Classical Music for Aficionados

When The Frogman ends a recommendation with an [ ! ] it's a done deal.

Cheers

The best to my hears is the LSO with Solti on Decca .

Solti  made a good 1-9 with the Chicago , but the LSO  is better .

The 5th seems the most loved .There is one by Barbirolli's with New Phil 
as a EMI " Great Recordings of the Century " that is one of the best anything I have heard !

Here is the 6th with Barbirolli , he is even better with 5th IMO .

https://youtu.be/9mXYbHiPRnI

Mahler gets my emotion , Brahms gets my Love .


https://youtu.be/keXPClVJGrc

This is the Symphhonie I love the most .

I believe this one is played as well as is humanly possible .

https://youtu.be/keXPClVJGrc

I have several Mahler 4's, but my favorite is this one:
https://www.amazon.com/Mahler-Symphony-No-Felicity-Lott/dp/B000027KLY
For me, Felicity Lott nails the vocal in the last movement.

Schubert, I agree with you re: Kleiber's Brahms 4th.  A great performance.  Kleiber's Beethoven 5 and 7 are also among the greatest classical recordings.  And there is a live Kleiber Beethoven 4 that is equally great -- the 4th is an under appreciated work of genius, and Kleiber does it justice.

I agree with you gg107 ,Thanks .

Can't argue with that,twoleftears, she is a Queen .

I really love her in Schubert and Elgar as well .Just about in all, really .

In his 90’s and still one of the greatest and most wanted Director
in the world .


https://youtu.be/4da76vqerKA


One of my favorite pieces . https://youtu.be/RBnTT6rkbK4    Done by the wonderful Hamburg Orchestra !

Oh Canada!

Surprisingly candid discussion, coming from them.

Cheers

Canada was a haven for run-away American Slaves and refused to give
them back and refused to allow any in Canada itself .
Some Americans still resent this . Most don’t .


https://youtu.be/Bf3e9Cl1-Bs


A very few resent that  in both  WW1 and WW11 The Canadian Army had the best Battle Record of  all
the Allied  Armies .

Jim, watching the  5  PM  BBC here the Bexit  fun in England is unreal!

Pray it's not that bad in Scotia .

The only good I can see that might come  to the  English  is that yes , your 
Empire IS gone and YES you need others .

Cheers 

The state of this country is an absolute disaster Len.
I see auld Lizzie was up in Edinburgh today for the state opening of parliament, here's hoping she and me shall still be around for the dissolution of the whole sorry mess.

I am listening to Annie Fischer's complete Beethoven piano sonatas (Hungaroton CDs).  If you prefer your Beethoven piano full-bodied and fiery -- as I do -- rather than cool and classically restrained, Fischer has to be a top choice.

Thanks , Jim , sad indeed !

This is a wonderful play of an Elgar Sonata VERY ever seldom 
 heard  in US  by 
one of the best musicians alive ,
A true Jewel !




https://youtu.be/2X96YaspfK0

@schubert  
Yes Len she is a really good fiddler now since her days as a new generation artist at the Beeb. I think I told you before that she was educated in the same town I live in and I used to see her and her mum shopping on a Saturday morning in the High Street. A couple of years ago James McMillan (the composer) opened a music festival in Cumnock his birth place about 10 miles from me and Nichola was there and I heard her play the Bach Chaconne and very impressive it was. It sure was great being about ten feet from a very beautiful Strad.
re. Annie Fisher's Beethoven ,very exciting on a par with Richter, just a pity about recording quality which could be variable.

God vacations in the Adirondacks , his best creation !

https://youtu.be/qa9IBbNMooU

Jim , The Highlands would be like this if they had not been raped .
State of New York ruled the Adirondacks would be Forever Wild ,
over a century ago . A 6 million acre park .

https://youtu.be/YeY4h0lGGeU

I spend much of my youth about 50 miles North in the Park , just a wild and about 50 miles from Montreal as the crow flies. Many Canadians hike here or did before the virus .


