"Italian conductor and musicologist Alberto Zedda is widely recognized as one of the world's most prominent authorities on the operas of Gioachino Rossini. (…) Although his work on behalf of Rossini remains widely appreciated, Zedda's handling of early opera composers has drawn criticism, particularly as he eschews period instruments and prefers to devise modern orchestrations for seventeenth century operas.
Second in a series of Polish anthology releases. The third disc is a computer drive/DVD compatible video disc featuring portions of a live concert in Germany filmed January 11, 1989…
Despite rumors some months ago that the RCOA series might be discontinued (fortunately unfounded), here we have Volume III, a 14-CD set that contains much of interest, but surely—for this collector—doesn't live up to its potential. For me, ideally that would concist of some of the outstanding performances of great symphonic music played by this magnificent orchestra, recorded in the extraordinary acoustics of the Concertgebouw with the usual Radio Nederland sonic expertise. During the decade represented in this set (1960-1970) the Concertgebouw Orchestra's programming often emphasized contemporary music and that surely is reflected in this album. We have well over five hours of music by Martin, Varèse, Berg, Webern, Henze, Lutoslawski, Nono and Dallapiccola as well as Dutch composers Ketting, Escher, and Vermeulen, and Polish composer Grazyna Bacewicz's Music for Strings, Trumpets and Percussion, an 18-minute three-movement work of imagination and vivid scoring.
It's hard to believe that any pianist, living or dead (or, probably, yet-to-be-born) could match, much less surpass, these performances. It was Richter, after all, who made Mussorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition almost as important an item in the standard repertory of the piano as Ravel's orchestration is in that of the orchestra. And it was Richter's performances of it, as well as his example, that have ignited the interest of subsequent generations of pianists in the Bunte Blätter, heretofore one of the most obscure works in the Schumann canon.
Monarchie und Alltag, the 1980 debut album by Die Fehlfarben, is one of the key releases of the Neue Deutsche Welle (NDW), the German equivalent of new wave. Die Fehlfarben were never quite the same after Monarchie und Alltag – constant lineup shuffling, intermittent streaks of band activity – and though the album fell upon deaf ears initially, it grew in stature over the years and rightly became recognized as a cornerstone of modern German rock, earning a deluxe reissue in 2000…