What is your current Record of the Week ?

[Barbirollians]

The Previn Richard Strauss recordings on Telarc . Fine as they are none so far has come quite up to the standard of his wonderful Philips recording of Metamorphosen.

[BBMmk2]

Beefy, re your post about John Ireland. Please give a ty to the brass band works he wrote, A Downland suite and A Comedy Overture(Orch. Vers. A London Overture). They both are very good, if not superior in this the original form, other than the string version of the former I mentioned, and the orchestral version, as well.

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

Mahler 10 Seattle/dausgaard
Very fine performance, untouched by routine, almost up there with Mark Wigglesworth

Fingers crossed that he and his record company are so encouraged by the sales and positive reviews of this that we get a recording of his magnificent conducting of the Bruckner Ninth with added Finale, Alison.

[rauschwerk]

A box which is never far from my player is Suzuki's superb 55 CD set of the Bach sacred cantatas. I bought this in June and at the current rate of progress it will take me a year or so to get through. Such wonderful music - at least one magical movement in every cantata. And it seems to suppress my CD buying appetite!

[teamsaint]

just to bump the thread, my own current " can't get it out of my head" is Milton Babbitts 1st Piano Concerto.

Strictly speaking this is not a current record of the week, as I am listening to it on Youtube, as you can see.

[Beef Oven!]

I keep meaning to post my latest musings ....

Part 1

I’ve been giving a hiding to .....

Trifonov - Transendental (Liszt) DG
Bruckner 3 - Sinopoli/Venzago/Skrowaczewski LPO&Saarbrucken/Norrington LCP&Stuttgart/ et al
Sibelius 6&7 (no pause) Minnesota Orchestra Vanska
Mahler 10 - Seattle SO Dausgaard
Tchaikovsky 4 - Maazel VPO/Gergiev VPO/Karajan DG 1985 EMI 1970 and some/Jurowski LPO
Caerulean - Carl Rosman Clarinet (Rebecca Saunders/Richard Barrett/Aaron CassidyChikako Morishita/Kagel)

Top choice?

Sibelius Vanska Minnesota Orchestra 6&7. This particular couple from the cycle has continued to grow on me. There is something strangely understated but perfect about Vanska’s performance with the MO. It is the most unusual Sibelius performance known to me but I can’t put my finger on why. Even though 7 doesn’t have the standard drama that we expect, it is still totally compelling.

Funny, teamsaint and I were both very underwhelmed and rather disappointed with Vanska in Sibelius at the Proms two years ago.

Part 2 to follow

[EdgeleyRob]

George Lloyd (sorry)

1st & 12th Symphonies,conducted by the composer

and

disc 9 from Simon Preston's complete Bach Organ music,mainly to hear O Lamm Gottes unschuldig, BWV 656,for just one more time,again and again.....

[Beef Oven!]

George Lloyd (sorry)

1st & 12th Symphonies,conducted by the composer

and

disc 9 from Simon Preston's complete Bach Organ music,mainly to hear O Lamm Gottes unschuldig, BWV 656,for just one more time,again and again.....

I have bad weeks too, Rob.

[EdgeleyRob]

I have bad weeks too, Rob.

Thanks BeefO

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

Strictly speaking this is not a current record of the week, as I am listening to it on Youtube, as you can see.

??? But, unless it's a Live streaming, then it's a "record", innit? (GREAT choice, though! )

My "current" (played sixteen times over the last fortnight) is Guiliano d'Angiolini's portrait album Cantilena on Simon Reynell's excellent anothertimbre label:

http://www.anothertimbre.com/cantilena.html

Beautiful, haunting, gentle sounds - very still, but endlessly fascinating and totally captivating. Astonishing to think that five or six years ago, I wouldn't have had much time for this Music. (Well - "astonishing" to me, of course. )

[teamsaint]

??? But, unless it's a Live streaming, then it's a "record", innit? (GREAT choice, though! )

My "current" (played sixteen times over the last fortnight) is Guiliano d'Angiolini's portrait album Cantilena on Simon Reynell's excellent anothertimbre label:

http://www.anothertimbre.com/cantilena.html

Beautiful, haunting, gentle sounds - very still, but endlessly fascinating and totally captivating. Astonishing to think that five or six years ago, I wouldn't have had much time for this Music. (Well - "astonishing" to me, of course. )

Yes,well I sort of meant that its not "my" record, in the sense that I don't own a copy.
Anyway, 16 times sounds a good recommendation , so I had a look around,and there are some tasters on youtube.

