Chandos Records

Anton Webern - Chamber Music for Strings
Schoenberg Quartet / Sepp Grotenhuis
EAC+LOG+CUE | FLAC: 227 MB | Artwork | 5% Recovery Info
Label/Cat#: Chandos # CHAN 10083 | Country/Year: UK 2003
Genre: Classical | Style: Early 20th Century

"…The whole disc is a great success. Recording quality is first rate, with the necessary clarity tempered by warmth and just the right amount of resonance. Excellent notes are by Dr. Christopher Hailey. Recommended, even if you still find Webern hard work." ~musicweb-international

Edmund Rubbra - Complete Symphonies - Richard Hickox (2001) {5CD Set, Chandos CHAN 9944(5) rec 1993-1998}
EAC rip (secure mode) | FLAC (tracks)+CUE+LOG -> 1.43 Gb | MP3 @320 -> 783 Mb
Full Artwork @ 600 dpi (jpg) -> 150 Mb | 5% repair rar
© 1993-98, 2001 Chandos Records | CHAN 9944(5)
Classical / Orchestral / Symphony / Contemporary / Modern

If you haven't yet encountered the music of Edmund Rubbra, this superbly played and recorded set of his complete symphonies would be an appropriate place to start. Rubbra may hardly be a household word on these shores, but his reputation has been rising steadily in Britain–largely due to recording projects such as the one under review here. It is a mystery to me why these brilliantly crafted, inexhaustibly inventive, and eminently likeable symphonies have not won a wider following, though perhaps in our fast-paced culture music that requires the listener's total concentration (as does Rubbra's) is not destined to win instantaneous approval.

During the 1990s, Collegium Musicum 90 and Simon Standage released several volumes of Albinoni concertos, which proved popular with critics and public alike. The concertos were released as discs of single oboe concertos, double oboe concertos, and string concertos. In this re-issue on the Chaconne label, the concertos are presented in opus number order, showing the contrasting colours and tonalities of the concertos as they originally appeared.

This album marks the second release by Polish-born violinist Joanna Kurkowicz to be devoted to the concertos of Grazyna Bacewicz, a violinist/composer who survived World War II and Stalinism with her artistic vision intact. Not only that, she adapted the violin concerto, not a form in great favor in the 20th century, to waves of successive influences. As Eastern Europe emerges as the crucible where musicians tried to build a durable culture out of the 20th century's various musical and political "isms," Bacewicz's music is well worth keeping an eye on.

Here is a major repertory hole filler: a decent cross-section of the piano music of Polish-born composer Alexandre Tansman on a single Chandos disc, featuring pianist Margaret Fingerhut. Tansman was himself a pianist of better than fair ability and produced much keyboard music for his own use; his piano music provides a snapshot glimpse of the various stages of development that Tansman went through.

The name 'Chandos anthems' is most frequently associated with Handel, but he was not the first, nor the last, composer in the extravagant household of James Brydges, the Duke of Chandos from 1719. Working concurrently with Handel at Cannons was the Berlin native, Johann Christoph Pepusch'snearly 20 years Handel's seniora who took over as Director of Music by early 1719 whereupon he adopted a distinctly Venetian approach to sacred music, in the manner of Lotti and Vivaldi.

These readings of Fauré's two late piano quintets by the Schubert Ensemble of London are paradoxical. The group's performances are strong-willed and purposeful in the outer movements, particularly in the C minor Quintet's ever accelerating Finale, yet soft-focused and sensuous in the central slow movements, especially the D minor Quintet's deeply dolorous Adagio. The tone changes from robustly incisive to sweetly sonorous, the ensemble from vigorously muscular to smoothly refined, and the rhythms from sharply accented to softly undulating.

This is a bargain priced box set of Lydia Mordkovitch's violin sonata recordings made for Chandos in the 1980s. I am admirer of her playing, particularly in the English repertoire, Howells, Dyson and Vaughan Williams (the Carlton disc with Julian Milford is a lost classic), none of which is unfortunately represented here. What we are given is a cross-section of continental work with the emphasis heavily on the Central-European tradition, tempered to some extent by the inclusion of Prokofiev and Fauré. T