‘Gratia’ Is Unexpected and Amazing

Available Now at 40% Off! I’ll admit, it took me a while to really dive into this classical-jazz crossover album. Is it fusion, or confusion…?  Italian Double bassist and composer Enzo Pietropaoli features arrangements of traditional sacred Marian antiphons, as well as some compositions of his own. Pietropaoli is on bass, Gabriele Mirabassi on clarinet, and […]

An Exciting New Release from Yarlung Records in Pure DSD 256 with Quartet Integra Performing Beethoven, Ligeti, and Lefkowitz

View Original Whenever I get to hear something that is so supremely good, and so delightfully performed, with such insight and richness, I feel it warrants a immediate sharing with you. This new Yarlung Records Pure DSD 256 album, released today, is such a recording. Can you tell I’m excited about it? Yes, indeed! You […]

Symphonies For The Whole World

Sir Antony Pampano’s recent recording of Vaughan Williams’ Symphonies 5 and 9 will no doubt be one of my nominations for an album of the year nomination, so I thought it would be an excellent time to remind you of this superb release from 2021.  VW’s 4 and 6 are remarkable.  Instead of folk melodies […]

BigRibbons – a New Label To Keep Your Eye On, With Free Sample Download

View Original What a pleasure to hear of a new label with audiophile aesthetics emerging from the greater Los Angeles commercial music community! This was my immediate reaction when I first started talking by phone with Ryan Sillifant, producer, mastering engineer, and performing artist for a new label, BigRibbons, launched by Wes Dooley, founder of […]

Recent Finds No. 58 More Nice Adventures with NativeDSD

View Original Once again we have a full measure of excellent recordings released in recent weeks. If I didn’t like them, I would not write about them. And I do like these very much. They start off with an outstanding new recording of trumpet concertos from the inestimable Tine Thing Helseth and Lawo Classics, then […]

Yarlung Pure DSD256 Reissues from the Master Tapes Continues with Orion Weiss

View Original As Yarlung Records celebrates its 20th Anniversary, founder Bob Attiyeh is reissuing in Pure DSD256 some of the 15ips 2-track tape recordings made in earlier years. We’ve previously seen released David Fung’s Evening Conversations (HERE) and coming before long will be Ciaramella’s Music in the Court of Burgundy. But now we have this very excellent recording with pianist […]

Dejan Lazic plays Rachmaninoff

Here is an album that’s been out for a while, and I think it’s been overlooked.  Rachmaninoff was the last major Romantic composer according to folks who decide these things. I’m not sure. Comparing Rachmaninoff with even Stravinsky has convinced me that Rachmaninoff was more than capable with some surprising sounds, while Stravinsky wasn’t always doing […]

Platero y Yo – An Andalusian Elegy

As well as being a performer and critic, the Italian composer Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco (1895-1968) wrote a considerable body of conventional diatonic music in a wide variety of idioms. In Platero y Yo, which dates from 1960, he set twenty-eight poems for narrator and guitar by the Spanish poet Juan Ramon Jimenez, which document what can […]