I couldn't agree more. And the later quartets are written generally with more economy - some of those early ones are about the longest quartets I can recall hearing.
Agreed and and although rarely mentioned I think his Lieder is fine as well. Have you heard any? For example this Bernarda Fink (with Roger Vignoles) CD on harmonia mundi is wonderful! https://www.amazon.com/Dvorak-Lieder-Antonin/dp/B0001WECMY
That's an excellent set George! I agree with @drh above in that "later tends to be better", especially with the String Quartets. In fact, the Panocha Quartet began recording these same string quartets again (starting in 2002), this time for the Camerata label but so far have only chosen qts the later quartets, 8 - 14. Speaking of the "American" op.96, the Panocha have recorded this at least 4 times, 3 of them with Supraphon! Not a radical difference between them, imo. Was going to play something else, but instead now listening to CD6 of this set, with String Quartets 10 ("Slavonic") & 11.
As long as we are on the subject of Dvorak string quartets, here's a little oddity. Edison was late to the electric recording game, just as with the disk game before it. Eventually Edison did issue a few multi-record sets of complete classical works on electrical diamond discs. The first of these was the Schumann Piano Quintet with E. Robert Schmitz and the Philharmonic String Quartet of New York. The second was the Dvorak "American" quartet, again performed by the Philharmonic String Quartet of New York. By its name that sounds like a studio or pickup group, but it actually was a recognized, established quartet in the concert hall. The other such sets were the Haydn op. 33-3 quartet (the one known as "The Bird") performed--surprisingly!--by the Roth Qtt. and, most extensive at 4 records, 8 sides, the Schubert first piano trio performed by The New York Trio. If you thought conventional 78 RPM sets were cumbersome, try one made up of four discs, each 1/4 inch thick. A whole inch of shelf space for a single Haydn quartet!
Wow I did not know that CD existed. I need to hear those performances. I have grown to really like the Khachaturian VC.
Ooops--should have said, for a single Schubert trio. The Haydn quartet takes up only half an inch....
That famous 15 sec long transition between the third and the final movement that I now realise calls out for the best stereo equipment is going to keep me engrossed for the rest of this short May Day holiday period after I upgraded to headphones with higher impedance to match the technical specs of the hardware I had been using with less powerful cans.
Funny, I just heard that work for the first time today (the Boston/Ozawa recording). Tuneful stuff alright. I always imagined Mephisto as having a rather high-pitched voice though and not as a bass.
Timeless masterpieces of course, but I don't really like The Lindsays' recordings. They sound mannered to me, with ritardandos and accents where they shouldn't be. The Angeles Quartet are wonderful in op. 76, and so are the Tokyo Quartet (if only they were recorded in better sound!).
No picking here--it's a score of rare beauties. Gounod's "King of Thule" aria is no slouch, but after Berlioz it sounds kinda square. And so it goes. I don't know this recording, but Charles Munch led a fine performance of this work with the Boston SO, among the first stereo recordings made by RCA (but, I think, not released in that form for some years afterward; it initially appeared in mono). Eliahu Inbal is one of those names that have been around forever but don't seem to get a lot of attention. I feel an eternal debt of gratitude to him for (on radio) giving me my introduction to Schubert's 3d Sym., to this day a score I love, when I was in collage, all the way back in the late 1970s. If it's a high-voiced Mephisto you want, you can find one in Schnittke's Historia von D. Johann Fausten. (https://www.amazon.com/Schnittke-Historia-Von-Johann-Fausten/dp/B000003G0S). Note that the "tuneful" quotient here is, shall we say, rather less than that in the various 19th c. adaptations of the Faust legend.
Oh, by the way, to return to the Berlioz Damnation of Faust for a moment, here's something you might not expect: there exists a recording of Wilhelm Furtwangler, of all people, leading a performance of the work on August 26, 1950 (concert from the Lucerne Festival), in German with a cast including Elisabeth Schwarzkopf as Marguerite. Very slow tempos, and to be honest I've always thought translating French into German was something of a disaster; moreover, on the scale of low to high fidelity, it languishes somewhere around "non" (at least, in my issue on Archipel). Still, worth a hearing, at least.
New acquisitions dept.: Today's mail brought me a four-record 78 RPM set of Rachmaninoff's cello sonata performed by Marcel Hubert (vlc.) and Shura Cherkassky (pno.). As far as I can recall, that's the only time I've ever seen Cherkassky's name associated with a chamber music piece. Can anybody here think of any others? Yes, I'm being lazy here; I know I should start checking on the web and in Wikipedia and whatnot, but it's late, and....