How many mediocre German Romantic cello concertos in a row can anyone listen to? That is the inescapable question posed by the second volume in Hyperion's the Romantic Cello Concerto series. Aside from Robert Schumann, the composers here vie for who's the most obscure: Robert Volkmann, Albert Dietrich or Friedrich Gernsheim. While Gernsheim may ...
It is hard to remember back to a time when this cover photograph -- three geezers in ties and dark suits, two of them bald and one with thick, horn-rimmed glasses -- could have been considered hip. But, even then, of course, the last thing Deutsche Grammophon Gesellschaft wanted in a recording of Brahms' Double Concerto was hip. What DGG wanted ...
While there are no complete recordings of each of Shostakovich's scores for the three Maxim films, there is this recording of nine cues from all three movies. Unfortunately, the notes don't indicate which cue is from which movie, so it is impossible to make a critical judgment of the quality of the scores for the separate movies. But it is ...
There was a time where the name of Alan Hovhaness was lumped in with the avant-garde of his generation; older sources frequently cite him in the company of John Cage and Lou Harrison, who were his close friends and shared his genuine interest in what is now called world music. However, thinking of Hovhaness as an avant-garde composer does him a ...
Erich Wolfgang Korngold was one of the most extraordinary musical prodigies who ever lived, and his compositional maturity was legendary in the early twentieth century. When Korngold was 12, his teacher Alexander von Zemlinsky said that his pupil had nothing further to learn, and Richard Strauss and Puccini expressed amazement at music he had ...
The category of light vocal music by German singers is not large, but this recording may be its historical high point. It was made in 1958, and part of its original Deutsche Grammophon liner notes are reproduced on the inside of the package. The claim of "rare, clear-as-a-bell beauty" for the voice of soprano Rita Streich is justifiable, and the ...
Bulgarian-Jewish composer Pancho Vladigerov was born in Zurich in 1899, but his family moved to his father's native country when he was still a youth, and thus the mature composer's music is imbued with the expressive melodies, propulsive rhythms, and vibrant colors of Bulgaria. On this 2005 CPO disc, Vladigerov's art is represented by three ...
Was Ernst Toch one of the great unknowns? Or just one of the unknowns? Or was the life and music of Toch too disrupted by fascists and fragmented by war to ever yield a coherent judgment?Thanks to conductor Alun Francis and the Berliner Rundfunk-Sinfonie-Orchester, there is now knowledge of all seven of Toch's symphonies. With this final volume ...
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