Best Romantic (c.1820-1910)
Reviews
Find Best Price at Amazon"If you have any love of piano music, Clair De Lune is a must."
"BEAUTIFUL, VERY SOOTHING AND GREAT FOR RELAXING."
"Lovely music, well-performed."
"I love this performance of "Reverie" more than any I've heard ."
"Great CD, totally enjoying the clarity & beauty of Debussy's music."
"I love this music...I can't believe such grand music exits on this disc."
Reviews
Find Best Price at Amazon"With the current set of complete Beethoven symphonies remastered to best mono-channeled sonics to date from the archived masters, we can finally hear into the boxy, cramped acoustics of the recording studio and by hearing into the orchestra departments, we can more accurately hear the extremely high level of technical discipline which the great conductor encouraged, if not demanded from his players. After listening through all nine Beethoven symphonies in remastered sonics on headphones, a modern listener can pretty much finally get enough of what Toscanini was doing with his players, and when it comes to Beethoven, it's fairly difficult in the final analysis to gainsay Toscanini as at least one way that Beethoven does sound, can sound, ... and perhaps ought to sound? Often Toscanini lets us hear a punchy, vital Beethoven in both the tempo/pulse and the details because his orchestra players tend towards such technical wizardry that their detailed yet single-minded execution makes Beethoven sound like his muse had set an ancient god's sandals on fire. But a careful listen to Bruno Walter (in Beethoven, Brahms, and other composers) may show that while the Walter vision left plenty of room for shaping and flexibility of lines and textures, Bruno Walter had nearly as deep an indebtedness to the underlying sense of flow and palpable proportion as we can expect to hear from Toscanini. However exaggerated and polarized the trash talked competition between these two Great Figures tended to become, just listening to Bruno Walter in Beethoven shows that he was as tough-minded when it came to harmonic-structural roots, to tempo proportions, as Toscanini, though each conductor was so distinctive, a listener hardly ever will mistake one for the other. And compared to some of the jet-setting Brand Name Conductors of today, few come close if we pause to play their Beethoven side by side, with either this Toscanini set or with Walter's. (Ditto, Bruno Walter, folks) Perhaps the only living conductor before us now who can mirror Toscanini's grasp of vertical ensemble, (so clear yet so expressive, many instruments being played as almost one voice) would be Lorin Maazel (except that Maazel is often caught in his recordings as less consistent or single-minded than either Toscanini or Walter?"
"However in downloading this body of work I found that when unzipping the file that, for some reasons the songs don't sort in order of the symphonies, that the track numbers of the movements which make up a symphony are incorrectly numbered which forced me to look them up on Wiki so I could properly organized them in Windows Media Player and -- when doing this -- I found that some of the movements are missing."
"These seem to be the Cargegie Hall recordings (lacking the "dead" room sound of Studio 8-H)."
"There are endless recordings of the Beethoven symphony cycle, and many are worthy of your time and consideration."
"Stated simply, this is the grandest cycle of Beethoven symphonies available.Don't let other reviewers make you think that the sound is terrible.It is not.I am very picky about what I listen to,and the minor imperfections in this set cannot come close to comparing with the positive aspects.This set has (in my opinion the best version of the 1st and 8th I have ever heard).I hope all that purchase this set get one tenth of the enjoyment out of it that I have."
"Beethoven only wrote nine symphonies."
Reviews
Find Best Price at Amazon"I really like the calm music for me and my son."
"Great relaxing nursing and naptime music."
"Looks cute haven't had a chance to listen because it is a gift."
"The music is all very soothing and my daughter drifts off to sleep every night by the 5th-7th track."
"I always fall asleep listening to classical musin - finally someone sells it as a sleep aide."
"A delightful, sleep inducing album."
"I originally received this CD as a baby gift and played it every night for three years."
"all babies should have soothing music."
