I'm Here to Win

Franz Liszt’s art songs form a fascinating repertoire. His lieder served as a vehicle for his own artistic and aesthetic development, but also as inspiration for his contemporaries, who soon followed in his footsteps in composing songs for voice and orchestra.

The "Limp Bizkit craze" seemed to hit Europe a bit later than it did the U.S. Looking back now, the tour in support of their third album, 2000's Chocolate Starfish and the Hotdog Flavored Water, was when you could start seeing cracks in the band's armor. Besides the fact that rap-metal was finally on its way out, this would prove to be the start of the on-again, off-again relationship between the band and guitarist Wes Borland (the only element that many took seriously in the band in the first place), resulting in the group's popularity taking a nosedive on subsequent releases. But overseas in the time frame of 2000, the Bizkit boys could still headline enormoudomes, and get the teens bobbing up and down in unison to rage and rubbery detuned guitar riffs…

Raphael and Peter Wallfisch are simpler in their approach to the five folk-style pieces of Op. 102 than Maisky and Argerich, preferring to let the music speak for itself rather than consciously interpreting it. Certainly Argerich makes her presence felt more boldly than Peter Wallfisch. Even if occasionally over-bold, she is the winner in textural clarity, as also in the more natural-sounding reproduction of her piano by the Philips engineers. Of the two cellists, Raphael Wallfisch is grainier in tone, Maisky more assuagingly liquid.

Of the many second- and third-tier composers of the early and middle German Baroque, Johann Philipp Förtsch (1652–1732) ranks among the more obscure, though in his case it is due not to the quality of his music but to the fact that for him music became an Read more Kapellmeister of Schleswig in1680 by one of the opera’s cofounders, Duke Christian Albrecht of Holstein-Gottorf. The Duke was embroiled in political conflicts with neighboring Denmark, and was forced to flee to Hamburg in 1683, at which point Förtsch resumed his medical practice, obtaining a licentiate from the University of Kiel and setting up a practice in Husum.

Martin Fröst - Roots (2016) {Sony Classical 88875065292}
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© 2016 Sony Music / Sony Classical | 88875065292
Classical / Chamber Music / Clarinet

The clarinetist Martin Fröst, after a series of recordings of modern-ish Nordic and Germanic clarinet repertory on the Swedish label BIS, gets a larger mouthpiece here with a release on the major Sony Classical label. Fröst's playing has never been better: he excels in both tough, angular lines and slow cantabile, and both are applied here to a wide variety of material. Three of Schumann's Five Pieces in Folk Style, Op. 102, are made into a little sonata here, and sampling any one of them (tracks 7-9) will show you how compelling Fröst can make only moderately interesting music. Like those pieces, most of the music is arranged from music in media other than clarinet and orchestra.

This album is marked by the interaction between John Lee Hooker and his guitar-playing cousin Earl. Earl, who succumbed to illness in 1970, was a fine bluesman in his own right, possessing a formidable slide technique. Many are unaware that the two often performed together, and the band that accompanies John Lee here also backed Earl frequently. The opening cut, then, a slow 12-bar number called "The Hookers" is not about ladies of the evening, but rather about the gentlemen in question.
Heard here less than a year before his death, Earl still sounds frisky and versatile, often utilizing a funky wah-wah style without ever descending into the psychedelic excesses that plagued so many late-'60s electric blues albums…