[nojwe]

  Any recommendations for a stellar recording of Sibelius' Pohjola's Daughter?

 
Osmo Vanska and the Lahti Symphony Orchestra. Nobody is better at Siblelius than Vanska. His recordings of the symphonies and Kullervo with the Minnesota Orchestra are incredible.

 

[czrtly]

For Pohjola's Daughter there also this one by Colin Davis on Eloquence:
 
https://www.amazon.com/Sibelius-Karelia-Suite-Pohjolas-Daughter/dp/B0007MR1W6/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1492792579&sr=8-1&keywords=colin+davis+sibelius+eloquence
 
His Symphony cicle is also highly regarded

 

[bosiemoncrieff]

Colin Davis was a really excellent Maestro. I saw him just once before he died -- in 2010 -- conducting the Dvorak Violin Concerto and the Glagolitic Mass. Anne Sofie Mutter was forgettable but he was incandescent. 
 
He is one of the most sensitive Mozart conductors of the last century, and far underrated. Someone said once that with Mozart, tempi are absolutely 'the matter' of central concern to the conductor. If you play him too quickly, he cannot blossom, and if you play him too slowly, he wilts. Davis's sense of Mozart tempi was just inerrant. His interpretations are always recommendable, even if they are perhaps not quite so transcendent as Böhm, or indeed James Levine.
 
EDIT: I've been listening to Florestan's opening to Act 2 of Fidelio. It follows your traditional Cavatina-Cabaletta form—slow, deeply felt first section and faster, more technically demanding second section. In the latter section, Beethoven gives us an extremely prominent oboe, so prominent that the only analogue I can think of is the flute in the Mad Scene of Donizetti's Lucia di Lammermoor. 
 
During the passage, he tells us repeatedly that he sees an angel that resembles his wife, Leonore. Is the oboe meant to represent the angel he is seeing? 

 

[Charente]

While browsing on Tidal, I spotted a track called YGGDRASIL on a jazz album called Trees by PJS. 

 

[rkw]

While browsing on Tidal, I spotted a track called YGGDRASIL on a jazz album called Trees by PJS. 

And you'll find other songs and albums on Tidal named Yggdrasil if you search. It's a real word, not something Schiit made up.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yggdrasil

 

[rkw]

While browsing on Tidal, I spotted a track called YGGDRASIL on a jazz album called Trees by PJS. 

And you'll find other songs and albums on Tidal named Yggdrasil if you search. It's a real word, not something Schiit made up.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yggdrasil

 
Hmm... I see that there is also music named Jotunheim, Ragnarok, Gungnir, Mjolnir, Bifrost...   I didn't go further.
 
Somebody should make up a playlist made from Schiit product names.

 

[Pietro Cozzi Tinin]

Check this site.
You'll see Baldr there too.
Vidar's half brother.
I really thought everybody in this tread knew this.
 
https://www.behindthename.com/names/usage/norse-mythology

 

[bosiemoncrieff]

Just got out of Prokofiev's second piano concerto and Rachmaninov's second symphony at the SFS.
 
Have to say I preferred the Prokofiev. There's something about some late romantic composers that is too saccharine, too syrupy, to "cute" to be entirely decent. Perhaps because as an adolescent I was captured by the thrilling but facile bombast in for example some of the russians, I cringe not merely at the music but at the embarrassing memory of my own uneducated enamorment thereof. Mike has exhorted me to listen to Mahler 2, and I am, but even my favorite Mahler (5) has moments in the last movement of such perfect lightness and whimsy, playfulness and humor, as to preclude the spirit of the work from entering the severe domain of Wagner. Perhaps one's 20s are merely a later phase of adolescence and I will mature to appreciate the spirit of the late/post Romantic for what it is. Nevertheless, something captured especially in Rachmaninov is the reanimation of the corpses of Brahms (and his contemporaries) with ever-increasing technical exigency as the years between the old master's first piano concerto and present lengthened. Harmonically, what does Rachmaninov do that Tristan and Parsifal do not exceed, fifty, sixty, eighty years prior?
 
