Phil Muse’s Atlanta Audio Club Mid-Summer Classical Reviews Column features Manfred Honeck and the Pittsburgh Symphony’s Beethoven: Symphony No. 6 & Stucky: Silent Spring: “What better choice for summertime listening than Beethoven’s time-tested ‘Pastorale’? … Quick but soul-satisfying pacing by conductor and orchestra makes it all come together. … Stucky pays respect to Carson’s dark, uncompromising vision of environmental destruction in musical terms that are positively chilling.… disspirited birdsong in haunting brass and reeds, relentless…
The Arts Fuse‘s Jonathan Blumhofer gives a warm recommendation to Manfred Honeck and the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra’s Beethoven & Stucky recording: “The Pittsburgher’s performance is nothing if not very well balanced and strongly colored. Solos short and long – for tuba, contrabassoon, and English horn, among them – are all well done. And the orchestra has clearly got a firm grasp on Stucky’s highly intellectual (but still accessible) personal style. … it’s forceful, well-written music and…
HRAudio.net‘s Adrian Quanjer gives a five-star rating to Manfred Honeck and the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra’s Beethoven: Symphony No. 6 and Steven Stucky: “Silent Spring” recording: “Unfamiliar as I was with Silent Spring, in Honeck’s reading it unescapably got my immediate attention. Expressing in music what is barely possible to express in words. Around 15 minutes of awareness of the formidable complexities of nature is in itself already worth acquiring this release. … I have no…
The May/June 2022 issue of Living Blues Magazine features a rave review for Doug MacLeod’s A Soul To Claim: “A Soul to Claim builds on MacLeod’s skillful, expressive acoustic guitar work, supported here by Dave Smith on bass guitar, Rick Steff on keyboards, and Steve Potts on drums. The arrangements are subtle, with lots of spaces between the notes and a warm, intimate character. The bass, drums, and keys are often felt more than heard;…
The latest edition of Blues Blast Magazine has a Featured Blues Review for Doug MacLeod and A Soul To Claim: “After many visits to Memphis with the Blues Music Awards and other work with the Blues Foundation, Doug MacLeod decided to move to that area and settle down in Tennessee, giving up the West Coast for a home on the Mississippi River. This album is inspired by his move and his new home. It is…
Classical Candor reviews the Carnegie Mellon Wind Ensemble and George Vosburgh’s recording of Strauss: The Happy Workshop & Serenade, Op. 7: “the Carnegie Mellon players do the piece justice, as we might expect from an ensemble that has been around since 1908. Maestro Vosburgh has been their Director since 2011. They dance through the music with a smooth, graceful, subtle, yet expressive agility. It was fun listening to them move effortlessly from Strauss’s more serious…
Another “Recommended” distinction from a MusicWeb International Critic for Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra’s Brahms & MacMillan release, and this time the spotlight shines on James MacMillan! “I really have to doff my hat to Reference Recordings, as well as to Manfred Honeck and the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra, for their commitment to programming and recording new music is genuinely admirable. … I have come across the music of MacMillan more than once in the past, both in…
Michael Cookson reviews the Carnegie Mellon Wind Ensemble and George Vosburgh’s recording of Strauss: The Happy Workshop & Serenade, Op. 7 for MusicWeb International: “The Reference Recordings label is noted for the quality of its recordings and this new album presenting a pair of underrated and neglected works for wind ensemble by Richard Strauss is no exception. … the Carnegie Mellon Wind Ensemble under Vosburgh provides an engaging performance making a convincing case for this…
“the San Francisco Ballet Orchestra play with a ravishing warmth. Clearly the orchestra has been well rehearsed. The brass playing is monumentally precision perfect; Liebermann’s music… is of extraordinary complexity. This is an especially densely written ballet in places in others it is quite the opposite, open to making orchestral players feel very exposed – and yet the orchestral playing is brilliant enough that details emerge with astonishing clarity. Those great sweeping string passages at…
Tekla Cunningham and Pacific MusicWorks’ Stylus Phantasticus gets a rave review and recommendation from MusicWeb International‘s Johan van Veen: “Over the years I have heard many recordings of this kind of repertoire, and it never fails to make a strong impression. The instrumental music of the 17th century is quite exciting stuff. However, its effect largely depends on the performance. If the contrasts within pieces are flattened out or the dynamic differences are equalized, the…
AllMusic‘s James Manheim gives the San Francisco Ballet Orchestra’s recording of Lowell Liebermann: Frankenstein a four-star review and recommendation: “This recording was made live in 2018 and marked the U.S. premiere in San Francisco, featuring the San Francisco Ballet Orchestra under conductor Martin West, and it is to be recommended for the live atmosphere alone. A good deal of enthusiastic applause is retained, and the audiophile engineering staff at Reference Recordings proves itself as able in live recording…
Textura Magazine reviews the San Francisco Ballet Orchestra’s recording of Lowell Liebermann: Frankenstein: “San Francisco Ballet Orchestra does a splendid job of rendering Liebermann’s score. As a live recording of the ballet production, stage noises, including the dancers’ steps, and a cough or two are sometimes audible, but they merely add to the live character of the event. … Liebermann’s score…memorably shifts between lyricism and anguish as the story alternates between scenes of the family and…
The February 2022 issue of The Absolute Sound gives high marks to our release of Rachmaninoff: All-Night Vigil, Op. 37 on LP: “This 2017 recording may seem like unlikely material to get the half-speed mastered, 45rpm, 180-gram virgin vinyl treatment, but LP partisans should be glad it did. Reference provides further evidence that Keith O. Johnson’s range as a recording professional knows no limits. … The choral sound has the low center-of-gravity that serves this…
Ralph Moore has a new rave review for Manfred Honeck and the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra’s Brahms: Symphony No. 4 and MacMillan: Larghetto for Orchestra recording: “From the way Honeck asks his orchestra to lean into the very first note, beseechingly and growing out of a whispered sigh, you know that this is a deeply thought out performance. Grand, stately, very “masculine” this recording is nonetheless lyrically flowing with its sights firmly set on the final…
Audiophile Audition‘s Gary Lemco has published a five-star review for Manfred Honeck and Pittsburgh Symphony’s GRAMMY®-nominated Beethoven: Symphony No. 9 recording: “This performance does indeed balance its multifarious adjustments to Beethoven’s dynamic requirements with a spacious warmth in the realization that does not suffer lags and sags in the musical line. … We should acknowledge immediately the contribution of acting principal timpanist Christopher Allen in the Scherzo, given the constant immediacy of his presence. This often wild…