Tír Na HiFi

fergus wrote:I bought this version of Monteverdi's L'Orfeo recently....





I had not previously heard of Coro Antonio Il Verso, Ensemble Elyma or the director Gabriel Garrido. I then scanned the vocalists and recognised the names of Maria Cristina Kiehr, Roberta Invernizzi and Gerd Turk among the credits so I was duly interested. However, what eventually sold it to me was the list of awards that it had received most notably for me being Diapason D'Or which for some reason is not shown on the above image. The recording and performances proved to be exceedingly beautiful and sensitive and had a slightly different "flavour" to others that I have.

My question after this is does anyone else use these awards (or others) as a buying guide? I must admit that one or two of these awards is usually enough to arouse my interest but when so many came with one recording I had no hesitation when buying.

Jose Echenique wrote:
Unfortunately many awards are granted for reasons that have nothing to do with artistic achievement (the label buys a lot of space in the magazine, the critic is a good friend of the artist, and most notoriously, chauvinism). And as so often happens I love recordings that are damned by critics (so much of Harnoncourt and Sinopoli in the Gramophone) and hate others that are praised to the roof by the same critics, so my dear Fergus, I think you really have to listen to a recording to decide if it works for you or not.

markof wrote:

Bach is just an endless fount of good things.
I'd not heard these sonatas before and the music, performance and quality is marvellous.
Here the original organ sonatas are transposed and arranged for a small ensemble including recorder, flute, violin, viola, lute and harpsichord.
Fantastic.

Mark.