out, as these well-known pieces are made to sound fresh and alive again. This 'Billy' is a great, energetic dancer, yet has wonderful delicacy, stopping to smell the cactus roses, as it were, on the way to a tragic fate. 'Appalachian Spring,' for all its beauties, is more attentive than usual to its darker side, especially as it includes the rarely heard "revival" scene, an edgy, propulsive, and forward sounding episode that immediately precedes the final Shaker apotheosis.

"The Enigma Variations, Froissart, Cockaigne, and In the South (a thrilling performance) all benefit from Slatkin's keen musical insight and impeccable execution. The London Philharmonic, long experienced in this music, provides its usual enthusiastic and authoritative performances."

--Victor Carr Jr, ClassicsToday.com [6/15/2004] Reviewing RCA 60389

LISZT: PIANO CONCERTOS NOS 1 &

BERNSTEIN CENTURY - FOSS: TIME

Classical Music

It's refreshing and invigorating to have a taut unyielding view of a fine score. This recording should win converts among those who still regard Puccini as merely soft and sentimental.

Rather as I expected, the reissue of Lorin Maazel's three recent recordings of Puccini's one-acters as a co-ordinated box of the Trittico sharply brings out the conductor's distinctive approach. It is an approach which is typified by the very start of Gianni Schicchi, where there is an almost Stravinskian sharpness in the ostinato rhythms. Generally Maazel's concessions to romantic expressiveness are calculated rather than obviously warm. This degree of severity has the merit of underlining the musical cogency of all three pieces, splendid examples of Puccini's mastery at his high maturity, and Suor Angelica—wrongly regarded for far too long as a limp piece of sentimentality —benefits just as much as either of the others with the succeeding climaxes spaced in carefully balanced relationship.

The snag is that particularly with CBS's somewhat close recording balance, the atmospheric qualities of each opera—which some Puccinians would regard as among their highest merits—are underplayed. When I first reviewed Il tabarro, this absence of essential atmosphere made me give a less charitable review than I would now. Hearing it in context with the other performances, it is refreshing and invigorating to have a taut and relatively unyielding view of a fine score, even while one misses the dark evocations of the scene under a bridge of the Seine in Paris, which other versions so vividly capture.

The other gain from hearing the performances together is to have the dominance of Renata Scotto reinforced in both It tabarro and Suor Angelica. In Il tabarro neither Placido Domingo as Luigi (not quite in his warmest voice) nor Ingvar Wixell as the bargemaster Michele (rather too gritty-toned as recorded) is exactly a cipher, but Renata Scotto consistently focuses the centre of involvement with her dramatic and finely detailed singing.

In Gianni Schicchi the central pivot is provided of course by the contribution of the veteran Tito Gobbi, and though there may be some signs of the voice not being as young as it was, it is a deeply satisfying performance, as fine in its way as the classic one he recorded for HMV 20 years earlier. That HMV version is included in the boxed reissue set of Il trittico which appeared two years ago (SLS5066, 10/76), with all three operas given marvellous performances but with very dated recording and only Schicchi in stereo. The Decca set under Gardelli (SET 236-8, 12/62) is more idiomatic in performance than this Maazel CBS issue, and the sixties recording is amazingly bright and full for its age. But the new issue, controversial as it may be in some ways, is certainly refreshing, and should in particular win converts among those who still regard Puccini as merely soft and sentimental.

-- Gramophone [8/1978, reviewing the LP release of Il Trittico]

Of the artists active today, Ricardo Muti has already been a welcome guest at the Festival for more than forty years. His first conducting engagements there did not just provide the basis for his current “telepathic” relationship with the Vienna Philharmonic, but also brought collaborations with important soloists of the older generation. Thus the new CD in the series Festival Documents includes the Piano Concerto by Robert Schumann under Muti's baton, with Sviatoslav Richter once more proving the uniqueness of his pianistic gifts. Over and above all its virtuoso challenges, Richter and Muti together give an account of the work triumphant in its formal cohesion and in which they sculpt it as a large-scale musical arch. Muti's deep understanding of Rossini and Mozart - represented here by the Overture to Semiramide and the Sinfonia Concertante K 364 respectively - is also clearly evident in these early recordings.

Classical Music

MARTINU: CELLO SONATAS JÁNOS

"Leonard Slatkin's series of Haydn London Symphonies brings fresh, refined readings at speeds that never sound breathless. There is wit from the Philharmonia woodwind and the string phrasing always gives pleasure."

-- Penguin Guide [2003/4 Edition] Reviewing RCA 68003

The appearance of this double CD set means that for the first time the entire Jungle Book cycle of Charles Koechlin is available on disc – and high time too, for these are wonderfully evocative pieces. If you have a taste for music which summons up a mythic world in gorgeous colours, then this disc is for you. Kipling’s Jungle Book was a lifelong obsession for Koechlin, and between 1899 and 1936 he based five orchestral pieces on it, some including voices, which together form a vast symphonic cycle. On this disc you can trace the evolution of Koechlin’s language through the cycle, from the hazy, twilight sonorities of the Three Poems, which sound like a cross between Debussy and Ives, to the more dissonant and eclectic Bandar-log. By this time Koechlin had developed a style perfectly suited to Kipling’s world, by turns hazily evocative and awesomely grand. Koechlin was a virtuoso orchestrator, and his music needs virtuoso playing to bring it off. The violins in particular are tested in some mercilessly rapid and ultra-high figuration, which in a less than accurate performance can sound scrappy. Fortunately the Berlin Radio Symphony Orchestra rises to the challenge well. David Zinman’s performances may not be as fiery as Leif Segerstam’s (Marco Polo), and at times he sounds a bit cautious – as for example at the beginning of The Spring Running, which sounds more like a jog. But this gives him more room to gather pace, so ultimately it’s more impressive than the rival version, which in general suffers from some uncertain playing, and in any case only offers a selection from the cycle.

-- Ivan Hewett, BBC Music Magazine

Track Listing
1. All in Love Is Fair
2. Skip-A-Long Sam
3. Send in the Clowns
4. Least You Can Do Is the Best You Can, The
5. They Needed Each Other
6. I Loves You, Porgy
7. Until It's Time for You to Go
8. Life Is a Wheel
9. Summer Knows, The
10. Beautiful Thing, A
11. Time for Farewell, A - (bonus track)

Personnel: Cleo Laine (vocals); James Galway (flute); Tony Hymas, Don Grolnick (keyboards); Cliff Morris, Bob Rose (guitar); John Miller (bass); Roy Markowitz (drums).

Producers: Mike Berniker (tracks 1-10); Kurt Gebauer, John Dankworth (track 11).

Engineers: Mike Moran, Ed Begley (tracks 1-10); Frank Catero (track 11).

Recorded at RCA Studios B & C, New York on July 10-12, 1974 and Studio D, Sausalito, California in August 1993.

Recording information: New York, NY (07/10/1974-07/??/1993); RCA Recording Studios, Studio B&C, New York, NY (07/10/1974-07/??/1993); Studio D, Sausalito, CA (07/10/1974-07/??/1993).

Photographer: Nick Sangiamo.

Arrangers: Tony Hymas; John Dankworth.

PIERRE MONTEUX EDITION VOL 14

Recorded in: Studio 7, New Broadcasting House, Manchester 16 & 17 May 2002 Producer(s) Brian Pidgeon Mike George Sound Engineer(s) Stephen Rinker

Rubinstein Collection, Vol. 13: Grieg: Piano Concerto, Balla