Celebrating 30 years as a band, Norway’s TNT pulled out all the stops on this live anniversary concert. Bringing out the Trondheim Symphony Orchestra, special guests like Dee Snider, and all three vocalists from the early years with Dag Ingebrigsten to the height of popularity with Tony Harnell and the latter days of Tony Mills, these 19 tracks encompass the wide discography of this Melodic Hard Rock band. I’ll admit a strong affinity in the 1980’s for this band- especially the period from 1984-1989 when the band would release a series of strong albums, “Knights of the New Thunder”, “Tell No Tales”, and “Intuition”.
Speaking to the New York Times in 2007, Alfred Brendel said of fellow pianist Till Fellner: “It has impressed me how ambitiously he has developed his repertory, being equally at home in solo and concerto repertoire, chamber music and lieder… I heard him do the best live performance of Liszt’s Années de pèlerinage”. Fellner’s insightful playing of the Premiere année from that collection of suites, underlines the contention, vividly conveying Franz Liszt’s literal and imaginative journeys. “Having recently travelled to many new countries,” wrote the composer in 1855, “through different settings and places consecrated by history and poetry, and having felt that the phenomena of nature and their attendant sights stirred deep emotions in my soul, I have tried to portray in music a few of my strongest sensations and most lively impressions”.
While quite a few arena rock acts of the '70s found it difficult to sustain their popularity beyond that decade, several acts continued to flourish and enjoyed some of their biggest commercial success: Journey, Styx, REO Speedwagon, and especially Foreigner. Foreigner's leader from the beginning has been British guitarist Mick Jones, who first broke into the music biz as a "hired gun" of sorts, appearing on recordings by George Harrison and Peter Frampton, and as part of a latter-day version of hard rockers Spooky Tooth. By the mid-'70s, Jones had relocated to New York City, where he was a brief member of the Leslie West Band and served as an A&R man for a record company. But it wasn't long before Jones felt the urge to be part of another rock outfit as he sought to put together a band that would be able to combine elements of rock, progressive, R&B, and pop into a single, cohesive style.
Belshazzar (HWV 61) is an oratorio by George Frideric Handel. The libretto was by Charles Jennens, and Handel abridged it considerably. Jennens' libretto was based on the Biblical account of the fall of Babylon at the hands of Cyrus the Great and the subsequent freeing of the Jewish nation, as found in the Book of Daniel.
This live recording was made at the Royal Albert Hall during one of London’s famous Promenade Concert seasons. Sir Georg Solti conducts the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and Chorus in a magnifi cent performance of Berlioz’s concert cantata La Damnation de Faust. This feast of Berlioz launched Solti’s farewell tour with the orchestra he had directed for twenty years and was described by The Times as “the unsurpassable culmination of two decades of music-making…one that summarised all that has been most admirable about Solti’s long reign in Chicago.”
Les Vêpres Siciliennes is one of Verdi’s misunderstood operas. It is usually presented to audiences today as I vespri Siciliani - that is, in a clumsy and pedestrian Italian translation and as such gives a false representation of Verdi’s original concept. This opera was composed for the Paris Opera to a libretto by Eugene Scribe, one of the greatest poets of the day and Charles Duveyrier. Verdi embraces the French idiom – the musical forms, the orchestration, the vocal writing – with the same grandeur and sense of occasion as Rossini and Meyerbeer before him. Certainly to give an opera in translation is no crime but to continually deprive the public of this particularly beautiful marriage of text and music is close to criminal. This is the third in the Verdi Originals series and this BBC recording of the opera finally restores the original French libretto.