The two works on this album reflect the West Coast and Northeastern sides of John Adams' musical personality. He has fused the two tendencies with uncommon elegance over the years, but here he allows himself the latitude to pay more direct homage to several predecessors who influenced him. The Dharma at Big Sur is a concerto for electric six ...
This is not the classic 1965 Jacqueline du Pré / John Barbirolli / London Symphony Orchestra recording of Elgar's profoundly elegiac Cello Concerto. This is a previously unreleased live recording made by du Pré and Barbirolli in Prague two years later with the BBC Symphony. Is it as good? No, of course, not: the 1965 du Pré / Barbirolli recording ...
Maurice Maeterlinck wrote his libretto for Ariane et Barbe-Bleu for Grieg, who rejected it, but Paul Dukas was delighted when it was offered to him. Completed in 1907, Dukas' opera appeared five years after Debussy's Pelléas, which it resembles in some of its text setting and in its sense of mystery. (Mélisande appears in the Dukas as one of ...
The three works presented here reveal distinctly different phases of Arnold Schoenberg's development, each a critical point of departure. In the Pieces (5) for Orchestra (1909), Schoenberg's atonal language appears full-blown and marks a clear break with tonality. For the first time, Schoenberg places content over form and dispenses with any ...
It was in the wake of Richard Wagner's passing that composers sought most ardently to create an answer to his Ring cycle with a property based on Arthurian legend. Perhaps the best of these efforts was Ernest Chausson's lone opera Le Roi Arthus, presented here by Telarc in a three-disc set featuring baritone Andrew Schroeder as the King, Susan ...
Afro-Canadian soprano Measha Brueggergosman (the unusual name is a mixture of her maiden name and her husband's last name) continues with this, her third album, to show herself as a distinctive talent rather than a novelty. The trio of composers included on Surprise may seem unusual (and Brueggergosman's early champion William Bolcom must be ...
In addition to his position with the turn-of-the-millennium model of the Beaux Arts Trio, South African violinist Daniel Hope has also cultivated a solo recording career. After a half-dozen discs released on AVS and Nimbus, Hope hit the big time as a soloist when he signed with Warner Classics and made his major-label debut in a wholly convincing ...
Let's say you can only listen to one recording of Wagner's Tristan und Isolde. Which one would you pick? Would it be the Wilhelm Furtwängler or possibly the Carlos Kleiber? Let's say, however, you can only pick from one of the digital Tristan recordings made around the turn of the millennium -- then which one would you pick? Would it be Antonio ...
Although the performances and the repertoire on the first disc of this two-disc set are more than somewhat disappointing, the performance and the repertoire on the second disc make it all worthwhile. The performers are the BBC Symphony Orchestra under Czech conductor Jirí Belohlávek and the repertoire are two middle symphonies and a couple of ...
To be fair, this double-disc sampler from Warner provides a generous introduction to the music of Edward Elgar, but its program includes too many excerpts to be a fully satisfying survey. One can be grateful that the beloved Enigma Variations and the popular Introduction and Allegro for strings survived complete, and that several short but famous ...
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