Music

Listen carefully, and you may hear echos of Bach’s big, hearty belly laugh in the opening of the D minor Harpsichord Concerto, BWV 1052. This is music filled with ferocious vigor and an irreverent, reckless abandon comparable to a sports car driver speeding around a sharp curve. It begins as a single musical subject, played by all of the instruments in octaves, which unfolds with wild leaps and crazy, jagged rhythmic surprises. This opening statement launches an exhilarating ride filled with sparkling virtuosity and pure fun. The contrasting second movement (Adagio) in G minor also begins with a single, extended musical line. This subject forms the ground bass line for the music which follows. It’s a melancholy and mysterious drama of conversing voices. Throughout the movement, we hear...

Review by: Jed Distler Artistic Quality: 7 Sound Quality: 8 Complete recorded cycles of Liszt’s Beethoven symphony transcriptions began to appear in the 1980s, including one from Harmonia Mundi featuring different pianists, now repackaged for the Beethoven 250th anniversary year. It remains a mixed bag, performance-wise. If Georges Pludermacher’s “Eroica” doesn’t match Cyprien Katsaris or Gabriele Baldocci for virtuosic flair, one must acknowledge his overall musicality and linear awareness. Symphonies 4 and 8 find Alain Planès at the top of his game, notably in the fleet and supple perpetual motion passagework throughout No. 4’s finale. Paul Badura-Skoda’s impressive dynamic range and full-bodied sonority compensates for occasionally awkward rhythmic adjustments thr...

CEO Volpe has a lot on his mind.A BSO insider muses on plagues, players, and pay in the context of management’s recent staff reductions and Tuesday’s upcoming vote on player salary givebacks.Like every other American symphony orchestra, the Boston Symphony is challenged to find an artistic and financial path forward through the labyrinth of the COVID-19 pandemic.An invisible quasi-living microorganism, relentlessly infectious, spreads fear and death among vast populations. Lockdowns, self-isolation, quarantines, contact tracing, and facemasks prove controversial and only partially effective. Social dislocation, anxiety, staggering loss of life, and massive economic downturn threaten to bring a major power to its knees as it struggles to retain its international preeminence. The US in 2020?...

Review by: David Hurwitz Artistic Quality: 6 Sound Quality: 9 I wish I understood what Chandos is thinking. They have this music in their catalogue already. There are a million other versions of it, some outstanding. This newcomer features a conductor with no special pedigree or audible affinity for this repertoire, at the head of what is, in effect, a pickup or studio orchestra. Can they play this stuff? Sure. Do Wilson or his players demonstrate any outstanding flair or enthusiasm? Hardly. They do offer speed, though. Wilson tends to adopt quick tempos throughout–sometimes frantically so–as at the start of The Pines of Rome, or the first and last sections of Roman Festivals. When the music gets louder he speeds up, when it gets quieter he slows down. Of atmosphere ...

Review by: David Hurwitz The Bottom Line: If you have the nine-disc Perlman Sony/RCA budget box then you already have almost all of the material in this newcomer that matters. All Rony has done is spread it over more CDs and include some collections, film...The content you’re trying to view is for Please register by clicking the button below in order to access this content.Subscribe Now only $49 a year Already an Insider? Login below: Over the past 15 years at ClassicsToday.com, we have earned a reputation for honest, hard-hitting, no-nonsense music criticism. ClassicsToday Insider offers both beginners and serious collectors of classical recordings a new, enjoyable and informative way of accessing and reading reviews—an experience specifically adapted to the Internet. At only ...

Review by: David Hurwitz The Bottom Line: This 14-CD set conveniently brings together all of Charles Munch's recordings for Universal: Decca, Philips, DG, and Vega. Some of the historical material has been hard to source, much of it is unique to his discography, while the...The content you’re trying to view is for Please register by clicking the button below in order to access this content.Subscribe Now only $49 a year Already an Insider? Login below: Over the past 15 years at ClassicsToday.com, we have earned a reputation for honest, hard-hitting, no-nonsense music criticism. ClassicsToday Insider offers both beginners and serious collectors of classical recordings a new, enjoyable and informative way of accessing and reading reviews—an experience specifically adapted to the I...

Raucci was featured in the recently released HBO documentary on the Hawkins murder.Pasquale “Paddy Duke” Raucci has been terminated by Hot 97 following the discovery of his participation in the mob that chased and killed 19-year-old, Yusuf Hawkins, in 1989.The NYC radio staple announced Raucci’s firing in a tweet this morning, citing his appearance in the recently released HBO documentary, Storm Over Brooklyn. According to the documentary, Hawkins, a Brownsville native, was walking in Bensonhurst with friends when a group of nearly 30 white men from the neighborhood converged on him. The altercation ended with Hawkins being fatally shot. Protests quickly followed, drawing national attention with the help of Reverand Al Sharpton and the Nation of Islam’s Minister Louis Farrakhan.A quick sca...

by: Rachel Narozniak Aug 23, 2020 After just one spin of WHO IS WHIPPED CREAM?, it’s glaringly apparent that the EP’s title is a rhetorical question, as the Canadian purveyor of crowd-agitating bass herself answers the question across its nine inclusions. The Vancouver Island-based producer’s debut EP is the longform apex of a stream of name-building releases that have earned WHIPPED CREAM street credit since she first began penetrating electronic circles, and as to be expected, the bass play that turned heads in her direction remains intact on the project (see “WRK”). WHO IS WHIPPED CREAM? notably crosses over into hip-hop/bass hybridiz...

TikTok has revealed that it’s planning on filing a lawsuit against Donald Trump and his administration. It comes after the US President ordered a ban of “transactions” with the owners of TikTok and fellow Chinese app WeChat earlier this month. The order states that the app has 45 days to find a new US-based owner or else Trump will ban the use of the social media platform nationwide. He extended the app’s deadline to 90 days soon after initially signing the executive order. On Saturday (August 22), a representative for the app, owned by China’s ByteDance, told The Wall Street Journal that it is preparing to issue a lawsuit against the Trump administration for its inability to follow due process. TikTok is planning on suing the Trump administration. CREDIT: Drew Angerer/Getty Images “For n...

by: Rachel Narozniak Aug 23, 2020 On “Unapologetic Raver,” Green Velvet and Eli Brown are taking electronic listeners “back, way back, back in time” to “a time before social distancing/when only ravers and doctors wore masks…a time when corona was a beer and not a virus.” A tech house time capsule that simultaneously captures the zeitgeist of the contemporary moment and that of an earlier age in electronic music, “Unapologetic Raver” thumps its way to streaming platforms to remind listeners of just how much the dance scene has changed in past decades. Directed by the same distinctive sort of spoken-word monologue that has so regularly pl...