Steve's bedroom now features Raff

[Mark Thomas]

The indefatigable Steve Jones and his Bedroom Band have turned their attention to Raff's string quartets. Rather surprisingly, given the pretty comprehensive Raff discography which has been built up in the last fifteen years, four of the quartets have yet to appear on CD: Nos.3-5 and No.8. Steve has now halved that deficiency by recording Nos.5 and 8 in his own inimitable way. Which is great news. They are downloadable freely as mp3s from IMSLP, the links being: String Quartet No.5 and String Quartet No.8 Suite in Canonform.

Steve is currently on a roll, continually adding to his roster of unsung chamber music culled from the pages of IMSLP. It's worth regularly checking his listing there.

[fuhred]

A big thanks to Steve and his fantastic software for bringing us all these unrecorded works! The Gigue of the Raff 8th Quartet is particularly impressive.

[Kevin Pearson]

Thanks for posting this Mark. I was unaware of his site. Looks to be some very interesting pieces there. I'm impressed by the quality of the Raff works. Very nice stuff indeed! 

Kevin

[TerraEpon]

Unfortunately this guy seems to record in mono (I'm guessing it's a simple computer recording)

[eschiss1]

as he's explained in a few places, he records each line separately then sequences them using Audacity. That may or may not answer the question?... (I don't know if he has an account here)

[Mark Thomas]

Steve has now added Raff's Third String Quartet to his growing list of recordings. I do urge lovers of chamber music to explore here. There are many, many little jewels hidden away and quite a few names previously utterly unknown to me: Max Puchat, Joachim Neergaard or Albert Doyen, anyone?

Steve himself is the first to say that these aren't in any way commercial-quality recordings, but they aren't computer-generated either and at least serve to give the music an airing, so that we can judge its quality for ourselves.