Awards 2011 - Symphony

Suk: Asrael
Czech Philharmonic Orchestra/Charles Mackerras
Supraphon

Was there an element of sentiment involved in Charles Mackerras's win here? He had died a little less than a year before reviewers got to listen to this album, so perhaps they allowed their judgement to be clouded a tiny bit. But it's clear the disc won on its own merits: Fanfare's Jonathan Woolf calls it "a performance of grip, precision, structural acuity, and expressive power". In Gramophone, Rob Cowan notes that "It's always problematical when a new recording has to confront rivalry from an almost impossibly great benchmark... in this particular context, Václav Talich's 1952 Czech Philharmonic recording". But, he points out, "Mackerras actually learnt Asrael from Talich and this performance... betrays an almost symbiotic identification with the music". Jan Smaczny in BBC Music Magazine calls this recording "the closest to the definitive version we have".

Runners-up:
Korngold: Symphony; Much Ado about Nothing
Orchestre Philharmonique de Strasbourg/Marc Albrecht
PentaTone

Walton: Symphonies nos.1 & 2
BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra/Martyn Brabbins
Hyperion

Borodin: Symphonies nos.1-3
Seattle Symphony/Gerard Schwarz
Naxos

Shostakovich: Symphony no.10
Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra/Vasily Petrenko
Naxos

I completely failed to predict this one. I was pretty sure Petrenko had it: his Shostakovich won the Symphony Award in 2009 and was runner-up in 2010 - and in fact under 2011's rules he would have won it then because he was pipped by what I would now classify as an Archive recording, Mahler from Klaus Tennstedt. But ARG wasn't so keen. Is it always ARG that's the downer? Not always. This year was clearly a good one for a particular kind of symphony - ones a classical enthusiast probably knows already but that are not necessarily counted among the elite.

Awards 2011 - Orchestral

Britten: Cello Symphony; Gloriana - Symphonic Suite; Four Sea Interludes from Peter Grimes
BBC Philharmonic/Edward Gardner; Paul Watkins
Chandos

Two Britten discs from Edward Gardner in this category, and he wins with what David Hurwitz on Classics Today calls "outstanding performances, as good or better than the composer's own... In short, this release is a major entry in the Britten discography". For Helen Wallace in BBC Music Magazine, "Three elements stand out: firstly, the dramatic intensity of purpose he finds in all pieces; secondly, the sizzling soloistic detail he draws from the BBC Philharmonic and, thirdly, the depth and scope of the recorded sound". There's little to add, as other reviewers say pretty much the same things.

Runners-up:
Halvorsen: Orchestral works, volume 2
Bergen Philharmonic Orchestra/Neeme Järvi; Marianne Thorsen
Chandos

Britten: Phaedra; A Charm of Lullabies; Lachrymae; Sinfonietta; Two Portraits
BBC Philharmonic/Edward Gardner; Sarah Connolly; Maxim Rysanov
Chandos

Respighi: Pines of Rome; Fountains of Rome; Roman Festivals
São Paulo Symphony Orchestra/John Neschling
BIS

Fuchs: Serenades nos.1 & 2; Andante grazioso and Capriccio
Cologne Chamber Orchestra/Christian Ludwig
Naxos

So, a good year for Chandos, then. Occasionally I question the wisdom of splitting off Symphony from Orchestral (especially when a disc is half-filled with a symphony and half-filled with other orchestral music) but it seems to work well. If we put the two together, then this year there'd be 3 symphony albums and 2 others, and Suk's Asrael would be the narrow winner. But you're not really comparing like with like.

Awards 2011 - Solo vocal

Strauss: Lieder
Diana Damrau; Münchner Philharmoniker/Christian Thielemann
Virgin

Why did this album get top marks from David Nice in BBC Music Magazine? "What wins this disc the five stars are the facts that Damrau, singing in her native German, is poised ideally between dreamy haze and Schwarzkopfian fussiness... and that her hallowed pianissimos allow the exquisite detail Thielemann draws from his Muncih players to shine". In IRR, Christopher Cook, too, is enthusiastic: "Here are 22 of Strauss's songs in their orchestral settings - the best-known and the less familiar - that ought to be on the shelves of anyone who cannot imagine a day without listening to this great German composer, admires musicians who have his music in their bones and yearns for committed singing that is as expressive as it is beautiful. Damrau possesses these virtues in abundance". As Bill White puts it in Fanfare, "Diana Damrau is one of the leading lyric coloratura sopranos in the opera world, so what is she doing recording Strauss Lieder? She's doing very well, thank you".

