His later Nocturnes are wonderful as well.
I’ve wondered about the Varèse. I’ve got an old copy from the 70’s (French label iirc ) so this Decca reissue could be mighty interesting. Can’t play the video as outdoors. I’ll play it later.
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I got the new Decca Pure Analogue reissue last week. It sounds fantastic and it’s my favorite of the batch of four that just came out in the series (Varèse, Strauss, Dvorak, Mahler). As it happens my dealer was out last week to fine-tune my REL six-pack array. They did a great job improving on my settings. The Varèse is the perfect album to illustrate what a six-pack brings to the table. It’s too bad I didn’t have it yet when my dealer was here.
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I just ordered a copy @JosquinDesPrez. For its age, my old Vox issue (French) with the Die Reihe ensemble is holding up well, but an offer on the Decca Pure Analogue was irresistible.
I’m looking forward to hearing it!
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EBS really did a great job remastering the Varèse. Enjoy it! I certainly am. It’s staying on my current playlist for a while.
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Ning Feng in remarkably interventionist performances of Mozart’s violin concertos. Whenever he gets the tune going, he pulls back tempo and/or volume, and his cadenzas could have come from Paganini. All this revitalizes music that quickly turns same-y in lesser hands, I really like it.
Cheers
EJ
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Purcell’s Fantasias are essential gamba food! This is a fantastic record, one of Savall’s best IMO.
Cheers
EJ
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An evening of Schumann here. He can often be hard work for my ears/brain, especially in his solo piano and chamber works as he crams in so many brilliant thoughts, one after another and I struggle to keep pace, but tonight, with the help of the recent Utopik Radikal from @Cymbiosis (utterly transformative IME) my LP12 had me transfixed.
Starting with @EJS prompt on the Piano Concerto and following with the Piano Quartet. The latter has never made so much sense, thrilled and stunned me as much as it did tonight.
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The 2005 performances of the Ring in Amsterdam were edited by Haenchen himself and released on SACD. Twenty years on, their main value is the memory of the occasion. The recordings suffer from the live sound stage: not that the sound quality is bad - quite the opposite - but the singers act out their parts to each other and an audience, which seldom puts the listener at the full focus - and we’re never drawn in the performance like a good studio recording manages.
Cheers
EJ
Compared the last 15 minutes of Haenchen’s Rheingold to the other Rheingold I have on SACD, Solti. Bad idea. In every respect, the Solti outclasses it even more than I remembered, even in terms of the recorded sound.
Cheers
EJ
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The Horneck/Pittsburgh releases on References Recordings are the best sounding large orchestral recordings in my collection. So I took a chance on this. 96/24 download. $10 and change as a Qobuz Sublime member.
Oops - just checked, and it’s on sale at Presto for even less. If it’s part of an RR all label sale, I’ll probably pick up some more.
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How do you like the Runnicle reading compared to Horneck?
Runnicle is one of my fave conductor but I do not have any of his Marhler.
I have no Horneck Mahler. I only have Horneck’s Reference Recording releases, and he hasn’t done any on that label. However his Bruckner 7th sounds great - and I’m not a big Bruckner fan.
Also, I won’t listen to the Runnicles Mahler until I have a chance to do so on my big system - with no air conditioners running. 
But I’ve yet to hear a Mahler 5th that had the sonic impact of the Horneck discs I’ve bought, so I’m excited.
In the meanwhile, I also picked up the Ohlsson/Runnicles cycle of Beethoven piano concertos on Reference. Reviews were mixed for the performances, but the sound should be first rate and the price was/is right, especially for downloads. I’ve enjoyed Ohlsson’s Chopin in recital and he almost convinced me that Scriabin knew what he was doing (also in recital).
And I saw just today that Ohlsson will be performing both Chopin concertos with Orpheus in NYC next season. I’ll be getting tickets.
Thanks for the heads up on this album. By coincidence I had just arrived back from Latvia a couple of days ago when I saw your post. We had a guide in Riga who stressed how important singing was to Latvians. Every 5 years a song and, more recently, dance festival is held in Riga, with over 40,000 participants in 2023, and over 10,000 singers in the final concert of the festival. All Latvians sing according to our guide so I’m not surprised the choir performs to such a high standard. Thanks again.
Roger
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At first listen, I found Laloum’s Novelletten excellent and Kreisleriana rather anemic. However, I was listening at too low a volume - this recording needs a healthy sound pressure to open up. Once past that realisation, I really enjoyed both performances. In Kreisleriana, Laloum doesn’t topple Perahia, Uchida or Pollini - all of whom put more emphasis on the contrasts at the cost of some four-squareness, while Laloum sounds like he has infinitely more shades and dynamic subtleties to his disposal.
Cheers
EJ
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I have Honeck’s Bruckner 4 and 9 on SACD. Excellent performances, especially #4.
Cheers
EJ
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