Lake George is 40 miles long and 600 feet deep. I once caught a 30 lb Pike . A favorite place of rich Swiss who say it's the most beautiful lake in the world .


https://youtu.be/C3TAXkd39rw

Absolutely stunning Len, I love those colours. 

Thanks , 204 ! ,It looks better in life and there are hundreds of lakes , all
beautiful . They are the most ancient mountains on the Planet , thousands of miles higher than ANY
others on the world at present .

There is a hiking trail of 125 miles cut in a 45 % manner south to north , I have hiked it over 50 times ,
My doc says she has never seen such rock-hard legs in a man my age in her 30 years on the job .

I didn't tell her the Adirondacks are , according to many American Native tribes , the power center of the earth .

https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/how-the-culture-wars-are-killing-western-classical-music

Ironically, I just read this article prior to you sending it!
Pretty sad.

That’s all true and very well written .

In late 50’s I knew something called "rock" would destroy the Big-Bands
and the Chopin I loved to listen to.

I did not mind saying so !

You have to be a complete fool  to say  " art for arts sake " .

I'm currently being bowled over by an Idagio stream of Mozart's Symphony #40. Played by the Ensemble Rezonanz. Conducted by Riccardo Minasi. Far from polite, it's a compelling, full-on romantic fireball rendition we might have heard in the days of Beethoven or Mendelssohn. Sound quality is just as excellent. 

Twoleftears, thank you for linking to the Spectator piece by Pace.  

While it's an overstatement to say that "the culture wars are killing Western classical music," as the Spectator article's heading proclaims, that's not really what this opinion piece says.  The thesis is that the culture wars are endangering academic musicology, and that will have harmful effects on Western music itself.

The Spectator piece is interesting and insightful.  But even the actual thesis of the piece is somewhat overstated.  Western classical music will likely survive even if academic musicology is further marginalized.  

Classical music survives because it's played, and listened to attentively, not because it is written about in journals.  

The greatest composers wrote music that expresses, more profoundly than any other art can, what it means to be a human being.  And now, though mass media and the Internet, the music is accessibly to vast numbers of people like never before in history.  They can find it, hear it, and have it change their lives.

First-rate composers still can flourish, and produce first-rate music in the Western classical tradition.  Think of Philip Glass, John Adams, and Thomas Ades.

There are reasons to not be so pessimistic about the future of Western classical music.  

gg107,

HEAR HEAR!

I think Western Classical music is falling in on itself and being dumbed down day by day. Every time I hear New Music I despair, Discordant, single lines with no harmony attached, written from a keyboard attached to a computer and then it goes through the Sibelius program to sort out themes and harmony then. The whole thing is bereft of any soul and then has to be played by orchestras who hate every note but who won't get funding if they don't play it.
I happen to go to RSNO concerts and some of the BBC Orchestras in Glasgow and they always have to play this garbage at the start of these concerts. When they are finished and the orchestra stands to accept the applause !!  there is a mass invasion of people coming to take their seats much to the amusement of the orchestra. I may upset some people now so if you are easily offended please don't read any further.
The BBC now have an unwritten law that new music gets played more frequently written by women and black people and all the better if it's both. I have never heard so much drivel in all my life , a lot of these people write computer games music. It shows how clever they are if they can get Sibelius to write it the more enharmonically the better.
After it gets an airing on the BBC then an ex BBC newsreader expounds it on air saying how virtuosic and clever it was, clowns wouldn't know good music if it jumped up and bit them on the backside.
I really am depressed about the state of classical music these days. I am glad I am the age I am as I won't have to see the eventual disintegration of it. Jim. 

I live in a large city with two world-class orchestras and thousands
of music students , well worth hearing .
And several superb halls .

With the concerts of the students , which I love, audience is other students, family and about ten old people like myself .

In the two world-class the audience is 90% over 70 .
Now with 4 million people you can pack the 1,500 hall and 2,500 hall
but 10 years from now , you guess .

I must say that the Saint Paul CO and the Minnesota Orchestra play
only the best . SPCO is a good a Mozart band as any .
The Minnesota IS the best Sibelius in the world .
Of course they have the best Finnish conductor in the world .

