Major Discoveries: Paul Paray’s Stunning Joan of Arc Mass
Paul Paray was not a conductor who happened to compose, but a real composer in the late, great French Romantic tradition. His Mass for the 500th Anniversary of the Death of Joan of Arc is a glorious piece of writing. Why it has re...
PAUL PARAY CONDUCTS FRENCH ORCHESTRAL MUSIC
Audiophiles and orchestral enthusiasts alike have long cherished Paul Paray's late-'50s/early-'60s Mercury Living Presence recordings with the Detroit Symphony devoted to French showpieces. Here, five previously available mid-pric...
Paray’s Rare, Worthwhile Piano Works
Because of his renown as a conductor, Paul Paray’s compositions are all but unknown, a situation that Grotto Productions has been putting right with a series of CDs surveying Paray’s creative output. This two-disc set comprise...
Dvorak/Sibelius: Symphonies Nos. 9 & 2/Paray
They don't make 'em like this anymore. No musical tradition has suffered a greater decline than the French, and no conductor represented the French school more tellingly than Paul Paray. These are wonderful performances: fleet, un...
Paray: Orch Works
This series of recordings of the works of Paul Paray represents a loving tribute from Detroit, his American base of operations. I'm not sure what exactly the Assumption Grotto Orchestra is (no doubt one of you will tell me), but t...
Chabrier & Roussel: Orchestral works/Paray SACD
Audiophile enhancements notwithstanding, the chief reason to acquire this disc always has been Paul Paray's vibrant and exciting renditions of these delightful works, performed with power, precision, and panache by the Detroit Sym...
Ravel: Piano concertos, etc./Haas/Paray
Here's a disc that never should have gone out of print. Monique Haas was a famous name in the 1950s and '60s, and the booklet notes offer a delightful picture of the provincial musical backwater that was Germany when it came to th...
Paray Schumann
Paul Paray's Schumann performances are exactly what you would expect, coming from this source. They're bright, clear, peppy, neat, and elegant, without a trace of German heaviness. Paray makes an excellent case for Schumann's orig...
Book Review: Furtwängler’s Writings–The Intellectual Biography of a Second-Rater
Roger Allen. Wilhelm Furtwängler: Art and the Politics of the Unpolitical. The Boydell Press, Woodbridge, 2018 (286pp). Just how smart was Wilhelm Furtwängler? That he was musically gifted there can ...
CD From Hell: Pfitzner’s Oleaginous Beethoven 1 & 6
Hans Pfitzner's Beethoven Symphony recordings, to put it charitably, are not among the 78 era's great milestones. When the curmudgeonly composer/conductor set down Beethoven's Sixth with the Berlin State Opera Orchestra in 1930, a...
