Eugene Church

Johann Sebastian Bach - The Conductors' Transcriptions (Damrosch, Gui, Klemperer, Ormandy, Wood & more)
BBC Symphony Orchestra / Leonard Slatkin
EAC+LOG+CUE | FLAC: 305 MB | Artwork | 5% Recovery Info
Label/Cat#: Chandos # CHSA 5030 | Country/Year: Europe 2004
Genre: Classical | Style: Baroque

…The point is that Bach is the most indestructible of all composers, in the best sense of the term. And as with all great music the work is always greater than any one performance of it, so these wonderfully imaginative reincarnations of Bach’s originals bring with them a great deal of satisfaction. Part of the intention in every case, surely, was to realise the nature of Bach’s music in new ways through the potential offered by a great orchestra in performance. In that crucial and important way Leonard Slatkin and the BBC Symphony Orchestra, along with the Chandos engineers, have triumphed…

Biographers of Georgia Tom Dorsey like to make comments such as "his life was a living testimony of the power of God." But there was also the trashy side to the man, expressed best in song titles such as "Terrible Operation Blues" and "Pig Meat Blues." When everything is balanced out, however, it has to be admitted that this is a case where an African-American performer chose the church over the honky tonk. In gospel music, his work as a composer and arranger is acknowledged to be so significant that he is often referred to as the father of gospel music…..

In the latter twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, Itzhak Perlman has been acclaimed as being among the leading violinists before the public, and, without doubt, has been the most visible of them in media venues, from recordings and radio broadcasts to television and film appearances. No other concert violinist and few other serious musicians have achieved the widespread exposure and popularity attained by Perlman.

Playing together for the first time for Hyperion, Hough and Isserlis are stunningly matched in this large-scale passionate romantic programme. The sonatas stand at the centre of the meaty repertoire established by Brahms—whose two cello sonatas Steven Isserlis has recorded for us in an award-winning disc accompanied by Peter Evans (CDA66159)—and characterised by grand sweeping gestures, lush melody, and heartfelt emotions that sear from pathos to frenzy. The Franck is, of course, an alternative version the composer wished for his violin sonata, a transition that many feel to be the work's happiest incarnation.

Stiffelio was based on the play Le pasteur, ou L'évangile et le foyer by Émile Souvestre and Eugène Bourgeois and was originally censored due to it involving as it does a Protestant minister of the church with an adulterous wife.
The golden timbre of Roberto Aronica graces the title role…His commanding tenor makes one sit up and listen, with some notable long-breathed phrasing and a smooth legato a joy to hear…[Yu Guanqun's] is a rich, true lyric soprano with a glint of steel and strong, even emission in the upper register…[Frontali] sings with great command of Verdian shape and line. (International Record Review)