WAGNER: Siegfried: Act I PreludeVienna Philharmonic, Georg Solti, cond. Decca, May and Oct. 1962Bayreuth Festival Orchestra, Daniel Barenboim, cond. Teldec, recorded live, June-July 1992Berlin Philharmonic, Herbert von Karajan, cond. DG, recorded Dec. 1968 and Feb. 1969Sadler's Wells Opera Orchestra, Reginald Goodall, cond.
With the "Nutcracker Suite" sequence of Disney's Fantasia now unavailable, I thought to kick off we'd just look at this little teaser from Helgi Tómasson's San Francisco Ballet staging.by Ken[To repeat, this is a second "encore presentation" of 2011's complete-Nutcracker post (the first since since all the way back in 2012!), which I thought came out pretty darned well.
You'd want to think twice before bidding on this record. The ABC Command label tells you it's one of the inferior later pressings; you want an original gold-label issue. (Note: Unfortunately, last year's preview-opening video clip of the Nutcracker Suite segment of Walt Disney's Fantasia has disappeared -- not entirely surprisingly, I guess.
The cover of the booklet accompanying the indispensable Music and Arts CD reissue of the legendary not-quite-complete 1951-53 Haydn Society cycle of the Haydn string quartets by the Schneider Quartetby KenFor decades now it has been one of the gaps in the ranks of available recordings, through much of the LP era and, until now, the whole of the CD era.
The prince of symphonic scherzos? Leonard Bernstein conducts the Scherzo of the Beethoven Ninth Symphony, with the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra augmented by players from numerous other international orchestra, in this Christmas Day 1989 performance of the symphony in celebration of the fall of the Berlin Wall.by KenLast week we got (eventually) to the first movement of the Bruckner Ninth Symphony -- a massive report, I'm arguing, that all is far from well in our world.
by KenIt's going to be pretty much a quick in and out tonight -- an actual, you know, preview. Sunday, as you may have guessed, we finally tackle the Bruckner Ninth Symphony. I still haven't decided whether we're going to do the whole thing in one fell swoop, which is going to make for an extremely large and unwieldy post, because there are any number of issues that come up, or we're going to work our way through the piece in pieces.
