Best Virelais
The second Gothic Voices recording was something of a milestone: the first recording of 14-century music performed by voices alone.
Reviews
Find Best Price at Amazon"Guillaume de Machaut wrote some of the finest medieval music I've ever heard. Some of the tracks such as "Foy Porter," and "Tuit Mi Penser" are monophonic; that is to say that only one voice is present, sometimes male, sometimes female. These monophonic songs are extrememly pretty; they have very pleasing and interesting melodies and rhythms -- just as sophisticated as anything one might hear in later periods, but different in style both compositionally and in terms of performance. The range of pitches is pretty wide, yet even the higher registers are smooth and natural, not overwhelming or grating like some opera sopranos can be at times. There are four- and five-part harmonies that are out of this world, mixing male and female voices in a manner one might describe as an otherworldly, Francophonic, medieval barber shop quartet/quintet."
"Wonderful material, intelligently presented, sung by gorgeous voices with perfect pitch control."
"Results: both good, but "The Mirror" is more intense, more passionate, and more artful in articulating the hockets and other effects of Ars Nova heterophony."
"This is a fabulous example of medieval a capella singing."
"The poetry is beautiful in itself."
Reviews
Find Best Price at Amazon"Sadly,the amount of early music and of medieval ensembles that are still in existence has decreased since the 1990's.There was the Ferrara Ensemble directed by Crawford Young,La Reverdie,the Newberry Consort,and some others.I put Phillip Picket somewhere in the middle.Why compare?"
Messe de Nostre Dame by Guillaume de Machaut ; 3.
Reviews
Find Best Price at Amazon"Fascinating disc with music ranging from the renaissance to the 20th century."
"The subject matter and participants and recording quality are of a high level."
"It's surprising that the group waited for so long to record this mass which should have been the "bread-and-butter" of its repertoire. I can not resist the comparison of this with Ockeghem's lament of Binchois "Mort, tu ...." in Orlando Consort's another CD Ockeghem: Missa de plus en plus & chansons. When the music reaches the inserted trope "Miserere miserere supplicanti Dufay...",(**) I am sure you will be, as I have been, swept away. If you read the scores (or if you are a superior listener who can reconstruct the score in your head while listening), you will realize that the music unfolds so naturally only because it is so well planned. Here Du Fay put all he had into this seven minutes of music: supreme knowledge of the compositional techniques and life long performing experience of the emotive capacity of the music."
"For this piece, the Estonian Philharmonic Chamber Choir (Paul Hillier) joins the Orlando Consort and the effect is mesmerizing."
Best Airs
"Grieg: Piano Concerto in A minor, Op. "Grieg: Piano Concerto in A minor, Op. "Grieg: Piano Concerto in A minor, Op. "Grieg: Humoresque, Op. "Grieg: Arietta, Op. "Grieg: Homesickness, Op. "Grieg: At Your Feet, Op.
Reviews
Find Best Price at Amazon"It manages to eclipse even the more famous A Minor Piano Concerto which comes in an earnest, straightforward reading with the Bergen Philharmonic Orchestra under Ole Kristian Ruud. (The same recording as on the CD album). The accompanying 56-minute documentary is not so much a Grieg biography as Andsnes' personal search for a better understanding of the genesis of the G Minor Ballade, a piece which he had never performed in public before. Sound is only available in LPCM Stereo but it is lovely; very present, wide ranging and preserving that special timbre of Grieg's own Steinway, set amidst the intimate acoustics of his home. Favourites here are the simple and lovely "Arietta", the melancholic "Homesickness" and of course the joyfully rousing "Wedding Day at Troldhaugen". This DVD makes a lovely memento of his latest survey of Grieg's music compiled for the 100th Anniversary of the great composer's death."
"Through this and other recordings and performances, Leif Ove Andsnes has established himself as a preeminent Grieg pianist of the modern era."
"He plays the Ballad in G minor, the Piano Concerto in A minor with the Bergen Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Ole Kristian Ruud, and a nice selection of Lyric Pieces with warmth and obvious love for the music."
"Enjoyed this film on the life and music of Grieg."
"I had listened to Leif Ove Andsnes CD of this great music, but this DVD does a wonderful job of tracing the life and musical genius of Grieg."
"Watched over 10 times already."
"Excellent!"
Best Odes
This 2-CD compilation captures the quintessentially English sound of the Choir of King's College, Cambridge set in the singular acoustics of their magnificent chapel.
Reviews
Find Best Price at Amazon"Others know more about music than I and a week or so ago, after reading the reviews I bought it."
"I love it, very enjoyable."
"This is great listening for anglophiles on this side of the "pond" as well as those fortunate to hear it at home!"
"Although English, the CD is for everyone and of everyone, a true classic."
