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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...

Why not?

When we set up the Raff Forums there was a general feeling against Avatars, the little pictures displayed next to each poster's name in each post. They were felt to be distracting and juvenile. Personally, I'm still of that view as far as Avatars themselves are concerned, but I appreciate that's not what's being suggested by John & Jim. I'll have a delve into the software and see if a photo can be added to our profile.

Welcome Izdawiz, after years of lurking!

Regarding all the old post and disccussion archives, are there future plans to incorporate those in this new forum.

Yes and no. Yes, there are plans in the sense that we're going to try and retrieve the old threads and posts and add them to the site as some sort of archive. No, nothing has been done about it yet because the priority had to be get a working Forum back up and running. I can't promise anything at this stage because a major issue is that the database is still infected with the malware links and silent downloads which caused the site to be suspended in the first place. If the database can reliably be cleaned then it will certainly be possible to restore the old forum. It'll not happen any time soon though.

Whilst writing, I must say how touched I am by all your messages. They really have made all the workof the last week worthwhile. Thank you.

Yes, Google have been commendably quick in restoring the Raff site to "clean" status. So, hopefully I can put this whole episode (and the attendant work) behind me now and get on with the music...

NO. I don't really want to buy another and feel the same. How would you characterise Ogden in comparison with two which I know, Gareth?

This is very significant news indeed. Well done on behalf of us all, Alan!