Craig Calhoun, et Al., Classical Sociological Theory

To commemorate the great composer's birthday, today 200 years ago.

Poulenc - Complete Chamber Music, Vol.1 - Alexandre Tharaud et al. (2000) {Naxos 8.553611}
EAC rip (secure mode) | FLAC (tracks)+CUE+LOG -> 208 Mb | MP3 @320 -> 134 Mb
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© 2000 Naxos / HNH International | 8.553611
Classical / Early Modern / Early 20th Century / Chamber Music

This excellent first volume in what promises to be a two-disc collection of Poulenc's complete chamber music offers performances that compare favorably with the best available. All of the musicians are superb, but several deserve special mention. Alexandre Tharaud plays Poulenc's piano parts with great flair, wit, and a true feeling for the music's manic shifts from raucous high spirits to nostalgia and melancholy. Since all of these works feature the piano, the importance of his contribution can't be overestimated.

Poulenc - Complete Chamber Music, Vol.5 - Alexandre Tharaud et al. (2000) {Naxos 8.553615}
EAC rip (secure mode) | FLAC (tracks)+CUE+LOG -> 256 Mb | MP3 @320 -> 172 Mb
Full Artwork @ 600 dpi (png) -> 70 Mb | 5% repair rar
© 2000 Naxos / HNH International | 8.553615
Classical / Early Modern / Early 20th Century / Chamber Music

The narrators are two gifted children, the pianist Alezandre Tharaud, whose acute playing has sparked the series. Set for narrator and small ensemble and originally improvised to please the composer's three-year old cousin, the tale of Babar the Elephant receives a charming performance from Alexandre Tharaud and friends with child narrators on this fifth instalment of Naxos's chamber-music series.

This highly accessible, colourful and melodic music is here interpreted by the Tapiola Sinfonietta under Jean-Jacques Kantorow, a team whose previous recordings on BIS have been enthusiastically received by the reviewers. A disc of works by Saint-Saëns was for instance described as ‘a smorgasbord of distinctive orchestral colours’ in Classic FM Magazine and was a finalist in the Gramophone Awards 2007.

The young Tippett – magpie and maverick – sought maximum intensity of feeling while shunning what he felt to be the sentimental fervour of Elgar, Bax and Walton. Equally abhorrent were the pastoral pieties of Vaughan Williams. Tippett took his stand with Blake and Yeats rather than Bunyan, and a Blake whose “bow of burning gold” required something altogether less complacent than Parry’s well upholstered jingoism.

Elliott Carter was something of a 'late starter' as a composer, but he has made up for that with an almost unprecedented fecundity of creative activ ity and accomplishment in advanced old age. The programme on this disc contrasts a comparatively 'early' orchestral work, from his mid-thirties, with the highly mature Violin Concerto written in his eighty-second year and a solo violin cycle most of which was composed in his nineties. At the time of writing this note (July 2005) Carter is not far short of his own centenary, and continuing to produce highly complex, sophisticated scores with an energy that would hardly be conceivable even in a much younger man.

from the attached booklet

In 1968 the choreographer George Balanchine made a ballet from two works by Xenakis Metastaseis and Pithoprakta and the following year he commissioned Xenakis to compose an original score for New York City Ballet. Antikhthon turned out to be one of the great might-have-been collaborations: Xenakis completed the score in 1971, but the work was never staged. The concept of Antikhthon Anti-Earth or Counter-Earth was first proposed by the Pythagorean philosopher Philolaus of Croton around 400 BC. He speculated that there was a Counter-Earth a hypothetical heavenly body that revolved with the earth around a Central Fire. This led to Philolaus being credited as one of the first to propose that the Earth was not the centre of the universe, but that it was in an orbit around the Sun (Central Fire), with the other planets.