C't Magazin 4 2014

Café del Mar Terrace Mix continues its successful story with another great selection of 13 titles, carefully compiled by Toni Simonen. An album that builds up gradually from mellow sounds to deep steady grooves and that delivers the finest Line Up since the first installment. So without any doubt this album belongs to the best realizations of Toni Simonen's mission to bridge the gap between chill and electro beats.

For Simon Rattle, Robert Schumann is "the echt Romantic." And in fact, the exuberance of the period, its passion, and its melancholy can be heard with unique intensity in Schumann's music to this day. For the Berliner Philharmoniker, Schumann's symphonies have always been part of their core repertoire. The 1953 Wilhelm Furtwängler recording in particular has attained cult status. And so it only stands to reason that the Berliner Philharmoniker should launch their Berliner Philharmoniker Recordings label with a cycle of the four Schumann symphonies.

These recordings of live LPO concerts at Southbank Centre's Royal Festival Hall between 2008 and 2011. The CD release of Symphonies Nos. 1 & 2 (February 2010), received great critical acclaim including BBC Music Magazine's Disc of the Month' and the recommended version of Symphony No. 2 by BBC Radio 3's Building a Library'. The CD release of Symphonies Nos. 3 & 4 was also praised in the press, with Gramophone describing the LPO as London's finest Brahms orchestra' and The Financial Times writing that Jurowski marries the best of tradition with the best of modern practice'.

This compilation is highly recommended, if you are into the dreamy, ambient side of electronic music. Sometimes you can imagine yourself floating in deep space, sometimes you are lying in a meadow, as it where, and looking at clouds passing above. Just let your imagination fly, and this album will guide you. All Ambient Nation albums feature individual tracks from compelling artists and give you a nice overview of the current Belgian electronic music artists.

This release on the Onyx Classics label has no right to be as good as it is. Pianist Maria-João Pires, 70 years old when the album appeared in 2014, has never been known as a Beethoven specialist. The Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra under Daniel Harding is a competent group, surely, but hardly on Europe's or even Scandinavia's A-list. The Beethoven Piano Concerto No. 3 in C minor, Op. 37, and Piano Concerto No. 4 in G major, Op. 58, hardly lack for varied and incisive interpretations. Yet there it is: this one delivers ideas that nobody else has offered before. In a nutshell, Pires makes the piano the quiet partner to a rather martial orchestra in these works.

The presence of the young Mahler Chamber Orchestra and the decision by pianist Leif Ove Andsnes to conduct it from the keyboard may lead you to expect a smaller-scale performance than listeners actually get here, in this second album of Andsnes' "Beethoven Journey." Certainly this isn't keyboard-pounding Beethoven. The slow movement of the Piano Concerto No. 4 in G major, Op. 58, has none of the giant-stomping-around quality it often received in golden-age recordings.

Ambient Sleeping Pill 1 (2014). This album is divided into two 40-minute, 5-track halves - both a sort of mini voyage. Both “Warm Night on the Cold Front” and “Dark Moon Lullaby” are epic and blissful (though quite different), slowly fading in and out, ebbing and flowing, with the most dynamic range on the album. Both tracks fade out slowly enough to allow you to fully leave your consciousness behind, before giving you a plush entrance into dreamland via “A Strange Economy” and “Gumball.” We then visit the more mysterious scenes of night, with the reverent “Catenary” and “Eluded.” Flying back on the wings of “Drift Chamber” and “Watching a Glowing Horizon Bend with Earth,” we drift in the heavens for what seems an eternity longer, before coming awake again…