Spanish Impressions is an AllMusic November Highlight with a 4.5 Star rating for the Hermitage Piano Trio! “The Hermitage Trio’s performances are impressive. All its members are of Russian background, but the deeply lyrical mode works well in this repertory, which would seem to have gems aplenty to offer.… Another major draw is the sound from the reliably strong engineering team of Reference Recordings, here working at Skywalker Sound in California; the famed Keith Johnson had a hand in…
James Manheim gives 4 and a half stars to Nadia Shpachenko’s Invasion: Music and Art for Ukraine recording on All Music: “The piece titled Invasion is not a wartime dirge but a mix of elements overturned by the war, “a counterpoint of moods — between ominous undercurrents, folkloric touchstones, and a modernist ‘authorial’ commentary,” in the words of annotator Peter Yates. This work is echoed in the Six Rags for solo piano, which are not classical…
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…
Wonderful four-star review for Pacific MusicWorks and Tekla Cunningham’s Stylus Phantasticus recording in AllMusic: “The composers range from fairly obscure (Giovanni de Macque) to all-but-unknown, even for people who have studied the early Baroque. Cunningham is a lively and virtuosic player who captures the daring mood and the spirit of experimentation in this radical group of works, and, as concertmaster of Pacific MusicWorks, she is able to surround herself with a continuo group quite attuned to what she…
James Manheim gives a 4.5 Star Rating to José Serebrier’s Last Tango Before Sunrise recording on AllMusic.com: “The works on the album stretch from [1957] all the way up to 2018 for the titular Last Tango Before Sunrise, but there is general stylistic consistency among them, although the sense of tonality varies. All are infused with Latin American rhythms, either the tango, as characteristic of Serebrier’s native Uruguay as it is of Argentina, or from Afro-Brazilian…
AllMusic Guide’s James Manheim gives a Four-Star Rating to Michael Stern and the Kansas City Symphony’s One Movement Symphonies recording: “the engineering here, from Kansas City’s Helzberg Hall, is more than enough reason to check out this recording. Stern chooses three works that, in addition to fulfilling the condition of the One Movement Symphonies title, have seriously complex textures that challenge an engineer to the maximum. Even listeners quite familiar with the Sibelius Symphony No. 7 in C major, Op. 105,…
AllMusic’s James Manheim gives a four-and-a-half star rating to Manfred Honeck and the Pittsburgh Symphony’s Tchaikovsky: Symphony No. 4 & Leshnoff: Double Concerto recording: “the Symphony No. 4 has rarely received such an intense performance… The Pittsburgh Symphony is in fine form in the symphony’s thrilling brass passages and in the all-pizzicato strings of the third movement. The accompanying Double Concerto for clarinet and bassoon by Leshnoff is also a pleasure: a neo-Romantic work agreeably…
Order Now AllMusic rates the new Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra and Manfred Honeck Shostakovich: Symphony No. 5; Barber: Adagio recording a ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️½ rating: “… an excellent contribution to the Shostakovich discography, even in the face of all the other versions of this work on the market. … masterful, deliberate, but never plodding performance by Honeck, with the Pittsburgh brasses sounding as good as they have in years. The Barber Adagio for Strings is an inspired note…