Author: Musicophile

I'm not a professional musician, I don't work in the music industry, I'm just what the name says, somebody who loves music. I've been in love with music for all of my life, took piano lessons for nearly 10 years, and played in several amateur Jazz groups. I go to concerts, both classical and Jazz, quite regularly. And I collect music previously on vinyl and CDs, now on my computer, and am slightly OCD on my music collection. You can reach me at Musicophile1(AT)gmail.com

Cavalli: L’Amore Innamorato – Christina Pluhar’s new album

Francesco Cavalli

I actually thought I knew my composers reasonably well, even more obscure ones, but Cavalli was new to me. I’m probably not the only one, this is one of the composers that was known only to early music

So I was a bit surprised to see two new recordings on this Venetian composer coming out at pretty much the same time, Mariana Flores Heroines of the Venetian Baroque (which good excellent reviews in the French press by the way), and also from Christina Pluhar’s early music ensemble Arpeggiata.

Cavalli was a singer and Monteverdi protégée who later started writing his own operas. At his time, he was famous enough tube noticed by Louis XIV’s Cardinal Mazarin to play his operas at the wedding of the Sun King. (That’s probably relatively speaking even better than being invited to play at Kimye’s wedding these days. But I digress.)

L’amore innamorato (Erato 2015)

Christina Pluhar’s ensemble L’Arpeggiata has released some great albums, although the recent ones, especially the “jazzy” Purcell, were reviewed rather controversially.

I haven’t yet seen any reviews on this new Cavalli album, but I think this will be less controversial, as was their initial Monteverdi Teatro d’Amore album from 2009.

It is basically a lot of fun. The beautiful voice of the Spanish soprano Nuria Rial (helped by Hana Blažíková) is a big part of the fun, but Pluhar’s early music ensemble really is playing with a lot of dedication here.

The program is a best-of of Cavalli’s operas (apparently he wrote at least 24), and this is probably a good thing, as following a full early baroque opera seria can sometimes be a bit tedious.

No boredom here, this is thoroughly enjoyable. I suggest you check it out! I’ve added a Youtube sample below.

My rating: 4 stars

You can download it here (Qobuz) or here (HDtracks).

UPDATE November 22: Alexandra Coghlan reviewed this album on Sinfinimusic and gave it 5 stars.

Pappano’s Aida – We’re Really Lucky This Kind of Album Still Gets Produced

Me and opera – again

I’ve already mentioned previously that I’m far less knowledgeable about opera than about instrumental classical music. I clearly come from an instrumental background, and must admit I judge even opera performances first and foremost by the orchestral performance.

I know true opera experts will be able to discuss singer X vs Y. To me, these things matter, but much less. So take my opera recommendations with a big grain of salt.

Furthermore, Verdi is not my daily fare. I listen to a Mozart opera about once per month, Verdi is only on the playlist every quarter or so.

Okay, so the disclaimers are out of the way.

Pappano’s Aida (Warner Classics 2015)

Well, luckily on this album you don’t just need to trust me. I have yet to see a negative review of this outstanding album. The debate is just out whether this is a four or five-star album.

New opera recordings these days are very rare. The productions are simply to expensive for a declining classical music market. So we can count ourselves very lucky if we get new albums at all.

And here we’re even more lucky, because this really hits all the right buttons. Beautiful singing from outstanding artists is matched by the great playing of Pappano with the Santa Cecilia.

Kaufmann is in a way the most hyped tenor of our days. Luckily for us, this hype really is justified, he has an amazing voice. I fully buy his Radomes. Anja Harteros as Aida is maybe a tiny bit lighter, but to be fair my reference so far is the legendary Karajan version with Tebaldi, so I’m being a bit picky here.

The recording quality is very spacious and resolving, and gives an excellent image of the Sala Santa Cecilia.

If only we’d get more of this kind of opera recordings, so we wouldn’t always have to go back to the 1950s and 60s for our operas. Sure, these legendary recordings will stay, but it is nice to be able to experience something with the sound quality of a 2015 high-res download.

My rating: Five stars

You can download it here (Qobuz) or here (HDtracks)

Keith Jarrett: La Scala

Keith Jarrett’s Live Albums

Keith Jarrett and his solo piano concerts are legendary.

