Barber reviews

Barber reviews

Barber's Violin Concerto: 3 of the best recordings

We take a look at a selection of the best recordings of Barber's Violin Concerto
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A Musical Zoo

Ashley Riches (bass-baritone), Joseph Middleton (piano) (Chandos)
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Hallgató

Ferenc Snétberger (guitar); Keller Quartett (ECM)
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From the New World

Hansjörg Albrecht (organ) (Oehms)
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Barber: Excursions; Souvenirs, etc

Yeseul Moon (piano) (MDG)
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Solitude

James Gilchrist (tenor), Anna Tilbrook (piano) (Chandos)
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Chimère: Works by Debussy, Poulenc, Previn, R Schumann et al

Sandrine Piau, Susan Manoff (
Alpha Classics)
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Barber • Tchaikovsky: Violin Concertos

Johan Dalene (violin); Norrköping Symphony Orchestra/Daniel Blendulf (BIS)
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When David Heard

The Purcell Singers/Mark Ford, Jonathan Schranz (Stone Records)
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Concentrated power and richness in Melody Moore’s American songs

‘A performance full of interest and vividly communicative artistry’
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The production and cast that Barber's Vanessa has been waiting for

'Vanessa is a great American masterpiece. Here now is the production and cast that Vanessa has been waiting for.'
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Manfred Honeck conducts Shostakovich's Symphony No. 5 and Barber's Adagio for Strings

Manfred Honeck’s Shostakovich sounds magnificent. From intense pianissimos to the shrieking upper register and full bass thwack of a grand peroration – which Honeck takes surprisingly at face value – there’s faith in what can sometimes seem like a time-serving symphony. I wondered whether Honeck’s determination to probe deep needed a slower tempo before the grinding first-movement development, but if the sequel means the most human and nurtured slow movement in the business, then it’s a small price to pay.

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Tides of Life: Lieder by Barber, Brahms, Schubert, Wolf

Thomas Hampson’s honeyed baritone and leonine good looks have delighted audiences for decades. A passionate advocate for art song, his latest foray into the studio showcases songs by Schubert, Wolf and Brahms in new arrangements for string orchestra, almost all by the British composer David Matthews, alongside Barber’s Dover Beach and Wolf’s joyous Italian Serenade. This continues a tradition of orchestral song established by figures like Berlioz, Brahms (who himself orchestrated Schubert) and others.

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Works by Barber Performed by Tedd Joselson and Ittai Shapira

Only a great violinist such as Shapira can take the unchecked gorgeousness of Barber’s Violin Concerto and make it burn. Joselson breathes life into the sadder, more abstract Piano Concerto.

Helen Wallace

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Barber • Britten

Elizabeth Joy Roe cites several correspondences in both art and life as her reason for putting these composers together. But this CD’s real justification lies in the closely related sound-worlds of their concertos. In the helter-skelter opening of Britten’s Concerto we hear echoes of Bartók, Prokofiev and Shostakovich, while Barber’s final movement has some indisputably Shostakovichian stretches: since the Russians were making the musical weather at the time, such influences were inevitable.

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Barber • Bartók

For once the cliché is justified: this is emphatically a disc of two halves. It starts competently enough with a performance of Barber’s Concerto in which Keith Jarrett, Dennis Russell Davies, and the Saarbrücken orchestra give a crisply intelligent account of this work which – as Paul Griffiths points out in his liner-note – successfully marries post-Romanticism and post-serialism. Jarrett’s first-movement sallies are spiky and challenging, and he and his orchestra work as one to convey scurrying urgency and burning eloquence.

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Barber: Early & Late Piano Works

Several world premiere recordings feature in this exploration of Barber’s piano music. The earliest pieces, from 1923, are especially touching. Fine advocacy from Nuti and, in Souvenirs, De Santis. (JD) 

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Barber: Cello Concerto

 

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Samuel Barber: An American Romantic

 

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Reich • Barber • Crumb

Samuel Barber, a conservative Romantic at heart, wouldn’t have relished sharing a disc with Steve Reich and George Crumb, leading figures in the stream of new music that swept him aside at the end of his life. And none of the trio, I hope, would approve of the CD’s provocative cover image: part of a bleak Stanley Kubrick photograph of a man and gun, aiming at a police van’s grill. The Quatuor Diotima’s vision of American music clearly doesn’t include the pastoral, the visionary, or Copland’s Appalachian Spring.

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Barber: Solo piano works

Samuel Barber once wrote about the daunting spectacle of ‘those black and white keys in a row, staring at me from across the room’. Yet he never abandoned the piano, and Leon McCawley’s near-complete collection allows us to follow the composer’s endeavours across 50 years. From airy trinkets of adolescence, we pass through wartime Americana, to the muscular post-war Sonata. After that, only music of nostalgia and retreat: a Chopinesque Nocturne; a hard-fought Ballade, written at the bitter end of a once-charmed life.

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Barbara Hendricks sings Bach, Barber and Copland

This lovely singer is here at her best; both in Bach and the vastly different Barber she is ideal in the purity and sweetness of her singing. Excellent accompanists. Michael Tanner


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Samuel Barber - Adagio

Centenary Barber is saluted in a well-rounded portrait with recent (a 2008 live BPO/Rattle Adagio) and classic recordings (the Endellions’ String Quartet and Leon McCawley’s nimble Excursions). Paul Riley

 

 

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Vadim Gluzman plays Barber, Bernstein, Bloch

 Isaac Stern’s classic accounts the Bernstein Serenade and Barber Violin Concerto recorded for CBS (now Sony) with the New York Philharmonic and Leonard Bernstein at their most incandescent, remain unsurpassed. In, for example, the gentle opening of the Barber, Stern sings every phrase with a captivating emotional sincerity.
 
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