Extreme Six

Following their critically acclaimed recording of Johann Gottfried Müthel’s keyboard concertos (BIS-2179), Polish ensemble Arte dei Suonatori and Marcin Świątkiewicz, who conducts from his instrument, perform the six Hamburg symphonies by Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach interspersed with solo fantasias for keyboard. The music of C.P.E. Bach has always been a source of fascination for the listener with its great variety of atmospheres, captivating melodic ideas, irresistible contrasts, surprising interweaving of voices, eccentric harmonies, and extreme dynamic transitions.

Florida death metal gods Obituary breathed new life (no pun intended) into the genre when they broke onto the scene in 1989 with their groundbreaking debut, Slowly We Rot. Donald Tardy's breakneck technical drumming and John Tardy's guttural, slithering vocals combined with brutally fast guitars for a sound not quite ever equaled in the death metal world before or since. The Complete Roadrunner Collection 1989-2005 gathers together Obituary's first six studio albums, including their stellar debut, 1992's landmark The End Complete, 1997's Back from the Dead, and more.

With this recital Shai Wosner declares himself a Schubertian of unfaltering authority and character. Entirely modern in style (tonally lean and sharply focused, never given to easy or sentimental options), he relishes every twist and turn in the so-called Reliquie Sonata, with its quasi-orchestral, defiantly unpianistic first movement and its astonishing second movement modulations (Alkan himself never wrote anything more boldly experimental). Unlike Richter in his monolithic recording, Wosner opts for the two completed movements rather than allowing the music to evaporate into thin air, displaying throughout a finely concentrated sense of music that achieves its vision and depth through extreme austerity.