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The Rufinatscha pieces are a mouth-watering prospect,  Alan. I do hope that you'll give us report on them, Ilja.

Great news about the recording, Alan. Coincidentally, Ilja, I will be in that part of Austria this summer but not until August I'm afraid. Looks like you'll have to hold up the "Hello, Mum!" banner for all of us...

Although clearly I disagree with Amphissa on the merits of the Górecki, I do agree entirely with the sentiments of his third paragraph. Well said. We should all enjoy what we enjoy.

I don't know the Messiaen. I do know the Górecki. It was quite in vogue in the UK 10-15 years ago. It's very accessible but IMHO pretty much a naive "Johnny-one-note" one-trick pony. The mood of lamentation and grief is effectively built up but, because it and the uniformly slow pace are maintained throughout the whole work, it looses its impact because there is no contrast, nothing to throw things into focus. Very much a case of "more is not always better".

Later this month cpo will be releasing Bruch's Oratorio Arminius in a two CD set and continue their Herzogenberg-fest with the first of three CDs covering his string quarrtets. This one has the String Quartet No.5 coupled with the early Piano Quintet. Two must-buys in my book as everything is a recording premiere I think.

I do agree on all counts: first two movements are great stuff, the finale on a rather lower plane, but I'm pleased to have the work and play it often.

Maybe, just maybe, it's fairer to criticise after you've heard the work?

Amen to that.

You'd expect me to beat the drum for Raff and so I shall.

The Piano Quintet is one of his masterpieces and I recommend that you buy the new Divox recording with Il Trittico. You get the added bonus of the substantial Fantasie for Piano Quintet (itself a delight) and Goetz' Piano Quintet. Avoid the MDG disk which couples it with the String Sextet. That's a fine interpretation, but the Piano Quintet is dire.

Then there are the four Piano Trios, any and all of which are superb. There are two cycles: Il Trittico once again on Arte Nova (discontinued but easy to find) is a fine budet option and there are also two separate disks from Trio Opus 8 on cpo. All these recordings are reviewed at Raff.org.

Coming up, possibly as early as the end of the year, is a second Divox CD which features the premiere recordings of the two Piano Quartets. The players are Il Trittico once again and these are stunning performances of two more glorious works.

Raff really is at his consistent best in these eight works. If you like his orchestral music you'll be bowled over by his works for piano and strings.

Dvorak's 2nd. One BIG tune and umpteen other great ones. A whistle fest...

How about Dohnanyi's Variations on a Nursery Theme? Just about as portentous an opening as you could conjure up - it even outdoes Brahms' 1st. Piano Concerto. Of course, what follows isn't quite what you're led to expect by this beginning 

Thanks, Martin. I've been wondering about getting hold of this for some time but was put off by some rather patronising reviews I'd read online. I'll track it down. Didn't Mathieu have a rather sad life: classic tale of a child prodigy for whom adult life went wrong?

From the excerpts available on the Hyperion site, the two Benedict works seem to be rather attractive creations in the Mendelssohn tradition. They are earlyish works and from these brief samples don't seem to have the stodginess which his late Symphony exhibits, at least in the radio recording I have.

The Macfarren (Walter, I see, not his much more celebrated brother George), sounds from its introduction to be rather old-fashioned for 1880, but I guess that needn't worry us 130 years on.

It's good to see English music championed in this series.

Here's confirmation of the Foote orchestral works CD now released by Naxos. Also released is the third volume of their Martucci survey.

I do agree, it is rather stark at present but I was focussed on getting it up and running. A lot of design time over several months went into the Raff site, tweaking and perfecting a look with which I'm still very pleased. But I had the luxury of being able to take as long as I wanted because the old site was still up and running. This time around, as we were offline, I didn't want to keep people waiting for my artistic juices, such as they are, to flow. So once I'd homed in on the software, it was a question of choosing one of its "themes" on which to base the site and then committing to it, whatever its imperfections.

There'll certainly be a softer and more welcoming banner in the near future (my wife is working on that) and over the next few months I'll be adding tweaks and changes to improve both the usability and the look 'n feel. For instance, last night I increased the size of the font in the breadcrumb trail below the main menu because it was way too small before. There may be more radical changes too, we'll see...