If Wikipedia is to be trusted, his Köln Concert is the best-selling solo and piano album in the history, with more than 3.5M albums sold. This may not be much by Taylor Swift standards, but for Jazz, where albums usually selling a some thousands of albums, this number is just mind-boggling.

And what is probably even more mind-boggling is that the Köln Concert is not a one hit wonder, but Jarrett has turned out dozens of solo concert albums in the last thirty years, and usually nearly all of them are worth having.

I’ve started this blog writing about the lucky chance I had to see Jarrett live earlier this year, and it is truly an outstanding experience.

In my 25 Essential Jazz albums post, I’ve promised to myself that I’ll eventually review all of his live solo albums.

This will be a challenging task, but well, you’ve got to have ambitions in life. Let’s see how long this journey is going to take.

La Scala (ECM 1997)

Every journey has got to start somewhere. I rather randomly chose La Scala for a start. Why? Well, the cover is beautiful, and it is probably one of the lesser known albums.

La Scala was recorded (you would have guessed) in Milan’s famous opera house, in 1995, and released in 1997. Apparently, this is the first time a solo jazz concert was hosted in these illustrious walls.

The formal structure of the concert is very simple, you have “Part I” (approx 45 min) and Part II, adding 28 more minutes.

Part I evolves very slowly over time. it reminds me of a large river maeandering slowly and majestically. You have time to let your mind wander around while listening to this. In a way, this nearly becomes meditation music, but this is Jarrett, so you can rest assured that you won’t get bored, instead you just keep floating with the river.

Part II starts a bit randomly. This is the style I personally don’t really like that much, I just get lost without a clear melody and rhythm. Well luckily for me he doesn’t overdo the randomness, and structure reemerges rather quickly after around 4 minutes or so. Unlike part I, this part has some much faster flows, and while part I was focused on chords, here you often just get a chain of individual notes. Around 10 min in, the character changes again, chords reappear, and a melodic structure reemerges.

And in my personal opinion, he’s really saving the best for last. The encore is “Over the Rainbow”, in a very simple, minimalistic approach. I’ve mentioned previously how much I love this song, and I’m not disappointed here either.

My rating: 4 stars (not the most essential of Jarrett’s solo albums, but we’re really talking from a very high standard here, this is still better than 95% of other solo piano albums out there).

You can download it here (Qobuz) or here (HDTracks)

My Must-have Mozart Albums

This post was directly triggered by a question I got to my last post on Mozart’s Violin Sonatas:

To quote jpas1954:

If someone, like me, wanted to listen to Mozart but didn’t know where to start, what would you recommend?

I figured instead of hiding it in the blog comments, I may as well make a post out of it.

So here we go.

The first 3 I already immediately answered from the top of my head, now a post with some additional recommendations,based on some more thinking about it.

The Clarinet Concerto

Take the second movement of the clarinet concerto, and you’re in heaven. The brillian Clarinetist Martin Fröst has recorded this twice, I prefer his second recording with the Deutsche Kammerphilharmonie. On top of the clarient concerto, you also get the beautiful Kegelstatt Trio, and a less well known Allegro, with brilliant guests such as Leif-Ove Ansdnes or Janine Jansen.

The Late Symphonies

For a newbie, I’d focus on the late symphonies 38-41, with the famous no. 40 a-minor and no. 41 “Jupiter”. My favorite version is by Charles Mackerras. He also has recorded the symphonies twice, once in Prague, once with the Scottish Chamber Orchestra. I prefer the latter, but the former is a good one if you want to get all 41 symphonies rather cheaply (and still very well played).

Piano Concerto no. 20 & 25

So many good recordings out there. But as I just admire Martha Argerich very much, I had to put this one out there. Is it the best? Probably not, but it is very special, and one of the last recordings of Maestro Abbado.

Good alternatives on fortepiano include Bezuidenhout and Brautigam, and on modern piano the Perahia recordings are also outstanding.

The Violin Concertos

Again Abbado with his own Orchestra Mozart, and this time the brilliant Giuliano Carmignola (see my review of his outstanding Four Seasons here), have recorded one of the best versions of the violin concertos and Sinfonia Concertante out there.

