… and the Internet becomes a virtual concert hall. Daniel Wakin has the story and the links.
Apologies for the dearth of posts in the last two weeks; back up to speed soon.
Category Archives: Classical Music, Recorded
Back to Mono: Petri on the CD Player
It must be nearly a decade since I’ve popped any of pianist Egon Petri’s recordings into the CD player. I’m very pleased to have made his reacquaintance.
Passionato.com Blogs, Tweets, Rocks On
If you like classical music and care about quality, you should check out Passionato.com (full disclosure: I’m helping them with Web presence expansion). Continue reading Passionato.com Blogs, Tweets, Rocks On
Cheap Thrills: Outstanding Recent Budget CDs
I know, I know — the market for music recordings is in flux if not chaos, and there are growing indications that downloads are finally starting to hit the head of a “tipping point” among the non-teen-and-college-age demographic. And yes, a growing share of my own acquisitions are file downloads. But for the most part I remain an unreconstructed consumer knuckledragger who orders finished product online, bids on scarce audio gratification in disc formaat on eBay, and frequents the handful of well-stocked “record stores” left in Manhattan.
Continue reading Cheap Thrills: Outstanding Recent Budget CDs
Scandal in Audiophile Land
Audioholics busts high-end audiovisual manufacturer Lexicon for re-chassis-ing a $495 Oppo blu-ray player and selling it for $3500. (Via Gizmodo.)
Spelunking for Well-digitized Vinyl
If you have not yet stumbled upon Grumpy’s Classics Cave, you are depriving yourself of some extremely rare aural treats. Yes, a bit of time is required to download Grumpy’s lossless .flac files, but your patience will be well rewarded. His latest offering from the cave is an exceptional vintage recording of lute music by John Dowland played with pre-historically-informed, almost neo-Romantic passion by Mildred Clary.
ECM at 40
The New York Times‘s Steve Smith profiles the groundbreaking German record label and its iconoclastic founder Manfred Eicher.
Vintage Holiday Cheer
Yes, I know it’s from an Easter oratorio. Yes, you’d expect me to post an historically informed version. But no! Here’s a 1938 aircheck of the “Hallelujah” Chorus from Handel’s Messiah (in what sounds to me to be Mozart’s arrangement) performed by the Concertgebouw Orchestra and Tonkunstkoor conducted by Willem Mengelberg, with a little bit of audio restoration from a so-so source by yours truly.
{enclose Handel-Mozart.Messiah.Hallalujah.1_eq.mp3}
Hear last year’s early electrical holiday cheer here.
Piano Gems from the Glorious Socialist Workers’ Paradise
A surprisingly good confluence of solo piano music from the former Soviet Union has found its way to the CD, SACD, and DVD formats in 2009. Four of these releases are of particular merit, and one of them made my Best of 2009 list.
Continue reading Piano Gems from the Glorious Socialist Workers’ Paradise
Best Recordings of 2009: More Critics Weigh In
Now that you’ve had a chance to take in my modest, understated views on this year’s best classical recordings, I feel it only fair to point to a few other top ten lists:
Continue reading Best Recordings of 2009: More Critics Weigh In