Classical Music for Aficionados

@Schubert  Aye and conducted by Gunter Wand.

https://youtu.be/ABGW92k2zU4?t=2 The National Anthem

Here’s a song that deserves to be sung in every civilized land .
It’s sung by a American iconic patriot artist who sang at President Trump’s Swearing -In, as one would expect .

Less than two weeks ago a nut slew 24 innocents randomly in Nova Scotia , such does not happen in Canada , unlike the USA .
For fifty years US government has refused to ban military weapons designed to solely to kill human beings, though a majority of the nation
would have it so , after children have been the dead in school time after time .

In Canada it took FIVE -days to ban all such weapons in Canada !!Period .



https://youtu.be/fkw6ASOuQVs?t=1


There is no better country !

Jim . there is also a great old 9th with Joseph Krips. Best thing he ever did. .

To me the best LP I have ever heard .


https://youtu.be/Vi85_BDRFXo?t=10

Volodos on Idagio with Schuberts Piano Sonata in A Major. D. 959.
Pretty  wonderful.

What virus ?
Nobody in the world can touch these ladies , or even come close .

https://youtu.be/UsDtmdWFBxU?t=5
Thanks for Volodos  on the D. 959 rv .  Truly wonderful  !

@schubert     Len thanks for that link to the Schubert , it was a lovely interpretation.

@rvpiano  .  I also have listened to D.959 and think it is a truly wonderful

performance. I think Volodos is a wonderful player and a real favourite of mine.

If I might give a little recommendation of my own while I am typing at the moment I am listening to Natalie Clien playing the two Haydn cello concertos. I must say they are delightful and done on period instruments which always gives me a little nervousness with anyone playing on gut.
I can say the orchestral sound is superb , it has a beautiful fullness and no screeches anywhere ( can't say that for the rest of them ) Do try it as it is featuring on Idagio at the moment. 

Oh yes jim !   That was played yesterday on my local public FM aka "Classical  Minnesota "  . Every time I hear Haydn I am reminded how great he was/is .Takes a backseat to none .
It was the stations spring fund raiser ( current regime is doing its best to kill it)  , and managed to get over 600,000 $$ in 3 days to fight back .

Len you are so right about Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven learned a lot of their craft from him. And that tripe about Beethoven having learned nothing from him is pure rubbish, you don't devote a complete set of string quartets to a person you said taught you nothing. Even Mozart devoted a set of string quartets to him also. I'll probably be branded a heretic for what I'm about to say but I'd rather listen to Haydn Symphonies than Mozart's .  

Dinna fash yersel laddy , yer nae the first  that said that.
To me its either six  or a half-dozen .
Here's one we all  believe. This one of the finest souls ever born in Scotia .
Video is not the best, but I chose this one because the Hall is nae 5 miles
from where I sit  right now .
https://youtu.be/3UrzYCG0_-M?t=2

Hear, Hear  for Haydn!A friend of mine who’s otherwise pretty knowledgeable, is an  ignoramus when it comes to this composer, as are many music lovers. Although I take a backseat to no one in my love for Mozart, in general, I prefer Haydn’s symphonies.  There are a few exceptions of course,  but Haydn wrote so many great ones.  He was always a master tinkerer, with a wonderful sense of humor.  Even the early symphonies are creations of genius and invention.I can always find something to love in ANY of Haydn’s 104 symphonies.

Had to get a second hanky jim .

Hears the voice of Scots at home and over the world over at it’s best !
https://youtu.be/xDXnu_hb_d0?t=1

https://youtu.be/KZqNGfni8TA?t=3
.

https://youtu.be/c7RGcdsM4Vk?t=2

A young lass singing my favorite Burns .

You got that right rv. !

I always steer people to the 6,7 ,8 masterpieces whether they have listened to Classical fifty years or fifty minutes !
As a religious person I have always thought the cherry on the top for
Hayden was/is his piety . His church music is better than Mozart’s
and IMO right up there with Bach's Passions , at least for a believer .

@rvpiano, The Rachmaninoff Symphonic Dances are also one of my favorite symphonic pieces! Thanks for all the recommendations earlier in this thread: Dallas-Johanos / Minnesota-Oue / Concertgebouw-Ashkenazy / Concertgebouw-Jansons.