"Exactly what I wanted for the holidays and other religious seasons of the year."
"A lot of repeats on this disk...but a wonderful selection none the less."
"excellent transaction.Fast shipping."
Best Motets
4 in E Flat; Rondo for Horn and Orchestra in E Flat; Serenade in G "Eine Kleine Nachtmusik"; Divertimento in D , and more, conducted by Vladimir Ashkenazy, Georg Solti; Neville Marriner, and more.
Reviews
Find Best Price at Amazon"Wonderful music for seeping and listening."
"I'm not a connoisseur, but this seems like a terrific buy to me."
"This is just what I wanted."
"The set offers exactly what I wanted, a wide range of Mozart pieces."
"Amazing collection; I bought this set to listen to with my baby and he loves it :)."
"Nice collection of music, well performed, at a very reasonable price."
"Meet my expectations."
Best Caprices
But if you've never heard Rachmaninov play Schumann's Carnaval , try starting there for one of the most imaginative recreations of a piece of music ever recorded.
Reviews
Find Best Price at Amazon"What an extraordinary pianist, and a great lesson on how to play his pieces, from the composer himself."
"Recording is older and not remastered, but fine for hearing the beauty of Rach... Kind of scratchy..."
"The recordings are obviously low quality, but this has nothing to do with the quality of music Rachmaninoff performs (these recordings are from the early 1900s, so the recording quality is expected)."
"This is a collection of all the recordings that Sergei Rachmaninoff made with RCA Victor."
"4 finally made me sit up and listen, even though I've owned two versions of this piece for a number of years (Ashkenazy & Wild)."
"Thus we can really appreciate Rachmaninoff in at least three different directions: composer, pianist and conductor; and if the first is generally recognized nowadays, the other two aspects of his genius are somewhat neglected. As a special bonus, we get Rachmaninoff as a conductor (disc 3) in his own Third Symphony, the symphonic poem ''The Isle of the Dead'' and the orchestral version of his famous ''Vocalise''. The very thought that we are able to listen to the playing of one of the greatest piano composers is difficult to assimilate and, for better or for worse, is bound to colour our perception of his recordings. Considering the fact that Rachmaninoff also made a number of transcriptions for solo piano of music by various composers, he easily emerges as a towering figure of Lisztian versatility, if necessarily on a much smaller scale. We should be deeply thankful that part of Rachmaninoff's life coincided with the invention of the earliest recording devices. Now, by modern standards Rachmaninoff's playing can only be described as highly idiosyncratic, with extreme tempo fluctuations and enormous sound. If today some brave young soul dares to play Chopin's Third Ballade or Second Sonata at a competition even remotely in the manner of Rachmaninoff, I am pretty sure he would be ostracized and any chances even of modest career would vanish into thin air. Occasionally, it must be admitted, this IS at the expense of the music, but far more often it is indeed a most refreshing exception among digital dullness that reigns supreme today. Rachmaninoff is generally regarded as a conservative and intellectual pianist, a puritan in the best sense of the word, and I daresay he is less impulsive than some of his illustrious contemporaries (such as Hoffman and Paderewski, for instance) but, being born as early as 1873 (30 years before Horowitz! ), Rachmaninoff certainly belonged to the grand nineteenth-century Romantic tradition of piano playing whose chief object was to communicate the emotional content of the music. Small wonder that these recordings have the most dismal sound in the whole box set: very loud background noise, highly artificial and often distorted piano tone. The Hungarian Rhapsody is particularly well recorded indeed, and it is a performance of towering virtuosity which may well make dizzy Cziffra himself, especially Rachmaninoff's dazzling cadenza. The performance is astounding, with super-fast octaves that blow Argerich away and very slow tempo for the second subject which makes it sound extremely poignant. They are far superior to the Edison ones from 1919 because, unlike them, they were made using Steinway concert grand and two horns for recording the treble and the bass sections of the piano. After 1925 all recordings Rachmaninoff made (again except any piano rolls) were electrical and these, of course, are greatly superior to the acoustical ones in terms of clarity and depth. Rachmaninoff's last recordings, made in 1939-42, are not the vintage mono RCA gave Horowitz a decade later, but they do not require much imagination from the listener in order to imagine why Rachmaninoff was the idol of many other great but vastly different pianists, such as Bolet and Horowitz for instance, and why Harold Schonberg himself used to rave about his abilities at the keyboard. 