Making sense of the provenance of Profil's Gounod: Messe Solennelle de Sainte-Cecile for purposes of this review was quite a task, but here is the scoop: the recording was made in 1996 for the long-lived but by now certifiably defunct German company Calig. This reissue is by a company that, by its full name, is Profil Edition -- Günter Hänssler, ...
Embodying the highest ideals of the Enlightenment, Die Jahreszeiten is surely Haydn's supreme masterpiece and the greatest secular choral-orchestral work of the second half of the eighteenth century. It's pantheism at its grandest and the pathetic fallacy at its most glorious, with the whole of nature given voices to sing God's praises. It's ...
Conductor John Eliot Gardiner, said England's Independent newspaper, "has had the last laugh" -- Vol. 1 of his Bach cantata series was named Record of the Year at the 2005 Classic FM Gramophone Awards in London, after the big Deutsche Grammophon label pulled out of the project and dropped Gardiner just before it got underway in 2000. No doubt a ...
Virgin's recording of Die Schöpfung is most notable for the fine playing and singing of Les Arts Florissants, under William Christie's experienced leadership. The period-instrument performance is generally reserved and well mannered, which may not be the characteristics most necessary for this extraordinary, forward-looking, and sometimes ...
Just weeks before his death, Luciano Berio completed Stanze (2003), a five-movement composition for voice and orchestra on poems by Paul Celan, Giorgio Caproni, Edoardo Sanguineti, Alfred Brendel (better known as a pianist than as a poet), and Dan Pagis. This valedictory work is pure Berio, instantly recognizable in its continually shifting layers ...
While it is true that with Hampson and Schmidt and Quasthoff exceptional baritones have been thick on the ground for the past 20 years, Dietrich Henschel may be the best yet. As he demonstrates on this disc of Schubert lieder entitled An den Mond -- Chant nocturnes, Henschel has a strong, sensitive and supple instrument more than capable of giving ...
Composers love writing art songs, or if you are in German, lieder, as they appreciate the immediacy of words. For listeners, however, it can be a matter of taste; unfortunately, a taste for art song seems to be something that not many listeners acquire. The German Orfeo label recognizes this dichotomy and to make sure that the good lied does get ...
"I hope that, before a judge, I could provide evidence of my good sense and my good taste" was Beethoven's lukewarm comment on his art song output. Only toward the end of his life did Beethoven develop a song language comparable in its innovation to his symphonies, piano sonatas, and string quartets; An die ferne Geliebte, Op. 98 (1816), virtually ...
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