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It's a very special piece which I have loved for years. Sitting in on the recording and hearing it over and over again played by intelligent and very capable musicians has meant that I have found so much more in it than I had heard over the last 8 years of listening to the same flat Swiss radio broadcast.

I don't think that anybody buying the CD when it's available will be disappointed with either the music or its execution.

Santa Claus should just about be able to deliver it, if the current schedule doesn't slip...

I'm in Sweden, at the recording sessions for Raff's Suite for Piano & Orchestra. Although I've heard it played live once before, the orchestra for that performance was enthusuaistic but hardly top flight. Today I've had the pleasure of hearing first class soloist, orchestra and conductor refine this opening over three takes into something which I found quite spine tingling. The way the short tutti builds the tension over just very few bars to announce an electric piano entry should make a genuinely "stunning" beginning to the recording.

Welcome back Fernando!   

When I say archived, Jim, what I mean is that a copy of what was online now rests on my hard disk. To make it accessible to everyone, obviously it needs to be online again and to do that safely we have to remove the infection, otherwise anyone who accesses it runs the risk of getting infected. The malware links are invisible when you browse the infected pages yes, but that doesn't mean that they aren't there. What has to be done is remove all the links and then there's no longer any danger. But you have to find the links first....

Yes, Peter, I have preserved a copy of the database which made up the old Forum. Of course, it also has preserved within it the hacked pages and posts which caused its demise. So, the job is to find a way of identifying and safely removing the malicious code whilst keeping the threads intact and searchable, if not capable of being added to.

I won't pretend that I am spending every waking hour on this. Indeed, after the problems of the last couple of months, which coincided with a very busy time domestically, I have taken a temporary step back from beavering away on the web. The eagle eyed may have noticed that I have not updated the Raff site for six weeks. It will be updated sometime towards the end of this month.

So, finding a way to preserve and publish the old threads remains a goal but it isn't an immediate prospect either.

You might as well vote, then, Kevin 

Here's the promised poll on whether we should have avatars.

On the whole I'm agnostic (or perhaps indifferent would be a better word) on the issue. I have no great yen to display an avatar myself. I do think that they tend to "dumb down" at least the look if not the tone of a Forum. On the other hand I had never considered Kevin's point about visual identification and I can see that and also his point that my attitude might be construed as being patronising. Which it wasn't meant to be.

I guess it comes down to what they look like and we'd just have to wait and see - I certainly wouldn't want to get into laying down rules for the look of avatars! There aren't many of us, when all's said and done.

There's no work for me, by the way, Alan. Just a couple of clicks would enable avatars. And John, I'd much prefer to have avatars than set up a separate portraits page.

OK, let's have a  poll and I'll abide by the result after, say, a week. I'll post the poll in a moment...

Thanks Ilja, Peter and Jim on the question of why Raff dedicated the Piano Quintet to the King of the Netherlands. I have no idea, but the Nassau link does seem very plausible.

By the way, you're right to highlight the Divox CD - it is immeasurably better than the performance on the MDG disc, even though that has the benefit of a superb performance of the String SExtet as a coupling.

Cheers,

Mark

It seems that cpo have at last woken up to  Brüll. They've announced a new CD with Alexandra Oehler playing some significant piano works: Piano Sonata op.73, Suite No.2 op.71 and the collection 7 Albumblätter für die Jugend op. 33 together with extracts from other collections.

Declamatory, yes Alan, but there's much more melody in the vocal writing than in long stretches of The Ring, for example.

I wouldn't so much say Brahmsian as generic middle-period German romantic. A very attractive work, it is melodically rich and well worth investigating. The Sterling CD which features it, together with the Concert Overture,  Könzertstück for Oboe & Orchestra and the Auf der Wanderschaft Suite is a rewarding investment.

International Record Review is a little UK gem. It's what the Gramophone used to be. Straightforward, open-minded reviews and serious features about composers and recordings. None of the flashy celeb stuff which Gramophone has espoused. It's available on subscription, although I don't know what the US cost would be.

I enjoy reading American Record Guide and Fanfare when I visit the US, but they're far too expensive to buy regularly over here.

Arthur Foote.