One thing will still be here , as this is the ground zero for Choral Music.
As it is also ground zero for the Lutheran brand of Christianity , count on it .

Len I am sorry to say it is a very different matter over in Scotland.We have very good conductors like Dausgard and Sondergard but they are held to task by rules from left wing gits with not one ounce of musical sense to them.
Jim.

As those who run the UK  live in about 1810 .................

To Jim and anyone else awake.

This is the most remarkable thing in Music I have ever seen and that
on one of the hardest instruments .

Unreal !                                      https://youtu.be/w3frQW6zLE4         

I just discovered on Qobuz a recent release of a monumental performance of Verdi’s Requiem conducted by Ricardo Muti, with Jesse Norman and Jose Carreras among the soloists.

Muti is a wonderful musician.  I heard him twice in recent years live at Carnegie Hall with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, and both concerts were remarkable.  On record, his Prokofiev is especially terrific.  

I just discovered this on youtube...

Ervin Nyiregyházi is one of my piano god....I dont have many....

He says " i dont mind really about the notes because what matters really is not there"...

Not the usual humility of an interpret to a composer... 😁😊

But the master of Ervin Nyiregyházi, Liszt, would have understood very well himself this iconoclastic way of playing....Our pianist is made of the same cloth that these notoriously "possessed" artists, Listz, Paganini or Scriabin....

I never listen to a more beautiful rendition of Liszt.....It is a heartfelt telluric playing where sophistication is only a memory not the center of the day....

With him we hear how a melody could be a spoken language....

Music dont accompany the written song here, music IS the original spoken word itself out of any language......

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D2_X8Mgk-jA

@Schubert      Yes Len that was a lovely rendition by that young man. your comment on one of the hardest instruments reminds me of a comment the French Horn virtuoso Denis Brain once made. He said that playing the horn was like driving a truck down a frosty hill with no brakes !!!

My definition of good-natured.  Not all pianists qualify.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VBbRTRBY4D4

Well at least she was good humoured about , I bet the piano tuner got it in the neck though !!

Absolute genius — “The Last Three String Quartets”  by Haydn
with the Prazak Quartet.  On Qobuz

The Prazak with one of the best of Modern Times.

https://youtu.be/s9YhxA6p2cY


And the Melos  with his second .


https://youtu.be/A5RPvs9DugI

Yes I also love the Prazak Quartet in the Haydn Quartets. Wonderful interpretations and a salutary lesson in how a recording should be made. I think it is one of the cleanest recordings I have listened to in a long while.

Just listening to Daniil Triffonov's new Bach recording on Qobuz , my his fingers can fly. It's very impressive and thought provoking, but doesn't plumb the depths if you know what i mean . That said it's very enjoyable.

Perhaps you might like this 204, she about blew me off my chair !

Sol Gabetta, in the last part of the Saint-Saens Cello # 2 , both it and her
seem little known in US .

This little outing won her the Opus Klassic ,the leading award in Germany for Classical Music .
Hard to believe a rather slim women can play like a powerhouse !

https://youtu.be/6lomOwF-LFs

Well , she can do his totally different 1st as well.

https://youtu.be/gdk7ELY68Ec?t=2


And make known the Greatness of Haydn on his 1st Cello Concerto .

https://youtu.be/gdk7ELY68Ec?t=2

Whoops ! got 2 Saint-saens 1st.

This is the Haydn Concerto in C , one of my fave’s period.
Sol does improvise , in her case check the cadenza.
She surely is a Great Artist !

https://youtu.be/g99hqqNFvg0?t=5

I’m not sure, but from that church and her name , I’d say she is from the large Italian group in the Argentine

@schubert        Hi Len, I've just this minute logged on and found your posts. I promise to check tomorrow and get back  to you as it's nearly time for bed over here . I love the Haydn C Major concerto, one of the nicest ever written and for me definitely up there with the Dvorak so I'm going to look forward to that. At the moment I am winding down with Arrau playing Schumann's Etude Symphoniques and enjoying every minute of it ( always an under current and darkness in Schumann ).
Oidhche mhath  Jim.