Crude Variations

The film received a pasting from UK critics but as the soundtrack chooses from a vast archive of great performances, it’s possible to retrieve something from the experience. The opening track, the Grosse Fuge, is a bold choice given the wider audience for whom this soundtrack is aiming. It receives a magnificent performance from the Takács Quartet which is as finely attuned to the music’s jagged outcrops as its sheltered byways. The uninterrupted flow of the sweet and soulful second movement of the third Razumovsky is pure poetry in their hands. Ashkenazy gives a brilliant but never rushed performance of the finale to the early Sonata in C minor and his straightforward manner in the Arietta from Beethoven’s last sonata is illuminated by the very clear Decca recording. Haitink’s performance of the finale of the Ninth Symphony with the Royal Concertgebouw and a quartet of soloists led by Lucia Popp does not storm the heavens and I don’t ever recall being so aware of this movement’s proceeding by paragraphs. However, it would seem to have found a comfortable place in a well planned and wide-ranging celebration of Beethoven’s genius.

Tom Waits collaborated with director Robert Wilson and librettist William Burroughs on the musical stage work The Black Rider in 1990. A variation on the Faust legend, the 19th century German story allowed Waits to indulge his affection for the music of Kurt Weill and address one of his favorite topics of recent years, the devil. Waits had proven an excellent collaborator when he worked with director Francis Ford Coppola on One from the Heart, making that score an integral part of the film. Here, the collaboration and the established story line served to focus Waits' often fragmented attention, lending coherence and consistency. He then had three years to adapt the score into a record album in which he did most of the singing and writing…

Evgeny Kissin appears to be an unwilling visitor to recording studios these days and offers for this double album live performances of Beethoven taped at six different venues over the decade from 2006 to 2016. Expect the varying acoustic properties of the halls to be a factor in your listening, plus balances of piano sound produced – as the booklet says – ‘under various technical conditions’. Less easy to tolerate is the amount of audience noise, intruding at the beginning of several tracks and at its worst in the Appassionata.

This set documents over three decades of exceptional artistry by Sir Colin Davis, one of the musical pillars of the Philips label, who died on Sunday 14th April 2013. He was a musician of incomparable integrity and class.
After signing to Philips exclusively in the mid-1960s, Davis produced work for the label of the highest quality and range over the next three decades: the first Berlioz cycle , pioneering Tippett, superb Haydn and Mozart, top-rank Sibelius, Beethoven, Stravinsky, Dvorak and Britten, and much else.

A quirky detour of late-'60s British progressive/blues rock, Blodwyn Pig was founded by former Jethro Tull guitarist Mick Abrahams, who left Tull after the This Was album. Abrahams was joined by bassist Andy Pyle, drummer Ron Berg, and Jack Lancaster, who gave the outfit their most distinctive colorings via his saxophone and flute. On their two albums, they explored a jazz/blues/progressive style somewhat in the mold of (unsurprisingly) Jethro Tull, but with a lighter feel. They also bore some similarities to John Mayall's jazzy late-'60s versions of the Bluesbreakers, or perhaps Colosseum, but with more eclectic material. Both of their LPs made the British Top Ten, though the players' instrumental skills were handicapped by thin vocals and erratic (though oft-imaginative) material. The group were effectively finished by Abrahams' departure after 1970's Getting to This. They briefly reunited in the mid-'70s, and Abrahams was part of a different lineup that reformed in the late '80s; they have since issued a couple of albums in the 1990s.