Tír Na HiFi

mcq wrote: Secondly, Florilegium's recent traversal of the Bach Brandenburgs.  A great performance of these works will tell you as much about the ensemble as the music.  These are perhaps the smoothest, most refined versions that I've heard on period instruments.  I should stress, however, that this is not a criticism but simply an interpretive decision on the part of the ensemble director, Ashley Solomon, who has traded dramatic urgency and dynamic extremes for a technically assured reading that should be valued for its thoughtful, cerebral and measured approach to this great music.  Tempos are swift, textures are light and transparent, timbral sonorities are beautifully realised and no detail in the original scores goes unremarked by these musicans and yet there is just such a sense of studied ease in these performances that seems a world away from the breathless urgency of such highly charged versions as those by Musica Antiqua Köln, Concerto Italiano and Il Giardino Armonico.  As listeners, we can only benefit from such diversity of interpretation.  Florilegium have taken their time to record these works, and the results are very rewarding.  Hopefully they will record the Orchestral Suites in due course.

Diapason wrote:

Seán wrote:

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
Symphony no 1 in E flat major, K 16
Symphony no 4 in D major, K 19
Symphony in F major, K Anh. 223 (19a)
Symphony no 5 in B flat major, K 22
Symphony no 44 in D major, K 81 (73l)
Symphony no 47 in D major, K 97 (73m)
The Academy of Ancient Music
Christopher Hogwood conducting.

Very enjoyable performances.

Diapason wrote:Fergus, I don't know this music well enough to say anything sensible about the recordings. I find Rachmaninoff to be a bit of a mixed bag. Sometimes he speaks to the core of my being, with ravishing melodies, but sometimes it leaves me a bit cold. I'm not sure about the Symphonies yet, tbh.