Just in time for the coronation of King Charles III comes this release, featuring music written for the coronations of George II in 1727 and of George I before him. The Handel works, written for the 1727 event, are the pure public Handel, with imposing choral-orchestral chords interspersed with straightforward but not simple episodes of counterpoint. They are meant to be crowd-pleasers, and indeed, they are; they're hard to ruin. What is on offer here from the RIAS-Kammerchor Berlin and the Akademie für alte Musik Berlin under conductor Justin Doyle are elegant but undersized performances characteristic of the Continental historical performance movement. Reports from Handel's time indicated an orchestra of 160; here are but 20 players. The choir, at 36 singers, is closer to Handel's 40, and this veteran group delivers a rich, satisfying sound with a rounded tone from the smaller solo group (not indicated in the score but often performed as it is here). The anthem The Lord Is a Sun and Shield is not by Handel but by William Croft, and one will be struck by how close it is to Handel stylistically. The overture to Handel's Occasional Oratorio, HWV 62, serves as an overture to the whole program, and there is a typically odd Chaconne by John Blow as an interlude. These are less-splendid but highly enjoyable performances for reliving the coronation atmosphere.© James Manheim /TiVo

Download not available
This limited-edition release collects the Herbaliser Band's 2000 and 2009 full-fledged instrumental band re-creations of their more electronic and beat-heavy studio albums. And it's a seriously cool and funky trip from start to finish across two discs. In place of samples and synth grooves, there are horns, live percussion, and deep bass guitars, with some scratching thrown in for good measure. If the original albums leaned toward hip-hop, these reinterpretations come across as buzzed-out jazz scores for some imaginary spy films. Indeed, a case could be made that Ollie Teeba and Jake Wherry are more accomplished jazzy artisans than hip-hoppers. Session 2 sees an increase in dynamism and ability, as they've only grown in their ability to translate their earlier works into the big-band realm. As invigorating and breathless as the film scores of Quincy Jones and John Barry, these sessions pay great respect to the past, while Teeba and Wherry make a case that the book shouldn't be closed on cinematic jazz grooves. Stellar.© Tim DiGravina /TiVo

Recorded live on April 19, 2014, in the Berlin Philharmonie, this recital by Martha Argerich and Daniel Barenboim was a reunion of two extraordinary musicians whose friendship began in 1949 in Buenos Aires, when they were children. Both Argerich and Barenboim were wunderkinder who amazed each other with their virtuosic playing, yet they didn't recall ever playing the piano together. This program of piano duos gave them the opportunity to redress that omission, and to bring their skills and temperaments to three works, the Sonata for two pianos in D major by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, the Variations on an Original Theme in A flat major by Franz Schubert, and the four-hand arrangement of Le Sacre du printemps by Igor Stravinsky. A clear effort was made to bring their performance styles in line. Barenboim, ever cool and laconic, had to ramp up his energy to match Argerich's more volatile and flamboyant delivery, but the adjusting really went in both directions. In the Mozart, Argerich and Barenboim seem almost self-conscious about the expression and pacing, and Argerich obviously pulled back to match Barenboim's tempo. There was more give and take in the Schubert, which offered both players freedom to play off each other, and they found a good balance at this point. While they made a valiant effort in Le Sacre, the performance is ragged; it needed much more practice and polish, and even though they must have enjoyed taking on the challenge side by side, it probably felt quite crowded over that keyboard. Deutsche Grammophon's sound is clear and fairly focused for a concert recording, and background noises were kept to a minimum.© TiVo

This program brings together two great French composers, separated by almost two centuries, that we would not think of bringing together spontaneously. But the freedom of mind of the Icelandic pianist looks at it otherwise, who, for his third album with Deutsche Grammophon, wanted to highlight their affinities as their contrasts in the light of their innovative contribution to the musical thought of their time. "I scratch my head wondering why Rameau's music is not played more. Between quality, inventiveness and unpredictability, there is never any element of formula in these pieces”, says Víkingur Ólafsson. By instinctively associating these style characteristics with those specific to Debussy, he decided to make an album of them: "I want to show Rameau as a futurist and underline the deep roots of Debussy in French baroque — and in Rameau's music in particular. The idea is that the listener almost forgets who is who by listening to the album." Debussy, who never stopped defending the French tradition by opposing it to German music, liked the decorative and complex lines of this Baroque composer with a French spirit like his own.An initial idea in the development of this skillfully constructed program, the transcription for piano of Debussy from Prélude to his Cantata La Damoiselle introduces it. Like the album's visual, Víkingur Ólafsson aims to be suggestive even in the accent he gives in Rameau to polyphonic voices supported by a flawless rhythmic impulse, which contrasts with Debussy, whose among other things the beautiful tumultuous Jardins sous la pluie which is played with a large breath in the image of wind load until the light returns. © Qobuz / GG

