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Your guide to classical music online
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Your guide to classical music online
Here are Shostakovich’s two largest, purely instrumental “program” symphonies in a handy two-for-the-price-of-one package. Paavo Berglund’s 1974 recording of the Seventh gains a modicum of
Sasha Rozhdestvensky plays both of the these concertos well, but not quite well enough. The Glazunov, a delightful work that’s high on charm and gloss,
The Quatuor Byron underlines the intimate nature of Shostakovich’s string quartets, which are far more personal than the usually extrovert symphonies. Quartet No. 8’s brooding
Vasily Petrenko’s take on the First Symphony is swift and youthful, as befits this precocious early work. In the first movement he doesn’t wring every
The sound is decent, clean mono, very well remastered in this new edition–and what can you say about the performances? The Britten was composed for
Wow! This is music making on a cosmic scale. You may hear some jaded critic offer up the following generic comment about this release: “These
The first movement and passacaglia of the concerto are simply gorgeous, from Lisa Batiashvili’s dusky but rich timbre to Esa-Pekka Salonen’s crystal-clear accompaniments. The rest
This Shostakovich Fourteenth ideally captures the music’s edgy, mournful, and beatific moods. Bass Piotr Migunov sounds appropriately ghostly in De Profundis, and delightfully rude in
Jamie Walton plays a mean cello, though he sounds more at home in the music’s more virtuosic moments than in its passages of tender lyricism.
Legendary treasures? Not exactly; Horenstein was such an inconsistent conductor. The only reason he matters now is because he had an admirably wide range of