I wanted to add the Gardiner / NDR Sinfonieorchester recording to the list... to my ears, it's unmatched in suspense, scale and space. The Dallas/Johanos recording sounds comparably sterile and too measured for my taste, and far less expressive. What are your impressions?

apm18,

I agree with you that the Johanos recording is very dry and somewhat sterile.  I must admit that I recommended it on the basis of this being an audiophile site. That particular disc has really excellent sonics.  Performance-wise there are many better versions. In general, I like Ashkenazy’s way with Rachmaninoff.

A lifetime project of mine, consciously started as a teenager, is baring fruits now in my advanced years.  I determined quite early that Mozart’s piano concertos were too precious to spoil by listenIng to them too often.  Hence, throughout my life I’ve listened to them sparingly, so as to discover new sweetnesses every time. I’m happy to say that it’s worked.  I still thrill to each concerto I hear!

A recording on Idagio inspired the above post:
Alexander Schimpf with the Bayerische Kammerphilharmonie.
Although it’s a version without winds (Mozart’s original draft,) the genius of invention still shines through.

The works are the 11th and 12th Piano Concertos.

To my hears the greatest rendering of "Symphonic Dances "Is on DG 477 9505 with the Russian National Orch
with Pletnev, It’s in a 4 CD of all his Symphonies which are Russian to the
core , ending of the Dances is an explosion !
A simple one CD is Ashkenazy with the great acoustics of the Amsterdam Concertgebouw .


IMO Rachmaninov’s greatest work is his Vespers Op 37.
A fantastic recording is HM Chant du Monde RUS 788050 St.Petersburg Capella , Chernuchenko
The perfection of the ensemble and blend of the sheer beauty of tone is beyond words .
There are many , many Russian choral works but in Russia itself THIS is considered the greatest of them all !

Schubert,

Yes,  I believe the two greatest Rachmaninoff conductors today are Pletnev and Ashkenazy, both extraordinary pianists as well. (Although Ashkenazy just retired.)

Rachmaninoff's Vespers - FWIW

Re music recommendations vs audiophile recommendations, to paraphrase rvpiano, one must be aware of your audience's priorities when making recommendations. Fortunately, in this case it really is a win/win proposition.

Schubert recently made a recommendation for Vesper's, more correctly known as All-Night Vigil, but called both, and it is hard to find fault with his recommendation. The music in this recording is simply magnificent. The opening with the basses just grabs you and on you go. If it's the only version you have, great. Very Russian I think. I wouldn't be without it!

However, for folks who are audiophiles, such as we have in this forum, there are other recordings which present a valid alternative,  performance wise as well as recording quality. 
The one I have in mind is All-Night Vigil by the Estonian Philharmonic Chamber Choir led by Paul Hiller (Harmonia  Mundi 907384). Apart from the differences in performance, which I will pass on discussing here as those differences are, as always, a matter of personal preference, the acoustic and presentation of the voices, for both the choir members and soloists, has much greater clarity and the recording has a greater sense of transparency and openness. 

Personally I could be happy with either!  

I just rediscovered a wonderful version of the Symphonic Dances by an old colleague of Rachmaninoff’s: Eugene Ormandy with the Philadelphia Orchestra.Really outstanding performance.  Maybe my current favorite version.
On my system, the sonics are much better on this cheapo Sony Essential Classics label than on the super highly touted Reference Recording label with the Minnesota Orchestra. 

 Pardon me while I digress into audiophilia. I don’t know how others feel, but I, for one, have never liked the sound of Reference Recordings, no matter how good my system gets.
i find the sound perspective distant and Ill defined. The opposite of Mercury Living Presence, which may to some be a little too close up, but which I greatly prefer.
Please forgive my rant!

I listen to Classical Music because it lifts up my heart and soul in a way that nothing else does . I have ZERO doubt if I had not just
stumbled into it, I would be a FAR worst person than the sinner I am still.


It is what it is , the Greatest Achievement of Western Civilization .I know it , I say it and will till the day I die !Educated and not so educated folks in every corner of the world also know this , try and get a Symphonic ticket in Tokyo .