Runners-up:

Pfitzner: Orchestral songs
Hans Christoph Begemann; Nordwestdeutsche Philharmonie/Otto Tausk
CPO

"Fête Galante"
Karina Gauvin; Marc-André Hamelin
ATMA

Loewe: Songs & Ballads
Florian Boesch; Roger Vignoles
Hyperion

Schubert: "Nacht und Träume"
Matthias Goerne; Alexander Schmalcz
Harmonia Mundi

Quite a few German Romantics here this year, and it's interesting that the top two are orchestral lieder rather than piano-accompanied. As it happens, Karina Gauvin's French recital is actually a reissue, which prompted a lot of soul-searching round here. There are a handful of albums that are reissues but not in the same sense as a box set or a budget-priced repackaging - if anything, they're an upgrade, bringing to attention something that might not have been properly noticed the first time round. So I made an exception for those few albums, and here's one of them.

Awards 2011 - Choral

Rossini: Stabat Mater
soloists; Orchestra e Coro dell'Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia/Antonio Pappano
EMI

A lament from Richard Osborne in Gramophone: "We have down the years been rather clutching at straws where recordings of Rossini's two great choral works are concerned. The Petite Messe solennelle has had just one memorable recording; the Stabat mater has had none... [dramatic pause] Until now". (ellipsis and dramatic pause added for gratuitous effect). Yes, Richard Osborne is impressed all right: "This is one of the great choral recordings". Let's turn to Ian Julier in IRR, who begins: "Given its patchy and complicated composition history, extending over a decade and outlined with the clarity and precision of a detective novel's denourment in Richard Osborne's excellent note, the cohesive and unified achievement of this much-loved choral work is" - wait, what? Did he just say Richard Osborne wrote the booklet note? The same Richard Osborne who reviewed the album in Gramophone? Oh dear oh dear. Fortunately, other reviewers liked it too, such as Simon Thompson on MusicWeb: "If you want the Stabat Mater as a prayer then look somewhere else, but I found this disc absolutely enthralling: after the final bars had stormed out of my speakers I even found myself letting out an involuntary "bravo"!"

Delius: Appalachia; The Song of the High Hills
soloists; BBC Symphony Chorus & Orchestra/Andrew Davis
Chandos

"Ikon II"
Holst Singers/Stephen Layton
Hyperion

Cherubini: Requiem in C minor
Kammerchor Stuttgart; Hofkapelle Stuttgart/Frieder Bernius
Carus

Howells: The Winchester Service and other works
Winchester Cathedral Choir/Andrew Lumsden
Hyperion

Despite Richard Osborne's ethical lapse, the Rossini earned its place, though Andrew Davis's Delius wasn't far behind. I think this is the first appearance in the Nereffid's Guide Awards for the Carus label. This seemed to be a stronger year for choral albums than usual - at least, there seemed to be more discs that reviewers were consistently enthusiastic about. Maybe that's just a vague perception on my part. I don't know. Leave me alone.

Awards 2011 - Opera

Donizetti: Linda di Chamounix
Eglise Gutiérrez et al; Orchestra of the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden/Mark Elder
Opera Rara

Mark Elder conducted last year's Opera winner, the Hallé's Götterdämmerung, and he returns with an opera that, according to Joel Kasow in Fanfare, "has far too long been relegated to minor status". Also in Fanfare, Henry Fogel notes that "This is a very tricky opera to get right, because it has elements of serious and comic operas blended into a form known as opera semiseria. If either element is blown out of proportion or minimized, the opera loses its balance... Elder is just about perfect". Fogel describes lead soprano Eglise Gutiérrez's work as "a truly sensational performance in every way". In BBC Music Magazine, Michael Tanner tells us that "All the singers are up to their roles, and the playing of the orchestra is bold; even the most conventional passages sweep you along... It's hard to imagine this set ever being replaced, or even rivalled".