Those who use the Naxos library might not have realised( I hadn't) that there is a good listing of new releases , so that page is definitely worth a visit.

[BBMmk2]

At the moment, Sibelius The Great Performances, from Decca Classics. loads of very fine performances. The Anthony Collins complete cycle of symphonies, with tone poems. Individual performances of the tone poems and Symphony No.5, including the classic Alexander Gibson 5th!

[pastoralguy]

Murray Perahia's Bach 'French Suites'.

Wonderful playing.

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

Two very different discs getting the "Must hear that again" treatment, but for similar reasons:

Magnus GRANBERG: Would Fall from the Sky; Would Wither and Die; Shadows & Light Ensemble, anothertimbre at84

I mentioned this CD after playing it for the first time back in November. I was a little disappointed back then - I'd bought and was very enthusiastic about Granberg's previous at disc (How Deep is the Ocean; How High is the Sky?) and the newer release didn't strike me instantly as that had done. It's grown on me somewhat! To describe the Music means using terminology more closely associated with earlier "avant-garde" Music (independent lines coalescing, irregular repetitions, wide-ranging melodic leaps, short detached notes with pauses between), but the Music itself is much gentler than many of those works - it's more like the first couple of bars of the Webern Symphony, repeated and rephrased (and with prepared piano and tuned gongs and glass bowls). It is single-minded in its very slow pace of change - after ten minutes of the first hearing, I was impatient to hear some kind of contrast - but after half-an-hour of a refusal to succumb to alter when alteration is found (or even when it isn't) the loveliness of what it is doing when ignoring established structural procedures becomes clear. And gets clearer with each subsequent hearing.

SCHUMANN: Piano Trio #2 in F major, Op 80; Israel Piano Trio; BRILLIANT CD 02102/3
From the BRILLIANT box of Schumann's complete Chamber Music. I've been playing this repeatedly, because I was very disappointed with the piece when I first heard it. I love Schumann's Music, and the Piano Quintet is one of my favourite pieces (the Piano Quartet is another) - but this work seemed to lack the thematic and harmonic quality of so much of his other Music. It just seemed dull. I wasn't going to let that lie, and so I've played this repeatedly throughout the last week - it's grown on me more, and I enjoy the experience of hearing it much more than I did ... but (and I think that this is at least partly the fault of the performers, who seem to playing as if they're just fulfilling their contractual obligations) it still seems to lack welly, and the tunes aren't nearly as good as Schumann at his best, judging from this performance.

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

This week, volume one of the String Quartets of Jurg FREY played by the Bozzini 4tets on the Wandelweisser label:

String Quartet (1988)
Untitled VI (1990-91)
A Couple of Final Points (1990)
String Quartet II (1998-2000)

I bought this disc after hearing the Second Quartet at the 2015 Huddersfield Festival - it is a quite remarkable piece; half-an-hour of an incredibly quiet progression of "whispered" chords and silences all of equal duration - the sensation it evokes is something akin to waking in the middle of the night and listening to the breathing of your partner, or sitting at night listening to a child's breathing. I find it very reassuring Music, completely original, and totally convincing.

The other works on the disc I don't find quite as beguiling - the First S4tet is a sort-of ten-minute resumé of the Feldman Second; very attractive, but wearing its influence very clearly on both sleeves. The two fragments (forty-seven and twenty-one seconds long respectively) need to be heard separately: in the environment of this disc, they get lost - but they are teasingly enigmatic gestures that demand (and repay) repetition. Untitled VI was the toughest piece for me to get a hold onto - at first hearing, it seems like a series of rising modes, each played by a solo instrument (the others tacet) using the players as a quartet of isolated soloists, with very very rare moments of ensemble. With repeated listenings, the quiet pleasures get greater and greater.

But the Second Quartet remains the "star" of the CD - it's always such an abrupt shattering of the mood when the CD stops.

And ...

Mendelssohn: String Quartet in f minor, Op 80; the Sharon 4tet; BRILLIANT Classics.

The one that starts like a cross between Schubert's Quartetsatz and the Jeremy Brett Sherlock Holmes theme. One of Mendelssohn's best pieces in a very good performance.