Fanfare critic Andrew Quint has named Michael Stern and the Kansas City Symphony’s Saint-Saëns: Symphony No. 3 “Organ” to his 2016 year-end “Want List”: “San Francisco’s Reference Recordings, issuing musically worthy recordings in audiophile sound for more than three decades, continues its rewarding relationship with Michael Stern and the over-achieving Kansas City Symphony. This all-Saint-Saëns program is anchored by the well-worn “Organ” Symphony, played here with sure-footed metrical precision plus plenty of cinematic splendor. “Professor”…
Nadia Schpachenko’s Woman at the New Piano recording gets a 4.5 star review from Andrew Quint of The Absolute Sound: “Reference Recordings garnered seven nominations for the 2016 Grammy Awards, including two for Woman at the New Piano. The disc premieres six works written in 2013 by four composers, three of whom, like Shpachenko, live and work in the Los Angeles environs. … Shpachenko and Lee perform the music with complete authority, and they’re superbly…
Andrew Quint with a new review for the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra’s Bruckner: Symphony No. 4 recording on The Absolute Sound: “Manfred Honeck and the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra’s last project for Reference Recordings garnered a 2015 Grammy nomination for Best Orchestral Recording, so expectations were high for this one, too. Perhaps that’s unfair, as Bruckner makes very different demands on a conductor and orchestra than do Dvorák and Janácek. But this performance of Bruckner’s “Romantic” symphony…
Fanfare Magazine critics can’t get enough of the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra. Raymond Tuttle wasn’t the only critic with a Pittsburgh Live! release on their year-end “Want List”: “Under music director Manfred Honeck, the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra is increasingly recognized as an ensemble to reckon with. It’s our good fortune that an audiophile label, San Francisco’s Reference Recordings has, so far, released two SACDs from the PSO. (The other is a Richard Strauss program.) The audio…