Romantic Dynamics

Van Cliburn: Tchaikovsky - Concertos No. 1 / Rachmaninoff - Concerto No. 2
Kondrashin, RCA Symphony / Reiner, Chigaco Symphony
SACD ISO (2.0/MCH): 3,23 GB | 24B/88,2kHz Stereo FLAC: 1,26 GB | Full Artwork: 26 MB
Label/Cat#: RCA Red Seal "Living Stereo" # 82876-61392-2 | Country/Year: US 2004
Genre: Classical | Style: Romantic, Early 20th Century

Two complete Living Stereo LPs on a single disc! Van Cliburn's history-making gold medal at the 1st Tchaikovsky Competition in Moscow at the height of the cold war helped his Tchaikovsky Concerto No. 1 to become classical music's 1st platinum record.

Karajan’s artistic grip on the Salzburg Festival unofficially spanned three decades and woe betide anyone who upset him. Whether Kempff did or did not must be a matter of conjecture. What is sure is that this was his one and only appearance at the event. He was 63 years old at the time and lived to the ripe old age of 96, outliving Karajan himself. He was also a major recording artist for DG and their influence on the Festival was almost as pervasive as the conductor’s. Nevertheless this disc manages to fill a gap in Kempff’s discography with the Beethoven and Brahms works, two of the composers (Schubert and Schumann the others) with whose music this great pianist is readily associated.

If you adn't noticed, Bach aficionados as a grumpy, contentious lot, and have been long before the period stylists assaulted the city gates with battering rams. In 1981 The Gramophone's reviewer greeted Gidon Kremer's first cycle of Bach's solo sonatas and partitas quite sourly, admiring the brilliant technique but deciding, overall, that the interpretation was wide of Bach's intentions. This strikes me as indefensible.

Though written almost contemporaneously, the violin sonatas of Richard Strauss and César Franck stem from different ends of the two composers' careers. The Strauss sonata was written while the composer was still a young man, at about the same time of his tone poem Don Juan. It is a sonata of youthful enthusiasm, still bearing the remnants of his training studying the works of the Classical and early Romantic masters while hinting at the rhythmic and tonal complexity that was to come in his more mature writing. The Franck sonata, by contrast, was written late in the composer's life and demonstrates Franck's developed style.

This is a repackaging in a budget priced twofer of previously released singles, both Read more Legends for cello and piano, received two reviews, one by William Zagorski and another by Martin Anderson, both in 24:4. By now it is well known that Heinrich von Herzogenberg (1843–1900) practically worshipped Brahms. But it wasn’t enough for him to try to imitate the elder composer’s style; he ended up marrying the woman that Brahms had proposed marriage to and then reneged on.

"…The Mannheim Quartet emphasises the stormy Romantic outpourings of the Op. 9's outer movements while achieving a particularly fine inner balance in its lyrical Adagio, and the playing in the sunnier Quartet in E is notable for felicitous phrasing and balanced dynamics…

Few musical partnerships have elicited such divergent critical opinions as Maurizio Pollini and Claudio Abbado in Brahms’s two piano concertos. Reviewing the First Concerto in April 1999, Richard Osborne found ‘a lack of quickness and intelligence in the inner-part playing’ while missing ‘any real sense of interaction between soloist and orchestra’. A year earlier Bryce Morrison, in his review of the Second Concerto, had found it ‘impossible to think of them apart, their unity [here] is so indissoluble’. BM also praised what he heard as ‘a granitic reading stripped of all surplus gesture, preening mannerism or overt display, intent only on the unveiling of a musical or moral truth’.

On MDG, the Meccore String Quartet has recorded Edvard Grieg’s three works for string quartet, of which only String Quartet No. 1 in G minor is in complete form. Grieg’s music is often seen as defined by a small body of works: Piano Concerto, Peer Gynt suites, Holberg Suite, Lyric Pieces for solo piano including the notable Wedding Day at Troldhaugen. Nevertheless, there are a number of gems to discover, including the Cello Sonata, the three Violin Sonatas and the G minor String Quartet performed here.