Runners-up:
Martin: Der Sturm
Robert Holl et al; Netherlands Radio Philharmonic/Thierry Fischer
Hyperion

Bartók: Bluebeard's Castle
Laszló Polgár; Ildikó Komlósi; Budapest Festival Orchestra/Iván Fischer
Channel Classics

Rossini: Ermione
Carmen Giannattasio et al; London Philharmonic Orchestra/David Parry
Opera Rara

Beethoven: Fidelio
Nina Stemme et al; Lucerne Festival Orchestra/Claudio Abbado
DG

A second appearance for Opera Rara in this category, and Hyperion scores a success with a rare venture into opera. DG is, for the third year in a row, the sole major label presence, but then the majors do have those massive back catalogues. The Bartók is another one of those reissues-that-kind-of-aren't-reissues, having first been released by Philips. Perhaps the most intriguing thing about this category is an absence: René Jacobs's recording of The Magic Flute got the highest bonus scores from foreign-language press - which is to say, continental Europe adored it - but neither IRR nor Classics Today was impressed. Of course this brings up the fact that if I had a slightly different way of calculating scores, it might have even won the Award. But it feels "right" that it should place just outside the top 5, which is essentially what these Awards are trying to reflect - a general feeling about how the year's reviews went, rather than a scientific description.

Awards 2011 - Opera recital

"Diva Divo"
Joyce DiDonato; Orchestre De L'Opéra National De Lyon/Kazuko Ono
Virgin

Clearly it wasn't enough for Joyce DiDonato to win last year's Award for Opera recital, because here she is again. And obviously that wasn't enough either, because she also appears as a soloist on this year's winning Choral album. Oh and that still wasn't enough, because "Diva Divo" - a selection of "trouser roles" and, uh, "skirt roles" - is also the Recording of the Year, the best-reviewed of them all. "Joyce DiDonato is surely one of the best American opera singers to emerge in recent years. Hers is a rich yet smooth lyrical mezzo... She is also as fine a vocal actress as you'll find in opera today", says Kurt Moses in ARG. "Perhaps the best thing about this recital", Robert Levine tells us on Classics Today, "is that everything DiDonato sings sounds spontaneous, as if the character - her- or himself - were actually experiencing it for the first time. Being an American, I'd like to chalk this up to her Yankee pluckiness, but it's really something else: She's a great artist".

Runners-up:
"Verismo Arias"
Jonas Kaufmann; Orchestra dell'Accademia di Santa Cecilia/Antonio Pappano
Decca

"The Italian Tenor"
Vittorio Grigolo; Orchestra del Teatro Regio di Parma/Pier Giorgio Morandi
Sony

"The Maltese Tenor"
Joseph Calleja; L'Orchestre de la Suisse Romande/Marco Armiliato
Decca

"Great Baritone Arias"
Peter Mattei; Royal Stockholm Philharmonic Orchestra/Lawrence Renes
BIS

There were only 17 entries in this category, compared with about 110 in Orchestral, about 75 in Solo vocal, and over 40 in Opera. So is it that opera aria discs are a small niche market, or that there aren't very many singers out there willing and/or able to record a recital? Hardly the former, seeing as there's plenty of money to be made in a well-marketed star singer. What's also interesting is that you don't have to go very far down the list of entries before you find an album that's regarded, on balance, as a bit meh. Opera critics are a critical bunch indeed, with very particular standards. They say things like "I haven't heard Berlioz's "Premiers transports" sung this beautifully since Gladys Swarthout did it with Toscanini back in 1947" (which is how Lynn René Bayley praised Joyce DiDonato in Fanfare).

Awards 2011 - Living composer - Instrumental

"Chinese Recorder Concertos: East Meets West"
Michala Petri; Copenhagen Philharmonic/Lan Shui
OUR Recordings

A warm welcome please to OUR Recordings, the label created 5 years ago by Danish musicians Michala Petri and Lars Hannibal. Fanfare's Raymond Tuttle says this "is, to enlist a perhaps overused word, delightful, and deserves to be brought to the attention of a broad audience". ARG's Todd Gorman tells us "This music speaks a language that communicates like little else I have heard lately". Tuttle: "If you don't believe me, try the opening work by Tang Jianping... This will go to the top of my list of musical pick-me-ups". Gorman: "Tang's piece ranks with the most interesting music I have ever heard". Tuttle: "If anyone still doubts the recorder's place as an instrument worthy of the same attention as its cousin the flute, Petri's playing here should put that to rest". Gorman: "As for Petri's playing, pick the superlatives of your choice; they should all apply". Classics Today's David Hurwitz: "This is beautiful music, often astoundingly so... an absolute joy from start to finish".