Best Requiems, Elegies & Tombeau
Reviews
Find Best Price at Amazon"It would be difficult to imagine an early music lover that would not be seduced by the first offering on this disc which is an incredibly lovely sustained work that presents a beautious melody by Heinrich Isaac "Fortuna desperata: Nasci, pati mori" (Reckless fortune). Some of the notable outstanding singers are: CARLOS MENA, PASCAL BERTIN, LAMBERT CLEMENT, FRANCESE GARRIGOSA AND DANIELE CARNOVICH. I purchased it because of the obvious enthusiasm of the performers carefully directed, not just energetic when it is inappropriate, but show deep respect, mystery and nostaligia in their performance."
"Thus it is not all 'Spanish' music per se but a collection including some old chestnuts from other lands."
"One of my favorite besides this collection from Charles V is his set of Armenian pieces (Armenian Spirit)."
"Sit back and imagine you are in the court of Carlos V of Spain!"
"Music (court, chapel, popular), history and politics (Carlos V - the 'first and last great Emperor of Europe', as Savall writes), culture and religion --- all intersect in this disc and its documentation which make it essential for all serious music lovers as well as cultural historians of all stripes."
"fast delivery."
"This is yet another cracking disc from Jordi Savall. The overall sound is lovely, the individual singers and players are excellent and the arrangements are impeccable; the judgement of the use of percussion is excellent, for example."
Best Romantic (c.1820-1910)
Reviews
Find Best Price at Amazon"Songs as bleak as the Russian landscape are strangely addictive if a duo as good as Hvorostovsky and Ivari Ilya are interpreting them."
"This series is extremely well recorded with beautiful heartfelt singing and interpretations."
"", the haunting "She is as beautiful as the moon", opening with strummed arpeggios reminiscent of Schubert's "Dioskuren" and continuing with melismatas in a distinctly Polovstian minor mode, and "In the silence of the mysterious night" climaxing with a magnificent G-flat and a long-breathed piano D to conclude. This is Hvorostovsky's first recording on the Finnish Ondine label, with whom he has signed a long-term contract, and although he has recorded some of these songs before, his voice is now perfectly weighted and his artistry honed by long experience sufficient to give them his finest interpretation."
"Hvorostovsky's voice is powerful and beautiful, his musicianship is top-notch, and his interpretations are probing."
"His Rachmaninov Romances reflect his passion for dragging the listener into his music, with pure empathy."
"Fine Russian pronunciation; articulation and accent (without which singing have no power and not able to be identified as 'Russian')."
Best Quintets
Reviews
Find Best Price at Amazon"The piece is turgid, with a largely homogenous texture and, what I'm coming to conclude is Chausson's fatal flaw as a composer, a complete lack of creativity in rhythmic and metric terms. I downgraded to 4-stars because of the Chausson's mediocrity and this sound engineering, but the Franck interpretation is excellent and makes me happy to own the disc for that reason alone. The Chilingirian version has more differentiated textures, which heightens my understanding of the work's structure and avoids the homogeneity of the Ludwig rendition, and the sound engineering is much, much better."
"I love César Franck."
"The Franck piano quintet is one of the best examples of late-19th century chamber music, along with the works of Fauré and Brahms."
"The Franck Piano Quintet is one of the greatest, if not the greatest, piano quintet I've ever heard. There aren't a ton of great piano quintets, but composers of the Romantic era seemed to make the greatest contributions to this sub-genre. The only other piano quintets I would put at or near the same level as Franck's entry would be those composed by Brahms, Dvorak and Faure (I'm sure I'm forgetting someone, but those are the three other greats that immediately come to mind). While Chausson is also very romantic, like Franck, the music is more chromantic and tonally adventurous, which is to be expected considering that he was much younger than Franck, who was one of his teachers, and it was composed after Franck's death."
Best Classical (c.1770-1830)
Reviews
Find Best Price at Amazon"Rebuilding my somewhat deficient Classical collection."
"Beautiful sound and presentation."
"A thrilling interpretation of The Ring, without all that awful singing."
"WOW you've got to hear this!"
