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Pekka Kuusisto: Willows album review – shining, creative and penetrating

by musicsoundwizard@gmail.com   ·  3 weeks ago  

‘We aren’t deleting notes,” says Pekka Kuusisto, “but deleting ketchup.” The Finnish conductor and violinist is talking about Ralph Vaughan Williams’ The Lark Ascending, a piece of such innate Britishness that it veritably tops UK classical song recognition polls. Kuusisto’s Lark isn’t RVW-lite, on the opposite hand, but a penetrating, convincingly upright myth that strips ...

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HK Gruber: Short Tales from the Vienna Woods album review – easy quirky finally these years

by musicsoundwizard@gmail.com   ·  4 weeks ago  

At 83, Austrian iconoclast HK Gruber reveals no imprint of shedding his anarchic edge nor indeed his capacity to entertain. This eclectic album involves his necessary piano concerto, premiered by Emanuel Ax with the Unusual York Philharmonic in 2017, and an absurdist potpourri extracted from his 2014 opera Tales from the Vienna Woods, both performed ...