Runners-up:
Tiensuu: Vie; Missa; False Memories I-III
Helsinki Philharmonic Orchestra/John Storgårds; Kari Kriikku
Ondine

"Sound the Bells! American Premieres for Brass"
The Bay Brass
Harmonia Mundi

Frank: Hilos and other works
ALIAS Chamber Ensemble; Gabriela Lena Frank
Naxos

Gallagher: Orchestral music
London Symphony Orchestra/JoAnn Falletta
Naxos

This is one of the least predictable of all the categories, given the sometimes haphazard coverage of contemporary music by our review sources. Aside from any editorial considerations about how much of such music to include, there's also some regional bias - American music's not so often reviewed in the British publications, or perhaps another way of saying this is that ARG and Fanfare tend to have better coverage of contemporary music. They and Classics Today reviewed all 5 of our discs here; Gramophone and IRR managed 2 each, and BBC Music Magazine did 1. And then, of course, because the music is unfamiliar, the reviewer must offer an opinion on the music more than the performances, which isn't a situation you find with, say, Beethoven - "this Fifth Symphony is quite an uninteresting work, but at least the performers seem committed...". So the unfortunate reviewer must usually start from square one as regards knowing what to think about the album at hand. One occasion where an earlier recording of the music was available possibly the most divisive album of the year: the Chandos release of Steve Reich's Desert Music and Three Movements got top marks from both BBC Music Magazine and Fanfare, but bottom marks from both Gramophone and ARG.

Awards 2011 - Living composer - Vocal

Sven-David Sandström: "Nordic Sounds"
Swedish Radio Choir/Peter Dijkstra
Channel Classics

"The title of this superb disc is the only banal thing about it", says Martin Anderson in IRR. "the music, performances and recording are all phenomenally good. Happy the composer that has this kind of choir at his disposal... The singing... will leave you slack-jawed in amazement: control of pitch, dynamic, rhyth, blend, you name it, is perfect". On Classics Today, David Vernier calls Sandstrom an "original composer uninhibited by conventional views on what singers can or can't do. Of course, when you have a virtuoso ensemble like the Swedish Radio Choir performing your music, what's to worry?" He also notes "Although there are many moments that will stretch the familiar boundaries of comfort for a casual listener, there's nothing here that's gratuituously irritating, and there are some pieces - Es ist genug; A new song of love; Agnus Dei - that will literally prime you with the familiar while launching you headlong into the experience of choral music's newest frontier".

Runners-up:
Miškinis: "Time is Endless"
Royal Holloway Choir/Rupert Gough
Hyperion

Penderecki: Credo; Cantata for Jagellonian University
Soloists' Warsaw Boys' Choir; Warsaw Philharmonic Orchestra & Choir/Antoni Wit
Naxos

"Beyond All Mortal Dreams: American A Cappella"
Trinity College Choir, Cambridge/Stephen Layton
Hyperion

Dennehy: Grá agus Bás; That the Night Come
Iarla O’Lionáird; Dawn Upshaw; Crash Ensemble/Alan Pierson
Nonesuch

This category had fewer than half as many entries as its instrumental counterpart, but noticeably better coverage by the British magazines. Again, a hard one always to predict, but it would be an odd Awards indeed if there wasn't at least one entry from Hyperion. Nice this year to see some Irish representation.

Awards 2011 - Archive

Mahler: Symphony no.10 - 1960 BBC broadcast (including lecture) & 1964 Proms premiere
Deryck Cooke; Philharmonia Orchestra, London Symphony Orchestra/Bertholdt Goldschmidt
Testament

"This is more than just a performance", Gramophone's James Inverne explains. "... It is a historic document and a fascinating insight into a major work's excavation". His colleague David Gutman warns of "plenty of rough moments" but these "may or may not matter to you given the obvious fervour of the music-making". In IRR, Robert Matthew-Walker, noting that the 1960 performance came "in the days when the BBC was the BBC", says that "The result is akin to being witness to the first performance of The Rite of Spring, of Elgar's First Symphony, or of Verklärte Nacht: this is an issue of major importance, the significance of which could not be exaggerated. I cannot recommend it too highly". Well, actually, Robert, you could have given it an IRR Outstanding accolade. Meanwhile, Fanfare's Christopher Abbot calls it "the Dead Sea Scrolls for Mahlerites".