Zappa in New York was recorded in December 1976 at the Palladium and originally intended for release in 1977. It was held up due to arguments between Frank Zappa and his then-record label, Warner Bros. When the two-LP set finally appeared in March 1978, Warner had deleted "Punky's Whips," a song about drummer Terry Bozzio's attraction to Punky Meadows of Angel. The Zappa band, which includes bassist Patrick O'Hearn, percussionist Ruth Underwood, and keyboard player Eddie Jobson, along with a horn section including the two Brecker brothers, was one of the bandleader's most accomplished, which it had to be to play songs like "Black Page," even in the "easy" version presented here. Zappa also was at the height of his comic stagecraft, notably on songs like "Titties & Beer," which is essentially a comedy routine between Zappa and Bozzio, and "The Illinois Enema Bandit," which features TV announcer Don Pardo.© William Ruhlmann /TiVo

The star of Valentin Silvestrov was on the rise even before the 85-year-old composer fled his native Ukraine after the Russian invasion and settled in Berlin, and this release by baritone Konstantin Krimmel and pianist Hélène Grimaud shot onto classical best-seller charts in early 2023. The impetus for the project came from Grimaud, who has championed Silvestrov's work. Indeed, she might have wanted to record these songs, for one of their attractive features is the way the piano and the voice interact on equal terms in simple textures, with the piano often doubling the vocal line. The Silent Songs were some of the first pieces Silvestrov wrote after abandoning modernist idioms in the 1970s, but they do not represent some kind of retreat into Soviet orthodoxy. They are simple but not minimalist, and they are uncanny. "We may feel we have always known these songs," Paul Griffiths wrote in the notes for an earlier recording of the Silent Songs, "and in a sense we have. The first hearing will not seem the first." The melodic material has the feel of late Beethoven in its almost naïve simplicity that seems to contain depths. Krimmel does very well in not oversinging these pieces, and his rapport with Grimaud is obvious. The texts are in Ukrainian and Russian, but "The Isle" is a translation of a poem by Percy Bysshe Shelley, and this makes a good place to start sampling (or else the translation of Keats' "La belle dame sans merci"). Yet, one can hear these songs without focusing too closely on the texts; they have a mysterious alchemy of voice and piano. This is a beautiful recording that will reveal much on multiple hearings. © James Manheim /TiVo

Download not available
This Deutsche Grammophon disc, Le Sacre du Printemps -- Los Angeles Philharmonic, is issued to celebrate the opening of L.A.'s new concert venue, the Walt Disney Concert Hall. The Disney is one of the most controversial structures to go into in the ground in the twenty first century, a twisted, semi-abstract edifice made of polished stainless steel and occupying 293,000 square feet with a seven-level parking lot below. Critics of the Frank Gehry-devised concert hall cum artwork ridiculed it as maximum ugly and overly expensive, and city leaders wondered if the inordinately bright building would need to be sandblasted so as not to blind pilots of commercial jet liners passing overhead. Although Esa-Pekka Salonen has made a number of successful recordings with the Los Angeles Philharmonic for both Sony Classical and Deutsche Grammophon, they have either recorded them out of town or in UCLA's Royce Hall, as the other large concert venue in town, the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, simply isn't a good venue for recording an orchestra. Disney Concert Hall was, in part, designed with that in mind. Hopefully Deutsche Grammophon hasn't waited a bit too long to bring out this Super Audio CD of the first commercial recording made at the Disney. Comparatively, a 1964 RCA Victor LP commemorating the Chandler's opening appeared within mere days of the main event, and in some quarters is valued as a keepsake. Nevertheless, the prognosis is good for the sound of Disney Concert Hall as a venue for recording the Los Angeles Philharmonic at home. The recording of Mussorgsky's Night on Bald Mountain is truly wonderful stuff, as every measure of Mussorgsky's clotted and knotty but fearlessly innovative original orchestration is heard here in glassine detail. Percussion strokes are precise, the rendering of brass and wind has an almost photographic quality, and strings are heard as a wave of sound rather than as a mushy tangle of wire. This is one of the most stunningly realistic recordings ever made of a symphony orchestra. The Bartók Miraculous Mandarin in its concert version is new to Salonen's recorded repertoire, and while it is a good performance, it's a little cold, which reflects Salonen's usual M.O. with Bartók. In this rendering of Stravinsky's Le Sacre du printemps, Salonen is far more individual in his handling of the score and its effects, and the sound of Disney Hall almost seems to project Le sacre's extremes. Salonen delivers a performance that is far from the pristine, note-perfect recording by Pierre Boulez, closer in spirit to that of Igor Markevitch.Salonen's rendering of the Stravinsky may not please all who hear it, but this is one of only a few orchestral discs in perhaps 25 years that is an imperative just by virtue of the sonic reproduction of the orchestra alone. Le Sacre du Printemps -- Los Angeles Philharmonic is provocative and intense and will give any decent home system a serious workout; like Disney Hall itself, it is a miracle of engineering.© TiVo

