What are you listening to?

[fergus]

I really liked this work. It contained lovely music and I liked the scale of it; there are five voices, no chorus and the instrumentation only comprises two violins and basso continuo. It is a lovely live chamber performance but that does not take away from the quality of the work and there was plenty of well earned applause at the end.

[mcq]

To my mind, one of the best CDs released this year is Anna Vinnitskaya's Ravel recital on the Naive label. This music remains some of the most challengingly modern in the literature and, along with Debussy's, is one of the trickiest to master. Beethoven's late piano works are more technically difficult, but Ravel's music provides its own interpretive difficulties - in the case of Gaspard de la Nuit, that of balancing the delicate impressionistic nuances of Ondine and Le Gibet with the dynamic extremes of Scarbo. Gaspard is one of the most forbidding pieces of music for solo piano. It really is an emotional tightrope of light and shade that the pianist is obliged to traverse. My reference versions are by Argerich and Pogorelich (and the latter's adventurous re-interpretation which I was privileged to hear in person at a concert in Dublin a few years back remains forever embedded in my memory - I hope we'll see him back in the studio one day to set down his latest thoughts on this work - certainly the version of Scarbo that I recall from the Dublin recital is the closest anybody has come to Ravel's "caricature of romanticism"). Vinnitskaya's version is one of the finest I've heard in recent years, certainly the equal of Steven Osborne's on Hyperion. Plenty of pianists command the technical resources to deliver this piece by rote, but the shading of tonal colouring, which is so essential to unlocking the emotional resources in Ravel's music, is something that strikes me when listening to Vinnitskaya. Richly rewarding readings of Pavane pour une infante defunte and Miroirs round out a deeply satisfying CD which comes warmly recommended.

[Jose Echenique]

I really liked this work. It contained lovely music and I liked the scale of it; there are five voices, no chorus and the instrumentation only comprises two violins and basso continuo. It is a lovely live chamber performance but that does not take away from the quality of the work and there was plenty of well earned applause at the end.

Alessandro Stradella was an extraordinary character. He was not only one of the finest composers of his time (he may have been the first composer in history to use a "crescendo"), but he was also a hopeless ladies man who got in trouble every other day with jealous husbands. In fact he was murdered by one when he was barely 40 years old. It is said that Purcell cried when he learned of his assassination.
And in his gorgeous oratorio La Susanna we can perfectly understand what the fuzz is about.
So far this is the 4th recording of this work, and by far it´s the best.
I´m very happy you liked it Fergus, and trust me, just as with Caldara´s Maddalena it will grow on you with repetition.

[Jose Echenique]

From the mid 90´s till 2007 the ORF label published every year cds with live recordings taken from the Barocktage Festival in Austria. The artists included you-name-it in Baroque Music: Fabio Biondi and Europa Galante, Jordi Savall and Hesperion XXI, Concerto Italiano and Rinaldo Alessandrini, Andreas Scholl, etc.
It was a fascinating and very useful series, what a pity that the World Crisis finished it.

[fergus]

On vinyl....

[Ciaran]

To my mind, one of the best CDs released this year is Anna Vinnitskaya's Ravel recital on the Naive label. This music remains some of the most challengingly modern in the literature and, along with Debussy's, is one of the trickiest to master. Beethoven's late piano works are more technically difficult, but Ravel's music provides its own interpretive difficulties - in the case of Gaspard de la Nuit, that of balancing the delicate impressionistic nuances of Ondine and Le Gibet with the dynamic extremes of Scarbo. Gaspard is one of the most forbidding pieces of music for solo piano. It really is an emotional tightrope of light and shade that the pianist is obliged to traverse. My reference versions are by Argerich and Pogorelich (and the latter's adventurous re-interpretation which I was privileged to hear in person at a concert in Dublin a few years back remains forever embedded in my memory - I hope we'll see him back in the studio one day to set down his latest thoughts on this work - certainly the version of Scarbo that I recall from the Dublin recital is the closest anybody has come to Ravel's "caricature of romanticism"). Vinnitskaya's version is one of the finest I've heard in recent years, certainly the equal of Steven Osborne's on Hyperion. Plenty of pianists command the technical resources to deliver this piece by rote, but the shading of tonal colouring, which is so essential to unlocking the emotional resources in Ravel's music, is something that strikes me when listening to Vinnitskaya. Richly rewarding readings of Pavane pour une infante defunte and Miroirs round out a deeply satisfying CD which comes warmly recommended.

Interesting: I read a very enthusiastic review by Bryce Morrison in The Gramophone today. Tempting! I like Jean-Efflam Bavouzet, but there's always room for another top-drawer Gaspard.

[Jose Echenique]

The children´s choir make all the difference.

[fergus]

I have not listened to that one, or indeed any of Haydn's Masses, in quite some time....I must rectify that soon!

[fergus]

On vinyl....

[Seán]

I have not listened to that one, or indeed any of Haydn's Masses, in quite some time....I must rectify that soon!

Me too.