Another very good version is Richard Tognetti with the Australian Chamber Orchestra.

Solo Piano Works

Kristian Bezuidenhout is one of the best Mozart players of these days. His latest release of the complete piano works, vol. 7, is particularly well-played.

For modern piano, try Uchida or Brendel.

The Requiem

Sadly, never finished, so you only get versions that were completed by others, like Mozart’s pupil Süssmayr.

Again, so many great versions out there; this recent release by the Dunedin Consort is excellent both on the playing and on the recording quality.

Alternatives include Gardiner, Harnoncourt, and many others.

The Violin Sonatas

See my previous post on Rachel Podger.

And finally, the Operas: Idomeneo

i’ll certainly write more about my favorite operas Don Giovanni, Le Nozze di Figaro, and Cosi Fan Tutte (see my review of Nézet-Séguins version here) in the future, all are absolute must-haves. Let me promote here the Opera that was Mozart’s own favorite apparently (at least some booklet told me at some point): Idomeneo

René Jacobs Mozart is always worth discovering, not always very orthodox, but certainly exciting.

This one is really very good, and is among the top Idomeneos out there.

This is certainly only an early starting point.

I still need to write about the string quartets, the Great Mass in c-minor, the piano quartets, the horn concertos, etc. etc. etc.

But you need to start somewhere, and for a newbie, you probably have an excellent starting point here.

Please add and suggest other alternatives in the comments!

You can find the recordings here:

Clarinet Concerto: here

Symphonies: here

Piano concerto: here

Violin Concertos: here

Solo piano: here

Mozart Requiem: here

Idomeneo: here

Rachel Podger’s Magnificent Mozart

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

When I was young and just started listening to classical music, I had a slight disdain for Mozart. “Too easy”, for kids, or similar stereotypes.

How wrong I was. Sure, pretty much every single Mozart piece has something immediately pleasing to it, something that even a non-classical music listener usually easily grasps, and mostly likes.

What I completely missed how hard it is to make something sound easy AND interesting at the same time. The more I discovered the music of Mozart’s now mostly forgotten contemporaries (Stamitz, Salieri, Michael Haydn, etc.) , the more you discover what is really missing there and what makes Mozart’s music so unique.

Mozart’s violin sonatas

When you think about chamber music, and the very simple but elegant form of violin sonatas, usually people think of Beethoven first, with his famous Kreutzer sonata, or sometimes Brahms (see my review of Brahms sonatas with Isabelle Faust here).

Mozart isn’t the first composer that springs to mind when talking about this genre. Probably this is partially due that quite a number of them were written when he was really young. Luckily, he stuck to this form throughout his life, and ended up writing 36 of them.

Rachel Podger

I’m a big fan of Rachel Podger. She is usually focusing on Baroque music and has recorded some outstanding albums here (more about this later on this blog).

However, she also ventures into Viennese classical music. And how well she does. She has recorded the complete Mozart sonatas in a total of 8 volumes. She plays here with Gary Cooper, who plays a beautiful fortepiano.

Let me arbitrarily talk about vol. 2 here, but honestly, all 8 volumes are worth getting.

On each volume Podger mixes more mature works with some of Mozart’s very early works (e.g. KV7 here). And while it is clearly evident that this is not mature Mozart (the boy was approximately 8 years old when he wrote this, and probably helped by his father), even this one is worth discovering.

But you also get the outstanding KV481 on this album which dates from the same time of his great Da Ponte operas (Don Giovanni, Figaro etc.).

As an additional bonus, Channel Classics is a label that care a lot about recording quality, and this is one more example of it.

My rating: 4 stars (5 stars+ playing, but the inclusion of the early sonatas gives 1 star off, making it just not AS essential as some other works).

You can get it in it’s native recording format of DSD here (Native DSD), note that not all players do support this format. Otherwise you can also purchase the full 8 CD box here much cheaper if you prefer physical media (Prestoclassical). At this point in time, there’s even a special offer ongoing.

Jean Michel Jarre’s New Album: A Time Machine To Infinite Boredom

Electronica

I shouldn’t be writing this blog entry.