1, 3 and 4 were recorded in that period; sadly, though the piano is fairly well projected, the orchestra sounds pretty horrible, especially the tutti passages which remind me of a lost radio station. Rachmaninoff's own transcription of Tchaikovsky's tender ''Lullaby'' was one of the last recordings he made, in 1942, and it is remarkable how little background noise there is and how clear even the quietest passages are. The many lyrical passages in all three movements are played with exquisite tenderness, whereas the dramatic ones have an awesome power and need be heard to be believed. Too bad, also, that all those treasures mentioned in the discography printed in the biography of Rachmaninoff by Bertensson and Leyda, such as Liszt's Rhapsodie Espagnole or ''Au bord d'une source'', were apparently lost. Alas, though we are fortunate to have all concertos and the Paganini Rhapsody, the solo piano fare is meager: eight preludes (out of 24), three etudes-tableaux (17), one musical moment (6), two pieces from Op. Except for the highly disappointing G minor prelude, with its shoddy climaxes so far removed from the powerful renditions of Horowitz and Lugansky, the other pieces are superbly played, and mostly available in an electrical version. There is no such thing, and thank God (should he exist) that we have no recordings of Mozart, Beethoven, Chopin and Liszt; they would be held as ''definitive'' and nobody would bother to play the music anymore. Mussorgsky's ''Hopak'' (1925) and Rimsky-Korsakov's ''The Flight of the Bumble-Bee'' (1929) are equally dashing, and so is the notoriously difficult Scherzo from Mendelssohn's ''A Midsummer's Night Dream'' of which Rachmaninoff obviously makes a child's game. (Fascinatingly, in 1972 Jorge Bolet recorded, very differently of course, many of these transcriptions in a now legendary LP which can be found as ''bonus tracks'' to his fabulous Carnegie Hall recital in PHILIP's Great Pianists of the 20th Century series.). Among the Chopin highlights from the ''electrical years'' there is a sweeping version of the Second Sonata (1930) with one of the fastest, singularly convincing though, funeral marches ever committed on disc. Since these 10 discs, on the whole, do confirm beyond any reasonable doubt Rachmaninoff's colossal stature as pianist, I may be allowed to conclude with few mild complaints. To name two examples, Mozart's Turkish March is way too rushed and sloppy, and the middle section of Schubert's Impromptu (Op. These are minor quibbles which do not in the least mar an otherwise absolutely fabulous set of recordings, a unique memento from another era of great pianism that will never happen again, alas."
"For example, while he would of course infuse his personality into a Scriabin piece, he could also approach it only as a master composer could; additionally he studied under the same instructor as Scriabin, and they were lifelong friends."
Best Chants
It's often quipped that most of those discs have been listened to exactly once and put away--to the puzzlement of many musicians and critics, who point out that there are more beautiful, more varied performances by professional singers available. Yet the singing of these Spanish Benedictines has a special quality that probably explains this disc's popularity--a reverent serenity that no doubt stems from the fact that the monks are actually praying, not just performing.
Reviews
Find Best Price at Amazon"My dogs lay down and relax to the sounds of the Monks."
"great music but interruptions in playback.. not sure if its my playback unit that is causing the problem or not.. jr."
"Very relaxing music."
"Sometimes soothing music makes the world a calmer place."
"Soothing and mellow with haunting overtones, this is a perfect CD to relax by."
"I remember when this was a popular thing in the 90's."
Best Choruses
The Most Relaxing Classical Music in The Universe, the 1st 2-CD set in the & Most Relaxing, series features some of the most well known classical pieces of all time, including Canon in D, Clair De Lune, Fur Elise, Ave Marie, Moonlight Sonata, Adagio for Strings, Greensleeves, and More!
Reviews
Find Best Price at Amazon"This collection of Classical music is superb."
"I love listening to this on the speake's of our travel trailer."
"Very good for relaxing."
"love this collection of classical music."
"Added this to my collection of relaxing music to fall asleep to."
"great music, very soothing."
Best Anthems
This description might also say that the program contains some of the best and best-loved Christmas choral pieces of all time, presented in a pleasing mix of familiar carols and lesser-known original works. Other notable highlights are Peter Cornelius's "The three kings" and the lively Willcocks arrangement of "Tomorrow shall be my dancing day."
Reviews
Find Best Price at Amazon"Classic recording by the Cambridge Singers men and boys choir."
"You can tell how much I love this recording by the fact that this is the third copy I've purchased!"
"This was to replace a very much loved CD that I left in the car when .I sold it!"
"Beautiful, ancient sounding Christmas carols."
"Lovely for any time of the year."
"You can't beat the polished ensemble sound of the Cambridge Singers and John Rutter has devoted his life to celebrating the joys of Anglican Christmas music."
Best Barcarolles
A classic collection of 11 CDs that compiles every recording that the late Arthur Rubinstein released on the RCA label from 1946-1967!
Reviews
Find Best Price at Amazon"I always believe Rubinstein's Chopin performance is the greatest."
"A must-have for Chopin lovers."
