Tag: Daniel Barenboim

Daniel Barenboim – Franz Schubert – Piano Sonatas (2015/2021)
FLAC (tracks) 24bit/96kHz | Time – 05:51:15 minutes | 5,54 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Digital Booklet, Front Cover | © Deutsche Grammophon (DG)

Somewhat surprisingly, Daniel Barenboim recorded the 11 complete piano sonatas of Franz Schubert for the first time between 2013 and 2014, thus making this Deutsche Grammophon box set an important first-time release. For admirers of Barenboim’s intellectual depth and clean playing, his approach to these works may be ideal, because Schubert’s music is always vulnerable to overly ripe or sloppy interpretations, and it takes a balance of ideas and emotions to convey the essence of the sonatas. While Barenboim has established himself as a masterful accompanist in Schubert, playing chamber works and lieder cycles, he has touched the solo keyboard works less often. However, these performances of the sonatas are as cogent and competent as if he had specialized in them for decades. Touch is critical in Schubert, and Barenboim’s refined playing shows a remarkable control of dynamics, colors, and shadings, which, together with his eloquent phrasing and careful use of the pedals, make it subtle and compelling for its variety. While the studio recordings are a bit dry, presumably to aid in clarity, the piano has a slightly ringing quality in the upper register and a warm middle to low range, so it has an attractive tone without studio enhancements. Highly recommended.

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Camille Saint-Saens – Organ Symphony – Gaston Litaize, Chicago Symphony Orchestra, Orchestre de Paris, Daniel Barenboim (1976/2003)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz  | Time – 56:20 minutes | 994 MB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download – Source: Qobuz | Front Cover | © Deutsche Grammophon GmbH
Recorded: May 1975, in Studio Medinah Temple, Chicago, United States

This celebrated recording of Saint-Saëns’ Third stands as one of the very few performances to challenge the acclaimed Munch/Boston version on RCA. It features playing of great panache (with a truly high-voltage finale), and if the strings in the first-movement allegro aren’t as tidy as some, Barenboim more than compensates by taking the movement gratifyingly up to speed. The big question for most collectors concerns the remastering, and here I have to say that it strikes me as an unqualified success.

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Daniel Barenboim – Elgar: The Dream of Gerontius, Op. 38 (2017)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 01:33:57 minutes | 1,57 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Master, Official Digital Download  | Source: Qobuz | Front cover , Booklet | © Decca

Daniel Barenboim’s ‘The Dream of Gerontius’ is a significant addition to his critically-acclaimed Elgar series with Staatskapelle Berlin. This is Barenboim’s first recording of Elgar’s greatest choral masterpiece. Featuring the finest array of English-speaking soloists: Catherine Wyn-Rogers, Andrew Staples and Thomas Hampson.

The album is released to coincide with Barenboim’s performances of Elgar’s Symphonies 1 & 2 with the Staatskapelle Berlin at the BBC Proms on 15 & 16 July

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Staatskapelle Berlin & Daniel Barenboim – Brahms: Symphonies (2018)
FLAC (tracks) 24-bit/96 kHz | Time – 02:59:46 minutes | 3,02 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Master, Official Digital Download | Digital Booklet, Front Cover | © Deutsche Grammophon (DG)

More than 120 years after the death of Johannes Brahms, the answer to this question would seem to be a foregone conclusion. Not even Arnold Schoenberg’s essay “Brahms the Progressive”, famed at least for its title, has done anything substantial to change it. Schoenberg pointed to the asymmetry and irregularity of Brahms’s phrase structure, his stern adherence to and sharpening of Beethoven’s technique of dislodging the “strong” beats until the rhythm as we previously knew it fully dissolves. What we hear as downbeats are more likely to be upbeats, and vice versa.

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Daniel Barenboim – Works by Elgar (1975/2017)
FLAC (tracks) 24-bit/96 kHz | Time – 01:07:06 minutes | 787 MB | Genre: Classical
Studio Master, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Glossa

Can there be a more prodigiously gifted and versatile musician in the world today than Daniel Barenboim? Symphonic and opera conductor as well concert pianist, recitalist, chamber musician, Lieder accompanist par excellence, the Argentinian-born Israeli Renaissance man of music is also one of the most extensively recorded artists of all time. Sony Classical is proud to present the first complete retrospective collection of his albums for CBS/Sony Classical and RCA Red Seal.

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Daniel Barenboim – Elgar – Sea Pictures. Falstaff (2020)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 58:49 minutes | 0,99 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Decca Music Group Ltd.

No conductor working today has done more to internationalise Elgar’s music than Daniel Barenboim. Like Georg Solti and Bernard Haitink before him, Barenboim has recognised that the best of Elgar’s music deserves to be compared with that of his European contemporaries, and that its roots are often more firmly embedded in Austro-German late Romanticism than they are in the pastoral landscapes of Edwardian England. He made an extensive series of Elgar recordings with the London Philharmonic in the 1970s, but returned to the composer in 2014 with a recording of the Second Symphony, followed two years later by the First. Magnificently played by the Berlin Staatskapelle, with its burnished, dark central European sound, both performances were a revelation, immediately reconnecting Elgar with the composers he most admired, Brahms and Richard Strauss. If Barenboim’s subsequent Berlin recording of The Dream of Gerontius was less exceptional, it still cast fresh light on a staple of the British choral repertoire.
Elgar: Sea Pictures; Falstaff album art work

The two works on this latest disc present a very different challenge, however. Where the symphonies and even Gerontius relate very obviously to European archetypes, there’s something much more indelibly English about both Falstaff and the song cycle Sea Pictures. Falstaff is the nearest that Elgar came to composing a Straussian tone poem (he called it a “symphonic study”), but there is something missing here. Technically once again the performance is impeccable, but it misses a nostalgic dimension that the finest British recordings – Adrian Boult’s, John Barbirolli’s – identify more convincingly without ever becoming twee, which Barenboim’s performance unexpectedly does.

The Latvian mezzo Elīna Garanča is the soloist in Sea Pictures. Janet Baker’s recording with Barbirolli is the benchmark here, and though Garanča’s diction can be indistinct and she doesn’t match Baker’s conviction in the fusty Victorian poetry that Elgar sets, her golden sound and warm, supple phrasing are still very appealing on their own terms.

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