Classical Recordings Pg. 3

This is a reissue of a DVD first released by Arthaus Kultur in 2003. It was not reviewed in Fanfare at the time. Rinaldo was completed...

The Vienna based Artis Quartet (not to be confused with the Berlin based Artemis Quartet) was founded in 1980 and has quite a few fine recordings...

Right off the bat we have what is either a simple mislabeling of one of Haydn’s symphonies or an honest-to-goodness difference in reckoning. Oehms’s jewel-case back...

This is not an actual performance of La fille mal gardée but a film version made for the BBC between September 7 and 9 of 1962....

The Amar String Quartet playing Hindemith: What memories that association evokes! The original Amar Quartet was founded by Paul Hindemith (as its violist) in 1922 and...

Joel Hoffman (b. 1953) is a composer who has always cultivated a voice rich in expression and a more traditional romantic impulse. This doesn’t mean that...

The music of Vagn Holmboe (1909-1996), in addition to these chamber works (of which this is Vol. 2), extends to more than 370 pieces including 13...

Antony Hopkins is well known in the United Kingdom as a broadcaster and author (particularly on Auntie, otherwise known as the BBC). His music is finely...

The spoken introduction to the one live performance ( The Prayer of St. Gregory ) certainly sets the scene for this event. Even for the non-Russian...

The fascination of this program reveals itself only upon close inspection. Ten works based on pre-existing compositions are heard in juxtaposition with the originals. While Heinrich...

Violinist Hideko Udagawa’s program of Russian works begins with Aram Khachaturian’s Concerto-Rhapsody , written for and associated with violinist Leonid Kogan rather than violinist David Oistrakh....

If you were around during the late 1940s you almost had to be aware of the Sabre Dance from Khachaturian’s ballet, Gayne (as it was spelled...

The first album in this series was reviewed by J. F. Weber just this past year (MEW 1158; Fanfare 35:6). Unusually, it focused on Lassus’s age...

This excellent release features the enterprising and adventurous conductor Carmen-Helena Téllez and the Indiana University Contemporary Vocal Ensemble. Téllez directed this wonderful group from 1992 to...

Leclair’s op. 7 collection of violin concertos, published in 1737, wasn’t the first by a French composer, but it was the first to draw great praise....

Peter van Heyghen, Les Muffatii’s director, remarks in his notes that the concertos making up Jean-Marie Leclair’s op. 7 represent a culmination of Leclair’s second period,...

One of the truly great pleasures of reviewing—albeit a rare one—is to discover performers one did not previously know, then keep their names in mind as...

What is it about Liszt that seems to continually fascinate pianists? Is it the technical bravura inherent in some of his works—those flashy moments intended to...

Here is a program of unapologetically exhibitionist works for solo piano, performed by an artist who has absolutely no reason to be apologetic for his virtuosic...

Rufus Choi, a spectacular Korean-American pianist and Juilliard product, hits the ground running in this recital with an explosive performance of the Mephisto Waltz . There...

Historians of musical performance, at least those inclined to cultivating a popular following, are fond of conjuring so-called “golden ages.” Personally, I love historical recordings, and...

A first hearing of these discs raises a thorny question. In every respect, this music—unquestionably beautiful and mostly restful, peaceful, nostalgic, misty, wistful, and sentimental in...

The fourth volume in Chandos’s Lutosławski series contains one accepted masterpiece, a fascinating transitional work, one early work, and one arrangement by the composer of a...

This is the first of Fabio Luisi’s ongoing Mahler cycle that I’ve encountered, and we are in at the deep end with the deceptive simplicity and...

Not much need be said about this Mahler Eighth. The cycle with Markus Stenz and the Cologne Gürzenich Orchestra has reached about the halfway mark, with...

This disc presenting the complete piano trio music of Bohuslav Martinů was somewhat disappointing to me, but not because of the performance quality: that much was...

Bohuslav Martinů’s works for piano trio are fairly well represented on disc. In fact, a Praga release featuring the Kinsky Trio in a program exactly duplicating...

This collection brings together four works for string trio composed in Paris by one Frenchman (Jean Françaix) and two immigrants: Bohuslav Martinů from Czechoslovakia and Georges...

One of the most frustrating things about this release, and one which I find inexcusable, is that nowhere in the liner notes does it ever say...

I may be one of the few Fanfare reviewers who is a huge fan of the music of Étienne-Nicolas Méhul (1763-1817), one of the pivotal composers...

To put this Finnish composer in historical context, Erkki Melartin was born 10 years after Sibelius, and his life span, 1875 to 1937, was, to the...

As a rule, if I receive a reissued version of a recording previously reviewed in Fanfare , I do not bother to submit a review of...

In a review of Mendelssohn’s Songs without Words performed by Roberte Mamou (34:3), I mentioned offhandedly that there exist by Mendelssohn a number of pieces that...

Forgive me if I sound like a broken record, but I never tire of saying that we are blessed to be living in a golden age...

This utterly fascinating music represents an odd entry in the catalog of works by Mendelssohn. Commissioned by the English music publisher Coventry & Hollier, these op....

The problem with this disc is neither the music nor the performer but the instrument used. Listening carefully to this recording—some of the pieces more than...

This excellent and highly imaginative film on the great composer begins with a somewhat contentious claim, that even as recently as the 1970s Mendelssohn was undervalued...

Soprano Rhona McKail and tenor Nicky Spence join violinist Kaori Yamada and pianist Sholto Kynoch for Olivier Messiaen’s setting of his own text, La Mort du...

This appears to be the third CD of Krzysztof Meyer’s string quartets issued by Naxos, the other two being quartets five, six, and eight (Naxos 8.570776)...

Apart from those specializing in the music of the Iberian peninsula, few others will have heard of Tomás Milans i Godayol (1672-1742), a composer who was...

It’s almost a decade since American composer Paul Moravec won the Pulitzer Prize, and throughout the intervening years a fair number of recordings of his music...

I’ve admired the music of Paul Moravec (b. 1957) for many years, though I have mostly known it through his chamber music (such as his

The number of all-Mouton discs currently available has doubled almost overnight. The only full discs of Mouton’s music that were available last year were Graham Walker’s...

This disc presents rarely performed works by Leopold Mozart, composed probably in part for amateurs. The keyboard sonatas (for that is really how one ought to...

The more I listen to fine performances of Mozart’s concertos and symphonies on period instruments, the less tolerant I am of hearing these works on modern...

It was either Mozart or Beethoven who wrote in a letter that, when hearing a few new fortepianos, he felt they sounded more like harps than...

No one could accuse Aldo Ciccolini, on the strength of this record, of being wishy-washy or thinking like the herd when it comes to Mozart or...

One might say by way of criticism that Mami Shikimori plays Mozart a bit in the style of Brahms, and Brahms a bit in the style...

I have listed “Mozart Cello Sonatas” in the headnote as it appears on the cover of this CD, but of course, these are three of Mozart’s...

Massimilliano Ferrati’s performance of the A Minor sonata (K 310) raises the level of this Mozart recital from being merely very good to outstanding. Then again,...