"I'm not that professional, well I like the ballade No.1 very much when first listening to it on a plane."
"I have to admit that i am addicted to the Nocturnes."
"Rubenstein and Chopin."
"This is a gift for my birthday for my husband to give me!"
"Marvelous!"
Best Chansons
That's the only explanation of why Grammy-nominated composer Morten Lauridsen can claim that his works are some of the most often-performed new pieces in years, although few among the East Coast intelligentsia have ever heard of him. Like the similarly popular John Rutter , Lauridsen inhabits an extremely conservative style directed simply and single-mindedly at showing off the beauty of choral singing while it illustrates inspiring texts. Unlike many of his fellow neo-Romantic conservatives, Lauridsen displays a brand of conservatism that is completely convincing and sincere. Though the Los Angeles Master Chorale has a suitably red-blooded sound, the music would be better served with more precise diction. Rich, complex, intensely moving...Rose Songs may be the finest Rilke settings by an American composer.
Reviews
Find Best Price at Amazon"Bravo to Morten Lauridsen and Paul Salamunovich who appear to be a match made in heaven....Since the title piece was actually written for and dedicated to the conductor by the composer, I'm left wondering what it would have been like to have had initial recordings performed by the original inspirators of composers of the great, classical works who wrote those pieces for them."
"In my view, the CD is weakened by tracks 12-16 ("Mid-Winter Songs"), which sound Copelandesque sans Copeland's distinctively memorable tunes. Still, this is a good production that I have listened to several times, not the best in its genre, but definitely recommended if you like this type of music."
"This is one of the very finest vocal classical music albums (make that one of the finest classical albums, period) that I have ever heard. If you don't, the music is so good that I'd suggest shutting up and enjoying the music."
"Lauridsen's choral compositions are highly regarded, and often performed by vocal ensembles with for good reasons; his music is easily accessible to listeners, while also being musically satisfying to those performing."
"I cannot tell you how transporting this music is."
"Just received this Requiem from Amazon-Oh My God! A truly brilliant deeply moving masterpiece....it scours and penetrates your soul!"
"Dissonant music is not my favorite, and I really did not enjoy this CD."
Best Cantatas
Aside from the technical mastery and beautiful tone that are absolutes in all of his playing, one is dazzled by his curiosity and ability to adapt to so many forms and types of music. His Bach and Vivaldi are pellucid and played with non-sentimental crispness, his tango music gritty and rhythmically pungent, his jazz seemingly spontaneous, the "Meditation" from Thais simply ravishing, "Anything Goes" a romp, and the Appalachian music performed with both respect and a great twang, while the traditional Chinese music is fascinating.
Reviews
Find Best Price at Amazon"Excellent recording of this master of the cello."
"A very good value as it is two CDs with something for every taste, from classical to folk to "show tunes" to world music, and of course all impeccably performed."
"I bought this album primarily for Alison Krauss singing "Simple Gifts," one of the finest (and hard to find) renditions of that wonderful song that is often badly covered, both instrumentally or vocally."
"What a fabulous and diverse collection: Classical, American traditional, Chinese traditional, Appalachian, Brazilian, baroque, and jazz."
Best Partsongs
A Robert Shaw Christmas: Angels on High.
Reviews
Find Best Price at Amazon"So so good; a must for your collections; peaceful soothing spiritual music."
"Five stars for the music; 0 stars for the degree of difficulty in the Amazon Music app about how to re-upload downloaded music back into the Amazon Cloud."
"I grew up listening to Robert Shaw Christmas on the huge console stereo that took up half the living room!"
"As a Christmas music and classical music lover, I'm delighted by the inspired creativity and imagination shown by selecting these particular pieces. This is pretty much the very best Christmas CD I've ever heard."
"I have been forfunate to have sung with Robert during my college years-it was a truly wonderful experience to have him pop in on our rehearsals once in a while."
"The arrangements are simple, tasteful, and transparent; if you like BCM (Bombastic Christmas Music) this is not for you."
"This is some of the most beautiful Christmas music I own."
"A cappella music is difficult to sing and the Robert Shaw Chamber Singers do an amazing job of it."
Best Songs & Lieder
The Most Relaxing Classical Music in The Universe, the 1st 2-CD set in the & Most Relaxing, series features some of the most well known classical pieces of all time, including Canon in D, Clair De Lune, Fur Elise, Ave Marie, Moonlight Sonata, Adagio for Strings, Greensleeves, and More!
Reviews
Find Best Price at Amazon"This collection of Classical music is superb."
"I love listening to this on the speake's of our travel trailer."
"Very good for relaxing."
"love this collection of classical music."
"Added this to my collection of relaxing music to fall asleep to."
"great music, very soothing."