Zloty, anyone ? Rather amusingly, when I first came to Poland, we used these........ I was a MULTI MILLIONAIRE !!!!!!! (A million old zloty was equivalent to the current 100 zloty - they just got rid of four zeros in 1995 ! 100 new zloty = about 25 US dollars !)
I'll see you and raise you! This was a HUGE pocket-money for me while in primary school, Back to topic, A mish-mash of chamber music for tonight
Shame the recordings are so distant this is a lovely disc. It must be the CD as I have some great Supraphons.
I was a mere multi-millionaire. You were a mega rich oligarch in comparison. I feel so poor I see that you threw away, not 4, but 6 zeros back in 2003. Impressive !
The DM didn't exist at the time, the German currency was the Reichsmark between 1924 and 1948, when the Deutsche Mark was introduced in West Germany. Before 1924 the currency was the Papiermark, at the time when the hyperinflation hit the country.
Tonight I'm playing for the first time this two-act operetta by Offenbach. Even with all the dialogue included, it still only runs to 81 minutes. It arrived in the post this morning, and the first thing I did was to burn a disc of just the music, cutting out all of the endless dialogue (my edited disc runs at 54 minutes!). I'm never quite sure why the dialogue is always included in Offenbach recordings; it really doesn't appeal when it comes to repeated listenings. As for the music, it's nicely sung (in German, the French version is lost) and recorded, with some of the numbers surprisingly worthwhile, and I'm surprised we haven't heard more from the opera over the years on highlights albums given how good some of the writing is for the female roles in particular.
Listening to "Palestrina - Mass for Pentecost and Motets" performed by the Christ Church Cathedral Choir led by Stephen Darlington on Nimbus.
First listen to CD 6 from "Maria Joao Pires - Complete Chamber Music Recordings" on DG. Grieg - Violin Sonatas with Augustin Dumay (violin)
Listening to CD 48 from "Leonard Bernstein - The Symphony Edition" on Sony. Schumann - Symphony No. 3 'Rhenish' / Symphony No. 4
Listening to #3, which is my favorite Sibelius symphony, on Primephonic. Järvi nails it. The reviewer for Musicweb agrees with my astute observation. "Järvi explains in his booklet essay that no previous conductor of the Paris Orchestra had shown an interest in Nordic music. (I live near Toulouse, and that city’s outstanding orchestra, now conducted by Tugan Sokhiev, has performed very little Sibelius in the thirty years I have lived here.) How much at home, one wonders, do the string players feel when called upon to deliver those characteristic and ubiquitous Sibelius repeated figuration passages? A particular example occurs in the middle of the first movement of the Third Symphony. Is the long passage of semiquavers in the viola part accompaniment or an important and essential part of the texture? (Vaughan Williams, a huge admirer of Sibelius, and famous for admitting to ‘cribs’, uses a similar idea to accompany the solo saxophone in the Scherzo of his Sixth Symphony.) The Parisian viola section delivers this passage superbly, like an engine constantly turning. What a transformation took place in the five years between these two symphonies! We now have a composer absolutely sure of and true to himself, whilst the music itself is more enigmatic and inscrutable. I find this performance of the wonderful Third Symphony totally successful, right up to the extraordinary march that closes the work and seems to arrive from nowhere." Sibelius Symphonies RCA RED SEAL 19075924512 [WH] Classical Music Reviews: June 2019 - MusicWeb-International
Gerard LeVot: Chansons des Troubadours. SM France LeVot is a professor who occasionally performed troubadour songs. He is backed by a small group of French musicians from the Arion label. The performances are about as close as can be estimated to actual troubadour practices. LeVot also co-edited probably the best book on this subject: Songs of the Troubadours and Trouvères (Rosenberg, Switten & LeVot, Editors, 1998:Garland Publishers).
First listen to "Verdi - Otello" performed by the Maitrise Des Hauts-De-Seine and the Orchestre Et Coeurs De L'Opera Bastille led by Myung-Whun Chung from the Decca Verdi box.