As the second album to document the second Mahavishnu Orchestra, this one isn't as, well, apocalyptic as its predecessor, yet it does focus more intently on the band itself. Jean-Luc Ponty's curling electric violin lines help give this Mahavishnu band a more European sound than its predecessor, and some of the orchestral concepts of Apocalypse work their way into the picture via comments by a string trio and trumpet/sax duo. This band also had some interest in a bombastic funk direction that may have been borrowed from Mr. "Chameleon" Herbie Hancock, and would later be followed by Mahavishnu Two's drummer, Michael Walden. Gayle Moran's ethereal vocals don't date as badly as those on many jazz-rock records; at least she can sing. Overall, this Mahavishnu edition is more refined and not as aggressive as the first -- although they could charge ahead pretty hard, as "Be Happy" and "On the Way Home to Earth" demonstrate -- yet they were still capable of making memorable electric music.© Richard S. Ginell /TiVo

Mariss Jansons has been enormously successful in his live recordings of late- and post-Romantic symphonies, and he has made a strong case for 19th century orchestral music in general, though his catalog of performances with the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra on BR Klassik shows little representation of modernist works, aside from Britten's War Requiem in 2013 and Stravinsky's Petrushka in 2015. Flash forward to 2018, with this fairly routine pairing of Stravinsky's Le Sacre du printemps and the suite from L'Oiseau de feu, and it might indicate a trend, perhaps because Jansons has nearly exhausted the heavily Germanic repertoire he has championed since the millennium and needs fresh material. His performance of Le Sacre du printemps doesn't rank with the all-time greats because it doesn't offer any revelations or details in the score or original interpretive ideas, but it has sufficient rhythmic energy and instrumental color to be counted as a respectable reading, and would be worth following with a score. The performance of L'Oiseau de feu similarly has everything in place to make it acceptable, though anyone looking for an exciting and innovative interpretation should look elsewhere, because Jansons' offering essentially accords with Stravinsky's 1967 recording of the suite with the Columbia Symphony Orchestra, so it may be regarded as a standard performance with a pedigree. With this release, Jansons may be preparing to pursue a different direction from his customary material, but he needs to explore pieces beyond Stravinsky's great ballets to make his intentions known.© TiVo

Handel's oratorio Israel in Egypt, HWV 54, bombed at its first performance in 1739 and was heavily revised by Handel. The revisions go even further here, in what is marked as an adaptation by Apollo's Fire director Jeannette Sorrell. She makes wholesale cuts, removing numerous arias, consolidating others, and leaving only a few recitatives. Sorrell retains, however, the three-part structure of Handel's first attempt (the librettist was probably Charles Jennens of Messiah), consisting of the "Lamentations by the Israelites for the Death of Joseph," "Exodus," and "Moses' Song." She also keeps the chorus-heavy quality of Handel's originals. The nearly three-hour oratorio usually heard is sliced to just over 74 minutes. All this might seem an unwarranted intrusion, but Handel himself obviously struggled with the material of this oratorio, which isn't one of his more commonly heard works. And lo, Sorrell's reworking succeeds solidly, creating convincing dramatic arcs where they previously existed only in outline. The ten plagues are shortened considerably but make more of an impact in their abbreviated form. The greatest strength here is the choral writing, in many places the equal of anything in Messiah. Apollo's Fire is a rather underrated choral-orchestral group from the U.S. Midwest that offers a satisfyingly good-sized choir with clear text articulation and a fine sense of expressing what they are singing about. A strong offering that will be appreciated by Handel lovers during the 2023 holiday season and beyond.© James Manheim /TiVo

The contents of this release are a good deal less adventurous than the marketing would suggest, but that doesn't mean it's not a fine program of duo piano music from the 19th through the 21st centuries. With the exception of the opening minimalist A Soft Shell Groove by one of the pianists, Francesco Tristano, all the music is played in transcriptions by the composers themselves and sounds as it would have in the days when it was commissioned by dance impresario Sergei Diaghilev (who commissioned all three of the earlier works). The best news is that these transcriptions are somewhat neglected, and Tristano and his performing partner Alice Sara Ott essentially re-create what would have been an exciting program of avant-garde music from the time just before the mass distribution of recordings. Stravinsky's condensation of the vast orchestra canvas of Le Sacre du printemps is especially nifty, and the duo shifts gears effectively between Stravinsky and the much more sentimental world of Rimsky-Korsakov's Scheherazade. All the music is rooted in dance, but the contrasts among the four works are enormous. The concluding La Valse is as dark a vision of a doomed decadent society as one might wish, with waltz tunes threading their way through growing cacophony as intricately as in the orchestral version. Here and in the Stravinsky, the performers are not afraid to give the music percussive shock by banging on the keys when called for. Well worth the time of duo piano fans.© TiVo