Of course good sound is nice but is secondary at the end of the day unless you vomit .
I’ve heard of the Ormandy, I shall look again .




P.S . the opinion of a first class musician is scarcely a rant .

I think this question has came up many times in the past here but I think there is still time to give it an airing so here goes . Do any of you ever dismiss a recording because the recording quality is dire.

I am ashamed to say that I have done in the past and am still doing, case in point is Claudio Arrau's very early stuff say 30s and 40s. I have some of his records which I have put away because the sonics are horrible. One of the ones being a case in point is his 1944 Bach Goldberg Variations which when looked upon subjectively is an interpretation which is most definitely as good as the Glen Gould 1955 one. For a start Arrau's rubato's are not as extreme as Gould's but Arrau is every bit as good a technician as Gould himself and in fact Gould seems to play this version as if he was playing Chopin's etudes ( a bit extreme but I hope you get my drift  ). It is not just the  monotonous hiss and crackles, and that just gets worse the farther back you go but to me I just cannot countenance any of the bad frequency hills and troughs. The recording quality pre war was not great to put it mildly but it did favour some frequencies far more than others and that is why say you are valiantly listening to some of Beethoven's piano sonatas and every time the pianist  hits an F sharp the volume of the piano explodes in your ear with a very significant rise in volume and a very distorted sound also. As I have been talking about Arrau I used to have a copy of the Phillip's series Great pianists of the Twentieth Century, they had what they said was probably Arrau's earliest
recording Balakirev's Islamay. Now through this what I can only say sounds like a continuous blast of white noise and very low level audio I can just discern what I think sounds like a piano being hammered is this torrent of notes. Now this was in 1928 and it was indeed very primitive recording quality. Earlier in the acoustic recording era we had Ferruccio Busoni who went to but down some acetates and he played one or two of his most famous Bach transcriptions and the recording engineer came  out and then asked him to play this note harder than the rest and here are a couple of notes you need to play softer. He did try but gave up in disgust. As one of his friends said of that day "how can you record Busoni , it's like bottling an ocean ). 

newbee . I’l look for the Estonian , a very musical tongue in all they do.Say hello to Avro Part for me .

Though I almost always go to Russians on Russian Music  .

jim, IMHO there is nothing wrong with how you feel about poorly recorded music. I have many, well at least quite a few, records which I bought solely because of the quality of the performance despite the poor quality of the recording. I wanted to be informed. I listened and my curiosity was satisfied. I put them away and rarely have a desire to hear them again. Quite a few of these were old 'live' performances. Richter's Mussorgorsky's Pictures is a clear example. Sonics are terrible but you are unlikely to hear a more exciting performance. 

RV, Ormandy was my intro to Symphonic dances. I still prefer your previous  recommendation of Ashkenazy's.

 FWIW I agree with you about RR recordings, and I feel much the same way about Telarc recordings but for different reasons. I have more that I don't listen to than I do. That said I'm a sucker for RR's Copland Symphony #3. Also some of the earlier RR's are quite good as well. I've always enjoyed Keith Clarks recordings with the Pacific Symphony of the Menotti and Barber VC's and Copland's Appalachian Spring in its original 13 instrument version and which includes Eight Poems of Emily Dickinson sung by Marni Nixon, and a rarely heard Ourdoor Overture. The Telarc recording of Barbers Symphony #1 which includes Higdon's Blue Cathedral and Theofanidis' Rainbow Body is another disc I really enjoy for the music, especially the two modern pieces.

Babies and bathwater......:-)

Everything from Barber is a must ! As is the Great American novel
"A Death in the Family"  by James Agee  from which this poem comes .

https://youtu.be/RF05F0Sc4dw?t=4

Stumbled upon a stunning Barber Knoxville 1915 done with British Chamber Orch. without baton no less , Won’t get better than these great musicians ! Literally took my breath away . A masterpiece in all its glory .

https://youtu.be/PQzaFJZ8CuE?t=3

Newbee,

Reference Recordings LP’s are fantastically good.  I’ve just never had much luck in finding good sounding CDs, even though my player automatically reads their HDCD encoded discs.  I’ll have to try your examples of good ones.  I’ve noticed that lately their philosophy has changed: not such a distant, undefined presentation.  Even so, not state of the art as far as I’m concerned.
btw, You might want to re-listen to the Ormandy “Symphonic Dances” Especially if your set has improved over the years.  It was a revelation for me.