Runners-up:
Wagner, Strauss: Lieder and scenes
Kirsten Flagstad; Orchestra of the Städtische Oper Berlin/Georges Sebastian (1952)
Audite

Wagner: Der Ring des Nibelungen
Hans Hotter et al; Orchester der Bayreuther Festspiele/Clemens Krauss (1953)
Orfeo

Berlioz: Les nuits d'été; Handel: Arias
Lorraine Hunt Lieberson; Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra, Nicholas McGegan (1995, 1991)
Philharmonia Baroque

Mahler: Symphony no.8
soloists; choirs; London Philharmonic Orchestra/Klaus Tennstedt (1991)
LPO

You'll notice I've avoided the term "Historical" in this category to allow for performances of more recent vintage, though I haven't yet figured out where exactly is the line between an archive release and an ordinary release that happens to be a few years old. The original thinking for not including historical releases was that I didn't have much interest in them myself, but by expanding the definition to "archive" generally, things get more interesting, though I can't imagine I'll ever be the sort of person who must have every Toscanini performance ever. With the addition of this category and the next, the awards pretty much cover anything that gets released. Maybe soon I'll start to include DVD and Blu-ray.

Awards 2011 - Reissue

Liszt: Complete piano music
Leslie Howard
Hyperion

It would be nice to think that it was a foregone conclusion that Leslie Howard's immense and, let's face it, slightly insane project to record all of Liszt's piano music would win this award, but of course it's the nature of the Nereffid's Guide Awards that each release is judged in isolation on its own merits rather than on the basis of whether it is more deserving than others. But we needn't have worried. Noting that "Howard's abilities as a writer and investigative musicologist were essential to the series", James Harrington in ARG says "If all Liszt performances were as meticulously prepared as Howard's, we would cease to have Liszt detractors". What, do we still have Liszt detractors? I pity the fools. If you can't afford the 99-disc box you can pick and choose tracks on Hyperion's web site, which prompts the somewhat disturbing reflection that the first album in the series was released in 1985, a good 5 years before Tim Berners-Lee mooted the idea of the World Wide Web.

Runners-up:
"French Music"
various orchestras/Thomas Beecham
EMI

Lou Harrison: Music for orchestra, ensemble and gamelan
various artists; Gamelan Si Betty; Brooklyn Philharmonic/Dennis Russell Davies
Nimbus

"Complete EMI Recordings"
Alicia de Larrocha
EMI

"Complete 78-rpm Solo Recordings"
Percy Grainger
APR

OK, that answers that question then: when I created this category I wasn't at all sure what I'd end up with - would it be dominated by labels like Newton and Australian Eloquence, or what? Clearly box sets are the ones that find favour. Part of this is because of the somewhat haphazard way in which what you might call "mainstream" rereleases - things like Hyperion's budget Helios label and the major labels' opera repackagings - are treated by the review sources. Impressively proportioned box sets are more likely to get reviewed. It's nice to see Percy Grainger making an appearance in his anniversary year (and Chandos's Grainger Edition wasn't far off the pace), and as someone who's only now dipping a toe in the "focus on the performer, not the music" side of collecting, I'm glad to acknowledge EMI's churning out of large chunks of its archives. The Lou Harrison release sticks out a bit from this crowd: it's a straight reissue of four albums originally on the MusicMasters label.

Awards 2011 - What it all means

How it's made

For the 7 major review sources - as mentioned above - each disc gets a score out of 5 based on either the review's own provided score or my interpretation of the review; when MusicWeb and Fanfare provide multiple reviews of one release, I go with the best review, though the other reviews do figure in the final calculation of the overall score. The average is weighted to reflect the fact that the number of reviews varies from album to album (for my purposes, I've assumed that not being reviewed is very slightly worse than getting an average review). Then I do the same for the 3 minor sources - Klassik Heute, Audiophile Audition, and Classics Today France - all of which have a numerical score to make things easier for me (and avoid me struggling with foreign languages). And finally, bonus points go to those albums that are given a "discs-of-the-month" equivalent in the various continental magazines (obtained via their web sites) and the quarterly German Critics' Prize. Any release that was reviewed by 3 or more of the 7 major review sources goes on the long list, at which point I assign categories and eliminate anything released too late or too early. This year, the release period was from August 2010 to July 2011. There's a big lull in releases in July so it makes a natural cutoff point. Unfortunately I have to wait till January to ensure full coverage from Fanfare and ARG.