Every marketing expert tells you that you should have a clear positioning, and obviously my blog is very focused on Jazz and Classical music, where I hope I know more or less what I’m talking about.

In Electronica, I clearly don’t. I use Qobuz plus the free wifi connection at my gym to stream the latest electronic releases during my workout, but beyond that I really don’t have a clue.

So take what you read below with a grain of salt.

Jean-Michel Jarre

My disclaimer above wasn’t true 20 years ago. Back in high-school, together with a good friend of mine, we actually had a small home recording studio with about 7 synthesizers, run by a Commodore Amiga, a small mixing console, and a regular cassette recorder.

We were dabbling in our own little production of electronica, heavily inspired by stuff like the soundtrack to Le Grand Bleu/The Big Blue by Eric Serra, some Tangerine Dream and Vangelis-type stuff, but our real hero was Jean-Michel Jarre.

To this day, I consider Oxygène and Equinoxe great classics, and go back to them every once in a while.

Electronica 1: The Time Machine

So when I saw a new album released from him on Qobuz, I had to stream it immediately.

And then I read about who he was collaborating on this new album, his first for many many years: Air, Moby, Pete Townshend, Massive Attack, Vince Clarke (Erasure), Tangerine Dream, etc. etc. Holy cow. This had to be good, right?

So what happened?

I listened to this entire album twice, and really had to force myself for the second time. I’m sorry, but this entire album is just plain boring. Not a single track on there that I ever want to listen to again.

And really, I can forgive quite a lot of things, obviously this is no Beethoven and I don’t expect this from a contemporary pop album (this is more pop then electronica to my ears). But boredom is unforgivable.

I’m not going to give this a formal star rating as I don’t see this as a proper review, but just wanted to put out a word of warning: don’t buy this album blindly, you may regret it.

Below the official trailer to make up your own mind.

And please feel free to contradict me!

The Legacy of the Jazz Messengers (6): Freddie Hubbard’s Hub-Tones

I’ve a little bit neglecting my Jazz Messengers Mini-Series, don’t really know why. Maybe it is because I consider Freddie Hubbard’s albums for example as just a little bit less essential than the artists I’ve written about so far. Well, anyway, here we go again:

Freddie Hubbard

Freddie Hubbard is considered among musicians as one of the trumpet legends. He probably is one of the typical “musician’s musician”. He has, as my title indicates, played with the Jazz Messengers, but has played with pretty much every well-known Jazz musician of the period, be it John Coltrane, Miles Davis, Wayne Shorter, Herbie Hancock, you name it. He also plays on The Blues And The Abstract Truth, one of my 25 Essential Jazz albums.

Hub-Tones

Why the 1962 Blue Note album Hub-Tones?

Well, I was torn for a while whether I should feature Open Sesame, Ready For Freddie (both released 1 and 2 years prior to Hub-Tones on BlueNote), or one of the two subsequent releases on Impulse, The Artistry of Freddie Hubbard, or The Body And The Soul.

You get the picture, these years between 1960 and 1965 were highly productive for Freddie, and all of the above mentioned albums are worth having.

One of the reasons I chose Hub-Tones is probably the cover. Blue Note’s cover art from this period was generally excellent, but I really like the minimalist cover of this particular album.

The other reason is Herbie Hancock, which I prefer slightly to McCoy Tyner on the two previous Blue Note albums (yes, I have a piano background so those things matter to me).

Finally, this album features a lot of Hubbard originals, which I really appreciate.

Another great artist on this album is James Spaulding playing the flute and alto sax alternatively, who is not that well known these days, but has played as a sideman for a large number of Blue Note albums.

My rating: 4 stars

You can download it here (Qobuz) or here (HDTracks)

Francesco Cavalli

L’amore innamorato (Erato 2015)

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Pappano’s Aida (Warner Classics 2015)

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La Scala (ECM 1997)

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The Late Symphonies

Piano Concerto no. 20 & 25

The Violin Concertos

Solo Piano Works

The Requiem

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Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

Mozart’s violin sonatas

Rachel Podger

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Electronica

Electronica 1: The Time Machine

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Freddie Hubbard

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