Music Lane

Posted by srl1 (A) on December 29, 2016 at 07:55:30

In Reply to: RE: My faves of 2016 - what are yours? posted by Chris from Lafayette on December 28, 2016 at 17:04:33

I'm starting off with video discs. Here is my personal "find" better known as a snap buying choice that worked out very well. This set seems like a labor of love for the late Rafael Fruhbeck de Burgos by the Danish National Symphony Orchestra. It is a series of concerts, including the complete Beethoven symphonies along with the Berlioz Symphonie Fantastique, Strauss Alpine Symphony, and the Rodrigo Concierto de Aranjuez with Pepe Romero. I've always considered de Burgos to be a vastly underrated conductor, and these performances prove my point. Lots of joyous music-making here.





You can't go wrong with a great performance of Elgar's Cello Concerto, and Sol Gabetta does that here, and for you Ligeti fans (you know who you are) Sir Simon warms up the audience and the orchestra with Atmospheres! Throw in a good Wagner Prelude and a powerful Rite of Spring, and you have a really fine concert disc.





This disc is so much fun I have to mention it again. I am pasting my brief comments from my 11/28 post here. Both works are hair-raising (tossing?), exciting, and finger-breaking, and that's just the Beethoven #1! Yes, Khatia manages to do Beethoven proud and still make it into an exciting show piece. It's fun to watch Mehta and the IPO working to keep up with her. The Liszt comes off as it should, a bravura showpiece. The video quality is good, the camera work is normal, but I did notice that not as much time as I expected was spent on Khatia. Both dresses she wore (each concerto was shot at a different concert) were quite stunning, and I was somewhat worried when she bowed that there might be a wardrobe malfunction!





This is my reissue of the year. I'm sure that in time you will be able to buy just the Blu-Ray audio disc by itself. Anyway, this is one of those fancy collector's editions with the CD sleeves displaying the LP cover art. I actually prefer the sound of the remastered CDs over the Blu-Ray. The Blu-Ray sounds too nice. The CDs are the closest thing I've found to the sound that I remember Decca LPs having. The performances are brightly lit, aggressive, dynamic, detailed, and very exciting.





Now to my two "way out there but a lot of outrageous fun" picks. First up are the complete Mozart Piano Sonatas by Fazil Say. There are two things most might agree on with this set: it ain't Brendel, and it ain't HIP. Say marches to a very different drummer, but most of what he does here is respectful of Mozart. Also, if you still have your Glenn Gould hum filter installed on your system you might want to reactivate it while listening to these discs.





My final item falls under the category "You know you've made it big in the industry when they let you record and release something like this." This is one wild Tchaikovsky Violin Concerto. The CD pakaging and liner "notes" are really out there, too. Since I'm not really a fan of Stravinsky's Les Noces, I'm sure a lot of the content is really over my head. Suffice it to say that Ms. Kopatchinskaja can really play the violin. Maybe in a few years she will heed the admonition, "With great skill comes great responsibility."