★★★★★
aná?ek's music went largely unnoticed for most of his life - hardly gratifying, but perhaps it allowed him a creative freedom that more public artists find harder to risk. 's survey with the Bergen Phil taps into his boundless, brazen invention; that uniquely Janá?ekian blend of rustic and caustic. The series began at the end, with three blistering late works on the last year. This second volume charts the spry, earthy mid-period symphonic poems and rhapsodies...
- www.theguardian.com
2015-04-24
★★★★★
hese are fiery, full-Technicolor performances of the two great Janá?ek quartets - Nos 1 and 2 - with which the make a mark in a crowded field. Their is especially effective, turning this concise work into an unsparingly dramatic journey: starting almost hesitantly, it has, by the end, reached a pitch of absolute abandon...
- www.theguardian.com
2015-04-17
★★★★★
With its large cast, child singers and animal costumes, Janácek's Cunning Little Vixen was often thought too problematic for satisfactory production. In fact, it did not really make its way in the world until as late as 1956 with Walter Felsenstein's Berlin staging. Happily, a number of highly successful productions in Britain, led by David Pountney's marvellous WNO staging, have established it as a favourite in this country...
- www.classical-music.com
2014-04-28
★★★★★
Buy it from Buy the CDBERG, JANACEK, WEBERNLyrical Suite/String Quartet No.1/Langsamer Satz-Analekta2013 Extra-musical associations link these three works. All were the products of love affairs: Janá?ek and Berg's from their musically hugely productive middle-age infatuations with Kamila Stösslová and Hanna Fuchs-Robettin, respectively; Webern's single movement from a less momentous liaison with his cousin when he was 21...
- www.guardian.co.uk
2013-05-31
★★★★★
Filmed in Salzburg last year, Christoph Marthaler's production of Janá?ek's existential drama is an austere take on a work usually considered hard-hitting and emotive. It carries with it a whiff of absurdist theatre: taking his cue from the legal wrangling that forms the plot's background, Marthaler confines the action to a courtroom and entangles the protagonists in its rituals in ways that at times recall Ionesco...
- www.guardian.co.uk
2013-04-04
★★★★★
As a boy chorister in his Czech-Moravian homeland, Janácek (1854-1928) learned early the potential of choral writing. This selection is mostly folk-inspired, apparently sunny but hinting at the psychological darkness of the composer's better known operas. Six Moravian Choruses (transcribed from Dvorák's Moravian Duets) tell of a slighted heart, promises of love and parting "without sorrow"...
- www.guardian.co.uk
2012-01-23
★★★★★
Born in Sarajevo but brought up in Britain, where she studied at Cambridge University and the Royal College of Music, Ivana Gavri? makes a hugely impressive CD debut with this disc, a recital-length programme presumably designed to showcase her capabilities in as wide a range of works as possible, but planned with her performance of the Schubert A minor sonata very much as the centrepiece...
- www.guardian.co.uk
2011-01-10
★★★★★
For a couple of decades now, the Emersons have been strutting their stuff close to the top of the tree as far as international string quartets go, recording a good proportion of their repertoire in the process. But until now they have never tackled the two quartets by Janá?ek that rank among the greatest of the 20th century. The performances here have the sovereign control and the perfect weighting of each line in the musical argument that are the group's trademarks...
- www.guardian.co.uk
2010-04-02
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