Sheep Maay Safely Graze

Five discs - five conductors - four orchestras - nine composers - 28 works: Decca's collection Ultimate Baroque is as one might imagine a mixed bag. The best of the set is I Musici's sweet and fresh 1996 recording of Vivaldi's Four Seasons, with Mariana Sirbu as the lighter-than-air and younger-than-springtime soloist and Neville Marriner and the Academy of St. Martin-in-the-Fields' stately yet sprightly 1971 recording of Bach's four Suites for orchestra, and Raymond Leppard and the English Chamber Orchestra's robust and rambunctious 1970 and 1972 recordings of Handel's Water Music suites and Music for the Royal Fireworks.

This is a Great Classical piece for the lovers of classical, as well as the ones who may hate it. These Adagios CDs get beter and better each time there is a new release. I must warn you there some good as well as some bad ones. There is a certain Adagio flavor for everyones.

The Wise Virgins – complete ballet (1940) by William WALTON (1902-1983) after J.S. BACH (1685-1750) arranged by Philip LANE (b.1950) ; Horoscope – complete ballet (1938) by Constant LAMBERT (1905-1951). Both these ballets from a vintage period of the Sadler's Wells ballet company at the beginning of the second world war, have till now appeared on disc only in truncated form as orchestral suites. William Walton's ballet, the Wise Virgins, using movements from Bach cantatas, was quickly dropped in the theatre, with the score of three of the movements lost or destroyed. Philip Lane has now reorchestrated those, using the original Bach scores, in a style near enough to Walton's. Similarly, Constant Lambert's Horoscope, a colourful piece on an astrological theme, here appears for the first time with four extra items.

In the nineteenth century, piano transcriptions were both standard items in the performing repertory and the way most people got to know new music, or in the case of Bach, newly rediscovered music. There are lots of transcriptions for piano of Bach's works for strings, wind instruments, or voices, and Italian-French-American pianist Alessio Bax has dug into the older repertory and forged a program full of fresh items and attractive contrasts.

Johann Sebastian Bach - The Conductors' Transcriptions (Damrosch, Gui, Klemperer, Ormandy, Wood & more)
BBC Symphony Orchestra / Leonard Slatkin
EAC+LOG+CUE | FLAC: 305 MB | Artwork | 5% Recovery Info
Label/Cat#: Chandos # CHSA 5030 | Country/Year: Europe 2004
Genre: Classical | Style: Baroque

…The point is that Bach is the most indestructible of all composers, in the best sense of the term. And as with all great music the work is always greater than any one performance of it, so these wonderfully imaginative reincarnations of Bach’s originals bring with them a great deal of satisfaction. Part of the intention in every case, surely, was to realise the nature of Bach’s music in new ways through the potential offered by a great orchestra in performance. In that crucial and important way Leonard Slatkin and the BBC Symphony Orchestra, along with the Chandos engineers, have triumphed…

SOMM RECORDINGS is pleased to announce a celebration of Favourite Orchestral Classics by Iain Sutherland and the Philharmonic Concert Orchestra. Recorded in Munich in 1988 and Hanover in 1992, these glorious recordings bear the unmistakable stamp of the Scottish maestro’s reputation for emotion, colour and drama.

Nick Cave finally gives the dedicated fans what they've desired for years (and have probably amassed in various guises in shoddy bootlegs): an official career-spanning cataloging of the various Bad Seeds odds and ends on three CDs. There are 56 tracks compiled here…