At the end of the nineteenth century, nearly every theater company in Europe apparently felt compelled to put on a performance of Maurice Maeterlinck's symbolist drama Pelléas et Mélisande. Those that could afford it would hire a composer to write incidental music for it. In Finland there was a production of Pelléas, and, naturally, Jean Sibelius ...
Finding a good recording of either Shostakovich's Symphony No. 5 or his Symphony No. 10 is certainly no difficulty. Indeed, the market is saturated with recordings of every type imaginable, including the crass and gritty Soviet recordings of yesteryear; Bernstein's Fifth, which gives excess new meaning; and Herbert von Karajan's classic account of ...
This is old-fashioned, hot-blooded Wagner, with plenty of passion, lots of power, and, best of all, flowing tempos. One might have thought that the only way to get such performances these days one would have to pull out aging Furtwängler recordings, but in fact these performances are by Mark Elder with Manchester's Hallé orchestra. And though the ...
After their opulent and virtuosic Elgar, opulent and virtuosic Strauss should come as no surprise from Mark Elder and the Hallé. But even measured against their Elgar, Elder, and the Hallé's Strauss is sumptuous and opulent. From the glittering brilliance of the opening Don Juan through the sensuality of the central seven orchestral lieder to the ...
This isn't the time or place to discuss the merits of transcribing piano pieces for orchestra. Suffice it to say that some work -- Ravel's Mussorgsky's Pictures -- and some don't -- Glazunov's Schumann's Carnaval. In this recording of 12 of Debussy's Preludes orchestrated by Colin Matthews, it doesn't work. Although Matthews is clearly trying his ...
In 2007, EMI finally resolved the decades-old debate among collectors as to which is the better recording of Elgar's oratorio The Dream of Gerontius -- John Barbirolli's with the Hallé Orchestra from 1964 or Adrian Boult's with the New Philharmonia from 1975. It did this by releasing Barbirolli's Gerontius coupled with Boult's 1966 recording of ...
For a while in the '60s, it looked like Danish fin de siècle symphonist Carl Nielsen was going to hit it as big as his Austrian contemporary Gustav Mahler. His six symphonies got a fair number of recordings by such international conductors as Bernstein, Ormandy, Horenstein, Previn, and Barbirolli and received a fair number of positive reviews ...
Maybe you have to be English to fully appreciate this disc. One learns from the booklet that the opening of Vaughan Williams' Norfolk Rhapsody No. 1 "evokes the sense of sky and space one feels in East Anglia." What details would have to be changed so that it would be evocative of, say, Bishops Itchington? Yet this disc, performed and issued by ...
With the widespread popularity of stereophonic sound by 1957, it is perplexing that this 1966 recording of Brahms' second piano concerto would be made in monaural sound. Still more puzzling is why more was not done during remastering to brighten the sound. The result is an overall unsatisfactory sound quality wherein only the instrument that ...
Another winner from the Hallé -- Manchester Hallé Orchestra from their founding in 1858 by conductor Charles Hallé until dropping the surname at the end of the last century. This 2008 disc called English Rhapsody features works by George Butterworth and Frederick Delius: the former's A Shropshire Lad -- Rhapsody for Orchestra, Two English Idylls, ...
With the profusion of excellent all-digital recordings of Anton Bruckner's Symphony No. 7 in E major, probably the most popular of all his works, one might regard this 1967 recording by John Barbirolli and the Hallé Orchestra as suitable only for music historians and dedicated collectors. Certainly, the excessively hissy analog sound, the narrow ...
Since the work's premiere by the Cambridge University Greek Club in 1909, there have been exactly two complete performances of Vaughan Williams' incidental music in context for Aristophanes' The Wasps: a radio broadcast in 1972 and this performance also taken from a radio broadcast in 2005. One can readily understand why. The score is, relatively ...
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