Tír Na HiFi

Three Schubert Symphonies, Nos. 3, 5 & 6 under Beecham....





Schubert benefits from Tommy's swagger!

fergus wrote:

Jose Echenique wrote:

fergus wrote:

I thought that I had some of Mondonville's music in my collection but unfortunately I do not. Perhaps William Christie's "luxury treatment from Les Arts Florissants" (a very apt description for any Christie versions of anything that I have heard) would be a good introduction.

Oh yes dear Fergus, you do have this wonderful recording in some external hard drive at your place :-)

LOL!!!
You seem to know my collection better than I do Pepe as this is not the first time that you have pointed something like this out to me.
I am currently re-cataloguing my collection to help me with this very thing - perhaps I should get you over here to help me with it!! I knew that I had heard Mondonville's music before!!!

And it is a spectacular choral recording, maybe worth a revisit soon?

Jose Echenique wrote:

fergus wrote:


And it is a spectacular choral recording, maybe worth a revisit soon?

Absolutely Pepe, I will do just that!

M9, Barbirolli....





What a wonderful work!

Celi could be eccentric, willful and oh-so-slow, but when he was good, he was very, very good.
His Prokofiev 5th is a marvel.

fergus wrote:M9, Barbirolli....





What a wonderful work!

Yes it is.

A recent purchase bought primarily for the Honegger Cello Concerto....





Strauss: Don Quixote – A great interpretation with wonderful playing from Rostropovich. The sound is somewhat thin but it takes nothing whatever away from the overall pleasure of the performance.

Honegger: Cello Concerto – My first time to hear this work and I thoroughly enjoyed it. At 16:35 it was far too short a work; I was enjoying it so much!

Jose Echenique wrote:

Celi could be eccentric, willful and oh-so-slow, but when he was good, he was very, very good.
His Prokofiev 5th is a marvel.

After discussions about him on CMG I was put off my ever getting any of his recordings.

Seán wrote:

Jose Echenique wrote:

Celi could be eccentric, willful and oh-so-slow, but when he was good, he was very, very good.
His Prokofiev 5th is a marvel.

After discussions about him on CMG I was put off my ever getting any of his recordings.

It would be a pity to miss Celi´s finest recordings. Yes, at his worst he was impossibly slow, even perversely so, but at his finest he could bring so many insights into a score as to make you think that you are listening to it for the first time. Like Glenn Gould he could also be impossibly pedantic, he once called Karajan a "camel driver", and yet his orchestras loved him so much as to sacrifice recordings contracts.
His Bruckner could be visionary one moment, and punishing the next. For example, in his Tokyo performances recently released by SONY on dvd, the Eighth is like an imposing medieval cathedral that is both beautiful and supremely spiritual, but in the Bruckner EMI box the Eighth, with the same orchestra but recorded in Munich turns into an impenetrable perpetual punishment. Maybe that´s why he hated recording, the same work could vary from a lovely Dr. Jeckyll to a hideous Mr. Hyde...depending on occasion.
But once more, his finest performances are of a very high order, and should not be missed, like this Prokofiev 5th, the finest ever recorded, so good as to leave Karajan as a....camel driver...ha, ha.

One Eroica I forgot to include in my list of Eroicas is precisely Celi´s.
It starts in typical Celi fashion very slow, hardly "Allegro con brio", but it soon picks up. The best thing in it is the momentous Funeral March: grand, marmoreal, Wagnerian, obviously a great master is conducting. The playing of the marvelous Munich Philharmonic is ultra refined, the horns are fearless, the strings opulent.
This is the complete opposite of let´s say, Jordi Savall´s tight, dynamic, compact performance. Different things are achieved, but Celi´s late Romantic approach is not easily eclipsed (but his B Minor Mass certainly is, it hardly sounds like Bach at all).

This is one of his finest Beethoven performances, the Ninth, on the other hand is disappointing.