Weinberg Cancer

There’s a great quote in Wendy Lesser’s excellent book, Music for Silenced Voices: Shostakovich and his Fifteen Quartets, that describes the composer’s unique relationship with his quartets: “He could toy with cacophony, immerse himself in irony, indulge in all his darkest, least acceptable moods, and not be called unpatriotic, because nobody who cared about such labels [the Soviet censors] was listening to these compositions.” That’s why these works are so great: they represent the unbridled creative powers of one of the twentieth century’s great composers. This is the third of four releases ……

Robert Moon @ Audiophile Audition

The Levon Helm Band is making more than music in Woodstock, NY nestled in the heart of the Catskill Mountains, they are orchestrating a musical carnival known as The Midnight Ramble. The idea is to recreate, inside Levon Helm Studios, the traveling shows (like F.S. WalcottOs Rabbit Foot Minstrel show) that played in the South where Levon grew up as a boy, embracing the merging musical traditions of the time; blues, gospel, country, rock and roll, bluegrass, rockabilly, soul and jazz. Levon Helm (The Band, R.C.O All-Stars) made a career on stage and screen as a singer, drummer, band leader, writer and actor. He has assembled some of the premiere musicians on the East Coast to take part in the carnival. The room is a unique studio, all wooden (no nails only wooden pegs holding the barnOs towering hemlock beams together) with locally quarried bluestone and the ambiance of a church hall.

This is the last installment of the Pacifica Quartet’s Shostakovich cycle named “The Soviet Experience” because it adds one quartet by other Russian composers (Miaskovsky, Prokofiev, Weinberg, and Schnittke) to each release. Although there are many performances of the complete Shostakovich quartets available, the Pacifica Quartet’s traversal of these masterpieces is one of the best. Their sheer brilliance of execution, the emotional depth of their interpretation and the stunning sound make this a most desirable set……

Robert Moon @ Audiophile Audition