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#71
Recordings & Broadcasts / Re: A trip to the record store...
Last post by Richard Moss - Saturday 13 April 2024, 23:23I can't remember the details now correctly but in the 1960s I remember perusing the Classical Music Guide (or whatever it was called before it morphed into the enormous RED catalogue). The joy was not only seeing, at a glance, all the available recordings of a particular work, but the eye could take-in other/unknown works and composers in adjoining entries. There was no need to spell out a composer's name to get the details.
Admittedly, as John & Alan say, the choice then was much smaller but I suspect that, given if I had a copy of the catalogue in my hands, I would find what I wanted as lot quicker than typing in the details online. However, that meant a trip to the store to see the catalogue (until I started to buy it) so overall on-line probably was quicker (if less satisfying). The explosion in entries over the last two or three decades is mind-blowing. However, now when I peruse the PRESTO lists of the week's new releases, there seems to be fewer and fewer orchestral 'romantic-period' works being listed. I hope this is NOT the end of our 'golden age' for unsungs. que sera!
Richard
Admittedly, as John & Alan say, the choice then was much smaller but I suspect that, given if I had a copy of the catalogue in my hands, I would find what I wanted as lot quicker than typing in the details online. However, that meant a trip to the store to see the catalogue (until I started to buy it) so overall on-line probably was quicker (if less satisfying). The explosion in entries over the last two or three decades is mind-blowing. However, now when I peruse the PRESTO lists of the week's new releases, there seems to be fewer and fewer orchestral 'romantic-period' works being listed. I hope this is NOT the end of our 'golden age' for unsungs. que sera!
Richard
#72
Recordings & Broadcasts / Re: A trip to the record store...
Last post by Alan Howe - Saturday 13 April 2024, 21:23I have most if not all of the old Penguin guides. I still flick through them and find recordings I'd missed or forgotten about. Happy days. Much more fun than scanning websites...
#73
Recordings & Broadcasts / Re: A trip to the record store...
Last post by kolaboy - Saturday 13 April 2024, 20:53I still have an old Schwann from 1981. I used it (at the time) to look up various pieces I'd not heard before to request on our local classical station. Likely drove them nuts at the time...
#74
Recordings & Broadcasts / Re: Saint-Saëns: Déjanire
Last post by Alan Howe - Saturday 13 April 2024, 19:13I'm listening to CD1 as I type and I confess I'm vaguely disappointed. I had been expecting something along the lines of Samson et Dalila - but no, this is spare, almost severe; quite unlike anything else I've heard by the composer. Of course, this is late Saint-Saëns, having been composed in 1909-10 when he was in his mid-seventies. I suppose it'd be like expecting Verdi's Falstaff to be like Aida.
It's decently sung here - not spectacularly, but more than well enough, given that we just don't have many great voices in the romantic repertoire these days.
Déjanire will probably never catch on, but it may fascinate...
4,000 copies have been produced. Mine is no. 3597 (whatever that means).
It's decently sung here - not spectacularly, but more than well enough, given that we just don't have many great voices in the romantic repertoire these days.
Déjanire will probably never catch on, but it may fascinate...
4,000 copies have been produced. Mine is no. 3597 (whatever that means).
#75
Recordings & Broadcasts / Re: A trip to the record store...
Last post by Alan Howe - Saturday 13 April 2024, 18:59Yes: we live in an age of extraordinary plenty. I suppose if you think about it, it would be like comparing 1983 with 1942! However bitterly we might complain about the non-availability of so much music in recordings, we have a great deal to be grateful for. As I type this I'm listening to Saint-Saëns' Déjanire. Who'd've thought it...? (Mind you, we had better singers 41 years ago, especially in the romantic repertoire.)
I used to enjoy my trips to the record shops in London. They always had something I hadn't heard of: I was like a kid in some huge sweet shop (sorry, John: candy store!)
I used to enjoy my trips to the record shops in London. They always had something I hadn't heard of: I was like a kid in some huge sweet shop (sorry, John: candy store!)
#76
Recordings & Broadcasts / A trip to the record store, 41...
Last post by John Boyer - Saturday 13 April 2024, 18:31I recently came across one of my own old Schwann catalogs. I thought I had long since discarded them, but I still had one from July 1983. (I had started collecting them beginning in 1979). That we live in a golden age of recording is emphasized by what you could get in those days.
Do you like Raff? They were only three LPs available: Ponti's recording of the Piano Concerto, a competing one on the Genesis label, and Ruiz's recording of the Suite in D minor. That was it, nothing else. The Turnabout recording of the 3rd Symphony was out print by then.
Do you like Pfitzner? There was only one thing available, DG's recording of "Palestrina". Nothing else.
But even among mainstream composers there were many surprising gaps. For Robert Schumann there are no recordings of the third violin sonata, and of the other two there are only three: Zeitlin on Vox, the Laredos on Desto, Gorevic, long time principal violist of my local symphony, on Crystal.
What's interesting about these lonely three recordings is that not a one is on what were then the major labels of the day: RCA, Columbia/CBS, EMI/Angel, Decca/London, Phillips, and DG. Schumann, in 1983 treated like Bruch: a few favorites and little else.
And so it goes, composer after composer:the unsung composers we discuss here represented by one or two recordings or not at all, and even major composers represented by recordings of a limited number celebrated works, but the rest of their output ignored.
Do you like Raff? They were only three LPs available: Ponti's recording of the Piano Concerto, a competing one on the Genesis label, and Ruiz's recording of the Suite in D minor. That was it, nothing else. The Turnabout recording of the 3rd Symphony was out print by then.
Do you like Pfitzner? There was only one thing available, DG's recording of "Palestrina". Nothing else.
But even among mainstream composers there were many surprising gaps. For Robert Schumann there are no recordings of the third violin sonata, and of the other two there are only three: Zeitlin on Vox, the Laredos on Desto, Gorevic, long time principal violist of my local symphony, on Crystal.
What's interesting about these lonely three recordings is that not a one is on what were then the major labels of the day: RCA, Columbia/CBS, EMI/Angel, Decca/London, Phillips, and DG. Schumann, in 1983 treated like Bruch: a few favorites and little else.
And so it goes, composer after composer:the unsung composers we discuss here represented by one or two recordings or not at all, and even major composers represented by recordings of a limited number celebrated works, but the rest of their output ignored.
#77
Recordings & Broadcasts / Re: Julius Rietz Symphony No.1
Last post by Alan Howe - Saturday 13 April 2024, 14:42Thanks for the reminder, Eric. Here's the thread on Rietz's Symphony No.3:
https://www.unsungcomposers.com/forum/index.php/topic,8845.0.html
https://www.unsungcomposers.com/forum/index.php/topic,8845.0.html
#78
Recordings & Broadcasts / Re: Julius Rietz Symphony No.1
Last post by eschiss1 - Saturday 13 April 2024, 12:42meanwhile Rêverie has given us a file of the 3rd symphony, for which thanks.
#79
Recordings & Broadcasts / Re: Franz Schmidt Fredigundis
Last post by Droosbury - Friday 12 April 2024, 12:02That's good. Thanks Alan
#80
Recordings & Broadcasts / Re: Franz Schmidt Fredigundis
Last post by Alan Howe - Thursday 11 April 2024, 18:45Yes - a libretto with English translation.