Accent on Achievement

This performance goes right to the top. Not since the amazing mono Ancerl recording has there been a version of this work of such intensity, such expressive urgency, and (yes, believe it or not) such incredible orchestral playing. It’s impossible to praise the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic enough: they put their London colleagues to shame. The cellos and basses have a dark, tactile presence in pianissimo not heard since the old Kondrashin Melodiya recording. The horns play the daylights out of their solos in the first and third movements, while Petrenko has the violins sustaining, articulating, and phrasing the climax of the first movement with a passion and grit that’s beyond praise. Indeed, as an essay in Shostakovich conducting alone this performance deserves an honored place in every collection. Petrenko has the players digging into the second movement with unbridled ferocity at an ideally swift tempo.

Most recordings of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's Requiem in D minor are based on the completion by Franz Xaver Süssmayr, which has become the standard performing version, though some of these offer minor modifications of the orchestration and alterations of Süssmayr's awkward counterpoint. Yet as far as historically informed reassessments of the Requiem are concerned, perhaps only Arthur Schoonderwoerd's performance with the Gesualdo Consort and Cristofori on the Accent label is an attempt to re-create the experience of a funeral mass in Vienna in the 1790s.

Mozart's music for flute always seems to cause a twofold reaction. On the one hand, the music is undeniably beautiful, balanced and just a little more than what could be expected from the "gallant" style. On the other hand, note-writers are at pains to point out that Mozart apparently did not like the flute as an instrument and that in the case of the Flute Quartets, two of the four have not even been proved to be genuine Mozart.

Laghonia - Etcetera (1969) {1998, US, Remastered, Lazarus Audio Products, CD-2010}
EAC rip (secure mode) | FLAC (tracks)+CUE+LOG -> 288 Mb | MP3 @320 -> 96 Mb
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© 1969, 1998 Mag / Lazarus Audio Products | CD-2010
Rock / Psychedelic Rock / Obscuro

It's always a pleasure for a Peruvian to see one of our bands in Prog Archives (Well I had to add LAGHONIA because is not well known), but in this case is a mixture of happiness and pride because "Etcetera" is so well written that I'm 100% sure that if they would have been born in UK or USA by this moment they would be legends. Let's remember that in the early 70's a Communist Military ultra Nationalist dictator had almost banned Rock because he considered it a Yankee form of imperialism (Well, we can find lunatics everywhere), so the achievement of this guys is double, because they managed to stay ahead of the Latin American Prog' movement despite having everything against them. Normally the problem with foreign bands singing in English is the strong accent of the vocalists, this is not the case of LAGHONIA because one of the vocalists (David Levane) was from USA and Saul Cornejo had an almost perfect pronunciation of the language (Something very usual in Peruvian bands being that most singers come from Catholic American Schools so they learned English since very young).

These live recordings of Le Nozze di Figaro, Don Giovanni and CosÏ fan tutte are a fine tribute to celebrate 40 years of La Petite Bande. They have released an Anniversary Series to mark the oustanding achievement of this highly regarded Belgium-based ensemble.