A musicologist I knew once asked, rhetorically, whether music would have been different had Brahms never lived—as opposed to Wagner and Bruckner, innovators #2 and #3 of the nineteenth century after Beethoven. He has a fair point, but I give Brahms the pass I do not give Rachmaninov because (1) he was born forty years earlier and (2) his music doesn't 'wear its heart on its sleeve,' to euphemize the Russian's chief defect. 
 
Taste is naturally a personal thing and my distaste for emotional excess may bias me against technically proficient work that my ear finds stylistically repulsive. (This is not to say that I dislike emotional work—Wagner, in the night of love, Tchaikovsky, in the final duet of Eugene Onegin, indeed even the finale to Rachmaninov's own third piano concerto are all both satisfying and not childish.) I am, as my father's oncologist always quipped, a sample group of 1. (My father is alive and healthy.) However, despite my active interest in moving beyond Wagner to the C20, I have had little success falling in love with Mahler, Debussy, Schoenberg, Stravinsky, Shostakovich, and indeed even Prokofiev, though I continue to attempt to. 
 
My life in music is unfinished, though consciously frenetic.

 

[Pietro Cozzi Tinin]

   
My life in music is unfinished, though consciously frenetic.

 
Then try Philip Glass and Steve Reich.

 

[HumanFly]

   
Then try Philip Glass and Steve Reich.

I see Constanza has taken over completely now.
Well....it was to be expected.
 
Nils Frahm? Olafur Arnalds maybe? Nicholas Jaar?
Probably so far off I will be banned from this thread untill I announce at least 5 epic operas in latin.

 
 
 

 

[earnmyturns]

   
Then try Philip Glass and Steve Reich.

Here's my ad hoc 20th-21st century "classical" music recommendation list (leaving out Stravinsky who I like a lot but @bosiemoncrieff seems not to enjoy, and Reich, Glass because you already mentioned them). A very biased sample, result of accidents in my trajectory from 19th century classical. Missing lots because I've listened to some key works in decades and I need a refresher. I've listened to all of these, some in records, some live: Alban Berg (Violin Concerto, Lyric Suite), Bartók (String Quartets -- all of them in their different amazing ways, Sonata for 2 Pianos and Percussion, Music for Strings, Percussion & Celesta, Concerto for Orchestra), Pierre Boulez (Piano Sonata No. 2, Le Marteau Sand Maître, Pli Selon Pli), Karlheinz Stockhausen (Mantra, in the original Kontarsky brothers recording now only available from Stockhausen-Verlag), Olivier Messiaen (Quatuor Pour la Fin du Temps, Le Merle Noir, Sept Haïkaï), György Ligeti (Violin Concerto, Atmosphères), John Luther Adams (Become Ocean, Ilimaq), Kaija Saariaho (recent "Trios" album has several wonderful compositions).

 

[bosiemoncrieff]

Oh I did love the Atmospheres when I saw Dudamel perform them in LA. 
 
By the way, @baldr, is my new avatar a decent likeness? 

 

[HumanFly]

Chopins Nocturnes are a hung-over pleasure of mine. As well as Arvo Part. Somehow nothing that dude made goes on my nerves.Even when those nerves got abused.

 

[rkw]

  Bartók (String Quartets -- all of them in their different amazing ways, Sonata for 2 Pianos and Percussion, Music for Strings, Percussion & Celesta, Concerto for Orchestra)

 
To Bartók, I'll add his Piano Concertos. Many years ago as a college student, I heard the 2nd Concerto with Vladimir Ashkenazy at the NY Philharmonic. I was sitting in the 3rd row in front of the pianist and it had a great effect on me. At the same concert, it was also interesting because I could overhear musicians onstage talking to each other during intermission. Towards the end of intermission, one musician looked out at audience and began complaining to another about how so many people were still standing in the aisles. He was anxious to go home! Somehow it struck me as being very New York.

 

[earnmyturns]

   
To Bartók, I'll add his Piano Concertos. Many years ago as a college student, I heard the 2nd Concerto with Vladimir Ashkenazy at the NY Philharmonic. I was sitting in the 3rd row in front of the pianist and it had a great effect on me.

 
Nice coincidence, just (re-)bought and listened to a digital version of my favorite interpretation of the concertos as I mentioned on another thread. Never heard a live interpretation, unfortunately.