★★★★★
For his 1913 pantomime ballet "Le Festin de l'Araignée" ("The Spider's Feast"), Albert Roussel owes a clear debt to Ravel and Debussy. While the diaphanous textures and fanciful conceit of this insect-world tale may sound familiar, Roussel has his own wryly delicate voice. He summons an army of marching ants with a grimly purposeful timbre and sets the spider's web trembling with taut, shimmering strings. A crowd scene for a mayfly, ants, dung beetles and others takes on a wonder-struck air...
- www.sfgate.com
2009-11-06
★★★★★
This is a pretty good recording of a pretty good performance of a pretty good symphony. Koch's live digital sound is direct, if a bit too in your face. Christoph Eschenbach's conducting is forceful in the fast movements and suitably reverential in the solemn Adagio. The Houston Symphony's playing is powerful in every movement but still subtle enough in the delicate woodwind passages. And Bruckner's Symphony No...
- music.aol.com
2008-08-28
★★★★★
This set is a remastered issue of Eschenbach's recordings from the mid-'70s. His reading of these great, late Beethoven sonatas is fascinating. The slower movements, such as the Adagio of the Hammerklavier, and even places within the second movement of the Sonata No. 32 and the Bagatelles, become almost stream of consciousness music, but these are not random thoughts jumbled together. The counterpoint in the first movement of the Sonata No. 32 is coherent and reasoned with dedicated feeling...
- music.aol.com
2008-08-28
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