The particular disc of the “Dances” with great sound  that I’m listening to is a Sony Essential Classics with music also by Smetana and Offenbach.

Thanks for the reference. I haven't heard Ormandy's version in quite a few years - I disassembled my vinyl system and gifted it all, records included, to my son in law. Now I have only CD's and this is not one of them.

New on Idagio:  “Volodos Plays Brahms,” a disc from 2017.
I’d be interested in opinions of his Brahms interpretations.

Although Volodos may be my favorite among pianists performing today, i really don’t like his way with Brahms as represented in this album.  He plays in a hushed, sort of reverential manner, eviscerating the bones of the music.  It almost sounds impressionistic.  Brahms’ inherent counterpoint is somehow lost.  While this is not the heaven storming music of his youth,  Brahms is emasculated in this manner.
Volodos’ tone is sumptuous, and the playing is immaculate.  The recorded piano sound is really gorgeous. But, in my opinion these performances miss the mark by a wide margin.

My mind can’t get past Ivan Moravec .


And the older my mind gets the more it loves Brahms .

So does mine!

Here are the missing parts ,the intellect and study to know where the master was going and the heart, soul, and humility to travel that path .

https://youtu.be/wNV5I1Polws?t=1

Perfect !

 

Too bad Moravec didn't record more music for the solo piano. I have his Brahms Intermezzo Op117, #2 and OP118 , #2. This recording (Vaia 1096) was my introduction to Brahms solo piano music. Tough to follow up on this. Fortunately for other pianists, unfortunately for us, he didn't record a lot more.

FWIW I have two words for Volodos recording, somewhat dark and  broad (sumptuous?), and flaccid. I agree with your thoughts ---

I took a few minutes this morning and listened to the Intermezzo OP118 by Plowright, Kubalek (a long time favorite -  performances not damaged by the recording) and Lupu. I find  Plowright's Brahms the opposite of  Volodos'. He has 4 volumes of Brahms piano music and I wouldn't be without them. Not sleepy time performances. :-)

If you want great Brahms might I suggest Julius Katchen.

I can’t argue with you Jim, or newbee either .
I listened to Katchen and Lupu and they and Moravec all sound similar to me.But then, piano is not really my wheelhouse .
Just something about Moravec I like a tad better. I see Brahms when he plays ,

Perhaps it’s because I love the piano music of Leos Janacek as well , where he excels .

Len you talking about Janacek there brought me to mind of a disc I had ages ago and it was of all people Andras Schiff playing On an Overgrown Path and In The mists . I don't know what happened to it but I did really enjoy his playing of them.

Check this Lad ,
I am a BIG fan of Janacek !
https://youtu.be/jdy1FS3ql-s?t=2

https://youtu.be/Fan00iCNC80?t=3
Schiff is great but IMO Moravec is better in Mists .
Firkunsky was my go-to for a long time on Overgrown .

https://youtu.be/AOHRabxpg1Y?t=16
The full 44 m of Overgrown by Firkusny .

Firkusny was a student of Janacek  and he really "gets"  him .

Haydn to the Rescue !
https://youtu.be/q5_vTv0ucq4?t=3

London CS 6533.  Sonata for Two Pianos and Variations for Two Pianos on a Theme of Beethoven.  Bracha Eden and Alexander Tamir.
This is a must for piano enthusiasts as it was performed on a Pleyel double piano.  This very rare instrument was actually two grand pianos in one case with one reflective lid.  The remarkable thing is how well articulated the recording is.  You can tell just which performer is playing just what notes.  And of course the piano(s) match in sound exactly.

@schubert      Len thanks to you I have been listening to Firkusni all afternoon , Idagio has quite a treasure trove of his recordings. I really liked On an Overgrown Path so thanks for reminding me about him. Have a good weekend.