Dave Hurwitz's take on Raffs music for piano and orchestra here. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hSmj3mutYPk)
We could all use some more Raff in our lives.
Hear, hear!
Quite, but is this particular CD all it's cracked up to be?
Isn't this.... https://www.prestomusic.com/classical/products/8366240--joachim-raff-works-for-piano-and-orchestra ....the better choice ....?
Yes. Tra is more refined and elegant - but for sheer barn-storming excitement (pace its shortcomings) I do enjoy Ponti's performance on the old Vox/Turnabout label.
It's also the coupling, i.e. the Ode to Spring, that makes Tra Nguyen's CD a direct competitor to the Aronsky. I just can't see why Hurwitz would favour the inferior product. Ignorance, perhaps?
Quote from: Gareth Vaughan on Saturday 15 June 2024, 21:33[...] but for sheer barn-storming excitement (pace its shortcomings) I do enjoy Ponti's performance on the old Vox/Turnabout label.
Agreed, it's the Ponti I return to -- for both works -- again and again.
I must dig out his account...
Ponti is a bit like Marmite. I am one of his fans, and I love the free-flowing style of his Raff. (By the way,in reference to his Bronsart,it storms along in such a compelling way that I will not (pace semloh) be relegating it to the back shelves.)
I'm rather late to this party! Well, as you'd expect my preference is very firmly Tra Nguyen's accounts of both works for Grand Piano and I do find Hurwitz's choice of the rather staid and careful Aronsky interpretations perplexing, especially as the orchestral contribution on Tra's recording is so much more vital, her pianism more nuanced and the recording more vivid. I'm biased of course, as I was very closely involved in the production and the most thrilling musical experience of my life was to be Tra's page turner for the Concerto recording.
Ponti, as Terry rightly says, is very much a Marmite character (and I do like Marmite). The Vox/Turnabout recording of the Raff concerto is certainly one of his best (definitely avoid his later one with the Plauen orchestra under Theissen on the Dante label) but his interpretation is still wayward, the recording is a long way from modern quality and the Hamburg orchestra is scrappy. These are typical shortcomings in his catalogue, so whilst I do recognise the adrenalin thrill of Ponti's playing, the only recording of his which I listened to regularly in recent years was the Bronsart concerto and that's now been superseded for me by both Wee and Triendl.
Tra's recording's the modern-day 'Reference Recording', surely...
Oh, without a doubt.
For me, it's still a toss-up between Tra and Antonioli. The interpretations are basically identical, and although the Lausanne Orchestra is the more lyrical of the two, the Prague one is slightly better recorded. Not much in it.
But Aronsky's definitely inferior...
A sincere effort, but not particularly inspired, and further hampered by dull sonics. A sort-of anti-Ponti: where Ponti is perhaps too idiosyncratic, Aronsky remains rather too staid. Tra and Antonioli are in a different league.
Quote from: Ilja on Thursday 20 June 2024, 07:50Tra and Antonioli are in a different league.
But not, to mix metaphors, on Hurwitz's radar >:(
All the more surprising as Hurwitz clearly has a good relationship with Naxos and Grand Piano, the label by whom Tra's recording is published, is part of the Naxos stable.
Exactly. He could even have broadcast some tasty excerpts!
How is the recording by Frank Cooper? I have seen it floating about on youtube, but for some reason, I have never checked it out.
Here is Cooper's recording:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sh4RyOuwhaM
I've more than a soft spot for Cooper's rendition and it's good to be reminded of it. It has a rather old-fashioned and reserved feel to it, which works especially well in the slow movement, but it doesn't lack fireworks. He really is an excellent soloist. In the LP days, when the only choice was Cooper or Ponti, I always preferred his subtlety over Ponti's brash showmanship. What the recording does lack, though, is an orchestra to match him.
As an experiment, I subjected the Cooper recording to a treatment that I believe is similar to what the sound engineers did to have the orchestra sound fuller in the Henselt-Bronsart Paul Wee recording we discussed recently. If you're interested, the result is here (https://www.mediafire.com/file/yrxzyxs9nlefe67/RAFF-_Piano_Concerto_in_c%2C_Op._185__Frank_COOPER%2C_piano_Nu%CC%88rnberg_Symphony_c_Zsolt_Dea%CC%80ky.mp3/file).
Thanks, Ilja, but hasn't this boosted the piano too?
Yes it did to some extent; I didn't have the advantage of a separate track. However, as the orchestra was typically further in the background, it mostly boosted the softer, orchestral parts.
Well, no criticism of your illustration but, like the Wee, once one knows what has been done, it doesn't make the orchestral sound deeper or richer, just louder.
Yup.
Definitely not a recording I'd never heard of - I vaguely recall even seeing it in the recordings bins. (I have definite ideas what "recording I've never heard of" means- like the actual premiere recording of a (mid-20th-century) symphony, decades before what I thought its premiere recording was. That one I'd definitely never heard of.)