"His personal behavior was low....yet, these orchestral excerpts show the God-given musical genius he possessed right up there with Bach, Mozart, and Beethoven. The conductor was able to capture "the Noble Savage" aspect in Siegfried with those musical bits."
"Berlin Philharmonic is one of best orchestras in the world."
Best Baroque (c.1600-1750)
Reviews
Find Best Price at Amazon"If one has to give an extra-special Christmas gift, I strongly recommend, as I have, at various times here, the complete set of Bach Cantatas recorded at performances throughout Europe, and ending at St. Bartholomew's in New York (that odd faux-byzantine episcopalian contraption on Park Avenue two blocks up from my old office) each on its appropriate sunday, by John Eliot Gardiner, the Monteverdi Choir, Bach Soloists, and a batch of wonderful solo vocalists including Magdalena Kozena, Mark Padmore, James Gilchrist, Nathalie Stutzman, Robin Tyson, Katherine Fuge, Peter Harvey, etc. Throughout my life I have dipped into the various collections of Bach cantatas beginning with the pioneering Harnoncourt/Leonhardt collection, Suzuki, Ton Koopman, Richter, Gonnenwein, but as individual performances and overall, I think John Eliot Gardiner captures the beauty, liveliness, gravitas, virtuosity, drama, and devotion in the music in ways others did not realize was present."
"The singing is glorious, in part because the group was recording their Bach Cantata Pilgrimage in a succession of churches where Bach had worked."
"BWV 178 is an ingeniously constructed and intensely dramatic work; it is also (as Gardiner notes in his unusually insightful commentary) formidably difficult to perform. BWV 45, long a favorite, has recieved many distinguished recordings, including those by Karl Richter and Ernest Ansermet from the early stereo era. They should not be forgotten, if only because the solo singing--though more operatic than many listeners may feel comfortable with today--was so splendid (both Krause for Ansermet and Fischer-Dieskau for Richter eclipse all subsequent competition in the dramatic bass arioso). Gardiner conveys the deep unease at the heart of the work (more in the two arias than in the unexpectedly jubilant-sounding opening chorus) quite as well as his traditional performance-practice forbears, though once again I must note that the solo singing is not quite up to par. Gardiner's rendition of the great opening chorus stresses the dramatic contrast between the elegaic first half (which Bach later used for the "Qui Tollis" of the B-minor Mass) and the minatory fugue which follows. BWV 101 is probably the most harrowing cantata in the Bach canon: a deeply troubling evocation of peril, fire and sword--in both the literal and spiritual senses. Fischer-Dieskau and Richter are at once more animated and more alive to the dramatic potential of the text (one of St. Paul's most scathing denunciations of hypocrisy); Schwartz and Gardiner give a subtler and more subdued account that is just slightly disappointing for those who were expecting more incisiveness. There is not a hint of routine in any of these performances, even when the solo singing falls below standards set by the formidable competition in Suzuki's equally outstanding cycle."
Best Modern & 20th Century
Reviews
Find Best Price at Amazon"I'm always on the lookout for good background music to write to, and my goodness, this album is incredible."
"Blackheart is worth the price of the entire album all by itself."
"Two Steps From Hell specializes in the increasingly popular genre known as "Trailer Music"; compositions that are clearly in the style of action-adventure symphonic scores, but which are clearly not from movies you've ever seen."
"When I love a track or feel my mind creating visuals for some epic movie trailer or thrilling fight scene. It's like I mentally become a movie director and start visualizing scenes that excite my imagination to no end. But the auto tuned lyrical songs are terrible and certainly not a strong point for the Two Steps team."
"Imagine trying to find inspiration to tackle on dull chores, or even finding the drive to make yourself finish that half-block of a morning jog."
"Which is nice to have - the album flows rather well, and the tracks do lend themselves quite well to the title of Skyworld.."
"I've been a fan of TSFH for a bit now so as amazing as this album sounds to me there is some bias in my opinion."
"Since first coming to this genre after listening to their first album and finding many other offerings, I've found TSFH to not be capable of delivering consistently album to album. Their albums have two versions of each track, one with vocals and one without."