It's not opera; it's not a pop concert; it's not Broadway. It's all of these and none of them. Once you accept the fact that this sequel to the original blockbuster concert recording is less about music and more about entertainment and the power of musical personalities, you can appreciate what you're hearing as an event--phenomenal and bizarre, momentous and frivolous. This is an occasion to ...
Hundreds of compilation recordings have been thrust on the market in recent years on the theory that classical music makes a nice, non-threatening accompaniment to everything from working out to making love. And here we have one compilation promising to make your baby smarter. It's offensive enough that the music featured on these compilations is spliced up so that the most you hear of any work is ...
Having toured the world with its Beethoven Quartets cycle as the old millennium entered the new, the Takács Quartet now commits some of them to disc. This two-CD set from Decca includes the three Razumovsky quartets, Op. 59, of 1806, and the Harp Quartet, Op. 74, sometimes known as the Lobkowitz after its dedicatee, composed in 1809. Although the latter's presto yields the fastest version of the ...
Vienna's 18th- and 20th-century musical worlds meet on this new CD of chamber music. Mozart and Schoenberg are a delightful and enlightening pairing of the first and second Viennese schools. Though classical 18th-century chamber music would seem to have little in common with 20th-century atonal music, the two pieces are more closely related than one might expect. Both include a choir of 13 ...
Some Quartets, like the Busch, Italiano, and Talich, have come close to the inner core of these supreme masterpieces. The Takács Quartet now joins those select few. From the opening chords of the Op. 127--firmly stated, perfectly blended, just gruff enough while still sounding beautiful--you know you're in safe hands during this journey into the deepest, most timeless works in the repertory. Slow ...
Bryn Terfel is the most recent in a long line of great Welsh singers (and certainly one of the greatest)--a people who proverbially are "born with music in the blood and poetry in the soul." Here, he sings the songs of his native Wales: hymns, folksongs, art songs, tender lullabies, yearning songs of love and homesickness, and heroic, defiant patriotic songs--including the Welsh National ...