Liszt Ference Chanber Orchestra Vivaldi

The Finnish Baroque Orchestra (= FIBO) was founded by harpsichordist Anssi Mattila in 1989. For twenty years it was called The Sixth Floor Orchestra. The Finnish Baroque Orchestra consists of musicians well versed in the performance practice of early music and the instruments for which each type of music was written. In addition to all the major Finnish music festivals the orchestra has appeared in many parts of Europe.

The Finnish Baroque Orchestra (= FIBO) was founded by harpsichordist Anssi Mattila in 1989. For twenty years it was called The Sixth Floor Orchestra. The Finnish Baroque Orchestra consists of musicians well versed in the performance practice of early music and the instruments for which each type of music was written. In addition to all the major Finnish music festivals the orchestra has appeared in many parts of Europe.

In 1999, conductor Daniel Barenboim and scholar Edward Said created the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra to be a cultural bridge between young Israeli, Arab, and Iranian musicians, and the success of the enterprise has not only raised public awareness of their worthy cause, but also yielded some remarkable recordings. Celebrating the tenth anniversary of the orchestra's formation, Barenboim leads the orchestra in performances of two works linked to the city where the group held its first workshops, Weimar, where associations with Hector Berlioz and Franz Liszt are still strong.

"You can freely paraphrase Louis XIV and say: I am the orchestra! I am the cho¬rus! I am also the conductor!” With these words Hector Berlioz paid homage to a man who was indeed all of these things put together: Franz Liszt.
This eulogy, however, was not only for Liszt, the man; it was also for his instrument and the compositions he wrote for it, an instrument which, also in part thanks to Liszt, became the dominant instrument of bourgeois musical culture in the 19th century: the piano. The reason for this dominance? Liszt himself gave the answer by ascribing to the piano and to the ten fingers of the pianist the ability to reproduce the sonorities and harmonies of an entire orchestra. The improvements made to the piano at that time (around 1825), e.g. the new Erard repetition action and the exponsion of the instrument's range to seven octaves, support these claims.

Pianist Lise de la Salle has a big tone and a strong technique, but while she is surely up to the technical requirements of Prokofiev's and Shostakovich's first piano concertos, she seems out of her depth in their interpretive demands. She can pound her way through the muscular rhythms and massive sonorities in the outer movements of Prokofiev's concerto but appears immune to the lyrical poetry in the legato lines of the work's central Andante assai.

Pianist Lise de la Salle has a big tone and a strong technique, but while she is surely up to the technical requirements of Prokofiev's and Shostakovich's first piano concertos, she seems out of her depth in their interpretive demands. She can pound her way through the muscular rhythms and massive sonorities in the outer movements of Prokofiev's concerto but appears immune to the lyrical poetry in the legato lines of the work's central Andante assai.

Australia's most exciting opera company, Pinchgut Opera has attracted rave reviews since making its debut with Handel's Semele in 2002. ABC Classics has been with Pinchgut all the way, releasing all five of their previous productions on CD to critical acclaim; the magic continues with Pinchgut's performance of Vivaldi's Juditha Triumphans. Enter a world of musical ecstasy with the exquisite voices of Pinchgut and the subtle beauty of rare Baroque instruments in Vivaldi's gripping tale of virtue, passion and revenge.

This very well recorded disc from 2003 is yet another fine disc from Immerseel and his orchestra once more extending his 'period' interests well beyond the Baroque and Classical areas of musical history. In this case Immerseel turns his attention to music by Liszt which he will have been familiar with as solo piano music but which also exists in its orchestral guise supplied by Liszt. These are not transcriptions but are real alternative versions for orchestra. The one exception is the tone poem, From the Cradle to the Grave' which was a late work, never performed during Liszt's life and only available as an orchestral composition.

Medieval Baebes and other far greater shocks to the bourgeoisie have come along. Wild adventures placed under the rubric of performances of Vivaldi's Four Seasons are commonplace. Yet Nigel Kennedy continues to roost atop the classical sales charts in Europe, and even to command a decent following in the U.S. despite a low American tolerance for British eccentricity. How does he do it? He has kept reinventing himself successfully. Perhaps he's the classical world's version of Madonna: he's possessed of both unerring commercial instincts and with enough of a sense of style to be able to dress them up as forms of rebellion. Inner Thoughts is a collection of slow movements – inner movements of famous concertos from Bach and Vivaldi to Brahms, Bruch, and Elgar.