Largely overshadowed by the immense popularity of the First Piano Concerto, Tchaikovsky's Second Piano Concerto is no less deserving of attention and enjoyment. Although a completely different beast than the First Concerto, Op. 44 is still filled with the trademark compositional characteristics of most of Tchaikovsky's works, including long, ...
These are fine but by no means first rate performances of Shostakovich's cello concertos by Russian cellist Kyril Rodin accompanied by Konstantin Krimets. Rodin has a strong tone, an accomplished technique, and an assured interpretative profile, but he's not entirely up to the music. In the First Concerto, Rodin can barrel his way through the ...
No one in their right mind would listen to this disc all way through. Shostakovich's Ballet Suites, with their bright colors, bouncy rhythms, and their insanely infectious tunes, have all effervescence, all the evanescence, and all the substance of a soap bubble. A single suite is innocuously entertaining and more than one suite would surely drive ...
The impetus for Akira Ifukube's intensely rhythmic and assertive music -- indeed, the source of inspiration for his career as a composer -- was his first hearing of Stravinsky's Le sacre du printemps. Yet listeners may feel somewhat misled by this frequently cited biographical fact, and find instead that Ifukube's orchestral music sounds more like ...
Known internationally as an operatic composer, Gian Carlo Menotti is less frequently recognized for his numerous orchestral, chamber, and vocal works, which are generously sampled on this 2005 release from ASV. Even though Menotti displays an impressive technical acumen in his Concerto for violin and orchestra in A minor (1952) and elegant form in ...
For a work that appears to be one of the most finely crafted violin concertos of the twentieth century and an easy favorite with audiences, the Miklós Rózsa Violin Concerto has been recorded surprisingly few times. The 1956 recording by Jascha Heifetz, to whom that work was dedicated, dominates the field even though violinists Robert McDuffie and ...
Arte Nova's Russian Futurism, Vol. 4: Mikhail F. Gnesin errs on the same basis that Vol. 2 in this same series, devoted to Alexander Gedike, does; the composer featured does not represent in any way the Russian Futurist movement, nor does his work share anything in common with it. In this case such careless miscategorization might tend to ...
Three out of the four pieces on this all-Shostakovich disc feature the artistry of Dmitry Yablonsky either as a cellist, a conductor, an arranger, or all three -- and one of them has nothing whatsoever to do with Yablonsky. If you think that sounds like an unlikely program, you're right. If you think that sounds like an unbalanced program, you're ...
Bravo. Not some second-rate performance by a little-known banger, but rather a first-rate performance by a little-known artist, this 1996 recording of Mendelssohn's two piano concertos performed by pianist Andrei Pisarev with Samuel Friedmann leading the Russian Philharmonic Orchestra deserves to be heard by anyone who loves the music. Pisarev has ...
For many listeners, violinist Ilya Kaler is likely to be one of the best violinists they've never heard of. Although he has made several successful recordings on the Naxos label, the majority of his career has been spent in other endeavors. Most notably, he has been a gold medal winner in the Tchaikovsky, Sibelius, and Paganini competitions. Kaler ...
The Naxos Japanese Classics release Humiwo Hayasaka: Piano Concerto is one of the most consequential and significant volumes in the Japanese Classics series. This is not to say that the previous volumes devoted to the music of Ifukube, Mayuzumi, or Takemitsu are inferior in quality. From a purely performance-oriented angle, the interpretations by ...
Japanese composer Shiro Fukai belongs to the first generation of Japanese composers to write music with Western ensembles primarily in mind. Like his near contemporary Akira Ifukube, Fukai also composed for films, perhaps most significantly Kenji Mizoguchi's The 47 Ronin. Fukai's early death at age 52 deprives us of witnessing how he might have ...
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