What are you listening to?

[bombasticDarren]

Schubert - Symphony No.4 Tragic (Marc Minkowski, Les Musiciens du Louvre, Naive)

[fergus]

[fergus]

Schubert - Symphony No.4 Tragic (Marc Minkowski, Les Musiciens du Louvre, Naive)

Minkowski is not a conductor that I would associate with Schubert.

[bombasticDarren]

Schumann - Symphony No.1 Spring (Roy Goodman, The Hanover Band, RCA)

Gosh, I have not listened to that set in years!

Not to your tastes, or you have overdosed on it Fergus?
I have been sceptical of Roy Goodman in symphonic works but this performance of Schumann 1 had made me dust off my old Beethoven and Schubert cycles from the loft (his Haydn, I admit, is uniformally excellent)

[bombasticDarren]

Schubert - Symphony No.4 Tragic (Marc Minkowski, Les Musiciens du Louvre, Naive)

Minkowski is not a conductor that I would associate with Schubert.

My ears are now eagerly associating him with Schubert!

[fergus]

Not to your tastes, or you have overdosed on it Fergus?
I have been sceptical of Roy Goodman in symphonic works but this performance of Schumann 1 had made me dust off my old Beethoven and Schubert cycles from the loft (his Haydn, I admit, is uniformally excellent)

Not at all Darren....it was an early purchase and has just been superseded with more versions and simply got lost in the mists of time or the recesses of my mind!

[fergus]

Schubert - Symphony No.4 Tragic (Marc Minkowski, Les Musiciens du Louvre, Naive)

Minkowski is not a conductor that I would associate with Schubert.

My ears are now eagerly associating him with Schubert!

I have long admired him Darren and this is an interesting development!

[Jose Echenique]

Minkowski like Gardiner and Harnoncourt has wide ranging Catholic tastes. He can go (very successfully) from Charpentier to Offenbach in a second. I thought his Schubert cycle very good. In the first 5 symphonies I still think Brüggen unmatched, but Minkowski´s Ninth is superb, but all in all an excellent Schubert cycle.

[Jose Echenique]

Spanish Art Songs can´t compete with German Lieder or French Mélodies in variety and depth, but they have been blessed with glorious singers like Teresa Berganza, Victoria de los Angeles and going back further, Lucrezia Bori and Conchita Supervia to present them before an international audience. Sadly, Spain seems to have stop producing great singers for over 2 decades now, but Latin America is giving a hand with fine singers like Argentinian mezzo Bernarda Fink. It is true that both her parents are Czech, but since she was born in Buenos Aires her diction is of course perfect.
Falla´s famous 7 Popular Songs have been sung by every great singer imaginable including Jessye Norman, Marilyn Horne and Joyce DiDonato, but inevitably something is missing when not sung by a native speaker. Bernarda Fink´s rendition is not as fiery as Berganza´s or de los Angeles, but her voice is so beautiful and she is so musical that comparisons are almost pointless.
It is great that this time her baritone brother Marcos Fink didn´t join her in the recording, because he almost ruined Bernarda´s previous Argentinian song recital.

[fergus]