Some statistics
The long list (albums reviewed by 3 out of 7 major sources) comprised 1,542 albums and involved 7,967 different opinions. There were about 7,700 other albums not in consideration! (This is rather more than a year's worth of reviews - it stretches from September 2010 magazine issues to January 2012 issues).
The average score for an album on the long list was 4.09, which essentially means that, among releases that gain attention from several sources, the average album is a good album.
Gramophone, IRR, ARG, Fanfare, and MusicWeb each reviewed roughly 1,000-1,100 of the 1,542 long-list albums; BBC Music Mag managed nearly 700, while Classics Today covered just 388. You might wonder why the latter qualifies as a "major review source" in that case; well, record labels do like to make use of the "10/10" symbol.
78 albums were reviewed by all 7 major review sources; 7 of the 16 Award winners were.
3 albums were reviewed by all 7 major review sources plus all 3 minor sources and got at least 3 bonus accolades: Vadim Gluzman's Bruch, Pierre-Laurent Aimard's Ravel concertos album, and Gustavo Dudamel's "Tchaikovsky Shakespeare", although the latter 2 were not in contention, having each received at least one negative review (yes, from ARG in both cases!).
Some 38 albums received a top accolade from one source and a wholly negative (score of 1) review from another. In 16 cases, ARG provided the negative, while Fanfare accounted for 11. Classics Today France accounted for 8. The other sources tend not to give scores of 1.
Actually Dudamel is an interesting case. From the 7 major sources he got 8 reviews (2 in Fanfare): one 4.5, one 4, two 3s, two 2s, and two 1s. But he also got top scores from Luister and Scherzo as well as the German Critics' Prize.

The labels
Harmonia Mundi, Hyperion, and Virgin each won 2 awards.
Hyperion had an impressive 11 winners or runners-up, while Harmonia Mundi had 8. Universal (ie, Decca and DG) had 6; EMI (including Virgin) had 8; Sony had 2; Warner had 1 (on Nonesuch). Equally impressive, Hyperion appeared in 9 of the 16 categories, and Harmonia Mundi in 7. So perhaps for classical music we should redefine the term "major label".

And in conclusion
This year I made as much effort as possible to keep myself in the dark about what the final results might be. Perhaps this extra intrigue contributed to my feeling that this year's field was an impressive one. In all categories (except for Opera recital) we could produce a very convincing top 10, or 15, or even 20.
Adding the foreign-language "bonus points" proved very instructive, not just in sometimes highlighting differences or blind spots but also in sometimes providing reinforcement for my main review sources. As always, the ultimate point of the exercise is to provide some sort of quantitative impression of one person's qualitative experience of trying to find out what classical albums are really worth buying.
You should never trust a single critic, but put a bunch of 'em together and they seem to make sense.
Now go buy stuff.

Meanwhile, at 36,000 feet...

Where can you hear Saariaho's L'amour de loin, Ligeti's string quartets, the viola music of Quincy Porter, Philippe Jaroussky singing Caldara, Stephen Hough playing Chopin, Tennstedt's Nereffid's Guide Award-winning Mahler 2, and many, many more? On an Aer Lingus flight from Dublin to New York, as it happens. I discovered this last month, and hadn't flown for a year and a half before that, so I don't know how long it's been going on. But hurrah! When they first introduced individual in-flight entertainment the classical selection wasn't much good - a few generic "Best of Beethoven" sort of things. Those are still there, but there's now about fifty "proper" classical albums available too. I don't know how often they change them, though most of the albums seemed to be at most a couple of years old, many of them less than that. One little obscurity I was delighted to find was an album of Fritz Reizenstein's piano music played by Philip Martin, which included his Variations on the Lambeth Walk. Oi!

Now, I must point out that my joy at discovering so much high-quality and/or interesting music on the flight does not mean that I endorse the concept of flying. But I will concede that any mode of transport that allows one to listen to Joan Sutherland and Steve Reich, not to mention play (and, ahem, win) Who Wants To Be A Millionaire and watch Game of Thrones, can't be all bad.


Nereffid accidentally selects the wrong album.

Who'd be a pianist?

From Jeremy Nicholas's review in Gramophone a few months ago of a recital by Francesco Piemontesi on Avanti:

[the Bach/Liszt Fantasia and Fugue is] efficiently executed, cogently voiced but pallid compared with Percy Grainger's exuberance and sonority in 1931.

Who would want a job where, every so often when you've completed some work, someone leans over your shoulder and says, "Not bad, but this other person did a much better job eighty years ago"?

Arnold con moto

On a whim I'm listening to just those tracks in my music library that have a "con moto" marking.
Turns out Malcolm Arnold used that a lot.

This should have been posted on Facebook or something, shouldn't it?

And why do my first posts after a long break tend to be really trivial?