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Gramophone CD OF THE MONTH
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Pitch-perfect Prokofiev from the Pavel Haas Quartet... what comes through above all is a laser-like intensity and youthful brio... In the wondrous Adagio the cello line rises high, ghostly melodic statements in octaves can expose the smallest tuning difficulties and pizzicati needs must sparkle like. The young players pass every test before dispatching the inventive finale with equal aplomb, differentiating a wide variety of moods and timbres within a swiftish frame. Of the small clutch of classic performances of the component pieces, none is more usefully programmed than the present disc, nor so naturally recorded. Why hesitate?Gramophone | |
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BBC Music Magazine - CD OF THE MONTH
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Rather than trawl for forgotten manuscripts more widely through Latin America, Ashley Solomon and his group Florilegium prefer to concentrate their efforts on the archives in Bolivia. Solomon has founded a choir there, and both his groups regularly appear at the biennial renaissance and baroque festival in the Jesuit missions of the Chiquitos region. Their latest compilation includes pieces from those missions and from those of Moxos, together with music from the cathedral in La Plata, the present-day city of Sucre. Though the sources aren''t always made clear, it''s a lively, nicely varied sequence, mostly of works showcasing Solomon''s excellent Arakaender choir, interspersed with an anonymous trio-sonatas and organ pieces recorded on a wonderfully gutsy instrument at the mission church of Santa Ana in the Bolivian part of the Amazon basin. The Italian-born Domenico Zipoli is the best known composer represented, appropriately enough, perhaps, for he did at least make the journey from Europe to the Spanish colonies in the new world. The Guardian | |
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Berlioz: Symphonie Fantastique
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Though period-instrument recordings of the Fantastic are not uncommon, none that I have heard makes Berlioz’s linear scoring so startlingly different. This, you feel, is how it would have sounded in the 1830s (Erard harps and pianos included). The woodwind and horns, in particular, leap out, but it is the sheer raw clarity of every line and colour in these Flemish players’ performance, and its effect on the rhythms, that strikes you, especially in their revelatory account of the opening movement. Van Immerseel is, otherwise, quite a sober interpreter, resisting the temptation that besets many conductors to whip up the animatos (and setting a rather slow tempo in the Roman Carnival), but only the Scčne aux champs seems to me inauthentically heavy-handed. The finale is electric. The Sunday Times | |
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Special Interest DVD - Artists A to Z
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