We were there 2015 and stayed in Mestre. Very convenient location- 15 minutes to the vaporetto. Saved us lots of money. Before that I was there as a young adult. Back then Venice was stinkier - but far less clogged with visitors.....
I personally don't feel any responsibility to buy newer recordings - the few ones I have invested in are with Daniil Trifonov because his playing really moved me, Inon Bartanan , Jonathan Biss and Louis Lortier - because I attended their concerts and they were selling their CDs during intermission and after the concert, so I wanted to contribute. I like to support local classical music by attending concerts - that's about it. Same applies to rock or jazz music. If I like a new album of one of my fave newer bands (I usually check them out on YT or a streaming service like Spotify ) I get the CD or vinyl LP - if not - I don't - but for the most part it's attending concerts. In general I definitely think older recordings are far better for the most part. I don't get too many goosebumps from newer interpretations of my fave compositions. Art is a personal choice - not a chore.
If you go off season, it's not packed. We've been in late October and early April. No crowds at all but enough people that everything is still open.
I buy/listen to new releases mainly to discover composers I haven't heard before. CPO is one label that does a great job with that. A lot of the box sets I've bought in the last few years satisfy my need to hear the old warhorses.
I've almost stopped buying big boxed sets because I don't need more of the war horses. The only big box I've bought this year is 500 Years of the Organ. There's a lot of unknow to me composers in that box. I've bought a few small boxes.
I sold all my vinyl, including classical, when I joined the Air Force in 1983. In the early 2000s, I sold most of my CDs. The box sets are a great way for me to get all the goodies again.
Maybe it's just that I'm not aknowledging my subjectivity in that when I say that the number of new releases is declining what it really is is the number of new releases that interest me is declining and that certainly is the case.
I read other online classical music forums. I don't post in them; one is enough. In particular, although I'm not 100% sure, I believe I learned of this one over at good-music-guide.com.
Lots of my posts here are prefaced with "First listen to..." and my Amazon "Save For Later" list is perpetually maxed out at 600 CM CDs.
Adam Harasiewicz was supposed to be well-known for his Chopin recordings back in the 70's and I had hoped to find a used copy of his Chopin Nocturnes CD but to no avail until I stumbled upon the following BC box. This BC box is great as it has recordings by Zoltan Kocsis, Bella Davidovich, Evgeny Kissin in addition to Adam Harasiewicz. This box is one of the four Complete Chopin Piano Works in my collection ...
Fast fingers but rather superficial interpretations. More distant audio perspective than is typical with DG.
From my experience, at least, cannabis can greatly enhance my musical listening pleasure. My senses are more acute, I can get lost in the music and the entire experience is somehow more vibrant. Rock fans have known that for decades. And I suspect more than a few classical music goers do too. Not for everyone, but it would add a new reason for folks to check out the symphony. (In a similar vein, many restaurants here in Colorado now have have "cannabis pairing dinners". They are wildly popular. The Denver Symphony Orchestra actually has dipped its toe into this, with a few concerts of particularly dynamic music they dubbed "420 friendly".) As for young listeners, I took my 21 year old punk-loving son to the Proms and he absolutely loved it. It worked for him because all the barriers to listening to classical music (real or imagined) -- dressing up, having to "understand" what you're hearing, taking everything so, so seriously -- were removed. It was just "sit down and listen to music". Suddenly, classical music wasn't the caricature we've been given -- a bunch of stuffy old people dozing off to dusty, ancient music -- but rather amazing musicians delivering emotionally charged music. Will he become a classical music lover? I don't know. But I'm certain he wants to go again.
Same here. I am more than happy with most of the old masters. The wheels do not need to be re-invented. Better sound is not always equal to virtuosic performance ...
When I see this album cover I can't help but think the art director had a certain old joke in mind.. "roses on your piano" indeed..
I think it's a bit of a problem but also complicated. I'm not a vinyl listener, but if I was I'd only be listening to older performances. There's so much classical vinyl from that era in circulation for cheap, usually well taken care of, and almost no new classical vinyl is being pressed. There's a little bit being pressed by Deutsche Grammophon, but that's kind of about it. The volume of classical vinyl available now exceeds the demand by a wide margin, in most cases. For listeners on CD it's a different story, but there too the marketplace is being saturated. Not only are there tons of old CDs available for pennies, but a box set is selling for the price of a single new album. For instance, a new CD costs about $14. There are megaboxes being sold by the major labels where the cost per CD is under $2. And this isn't dross - it's great stuff. I mean you can get all of Karajan's recordings on EMI for under $100. I don't know where that leaves regular CDs, but I think they're going to be increasingly marginalized as streaming comes to predominate. Of course, who knows - Hyperion seems to be chugging along despite a resolute refusal to offer their music digitally except through their own website. It's on SACD where things get a little weird - especially for the Japanese market (but also for the west) there's been an awful lot of overpriced reissues where there are superior examples for a tiny fraction of the cost. I thought there was a pretty good microcosm of this regarding the Kertesz recording of the Dvorak 9th Symphony, where the Esoteric SACD of that recording, barely two years old, sold on eBay at auction for some $700. As I pointed out on another forum there are a number of excellent modern SACDs of the Dvorak 9th, including Ivan Fischer's, let alone the Fritz Reiner Living Stereo SACD that sells for under $10. Esoteric may be an extreme case (the same recording was available in a boxset with a blu-ray that includes the 24/96 source files Esoteric started with, along with much else: DVORAK Complete Symphonies / Kertész - 9 CDs + 1 Blu-ray Audio - Buy Now ), but I think SACD gets the worst of the fetishization of older mediocre recordings. I think the path of Praga was a particularly notable such example - they started issuing lots of original chamber music recordings, first on CD and then on SACD. However, in their last years they shifted to dumping older public-domain recordings from RTR or vinyl sources on SACDs, using the names of famous artists to sell what were essentially bootlegs. It's a shame.
First listen to "The Art Of Duo Siqueira Lima" on GuitarCoop. Works by Granados, Oswald, Villa-Lobos, Piazzolla and Pascoal
