Long time no activity on Discophage.com. Well, here is a return in a whimper rather than in a bang, with a review of four lovely 18th-century Italian concertos for Mandolin by obscure composers whose dates history hasn’t even retained, recorded by Claudio Scimone in 1971 and reissued by Erato in 2009, 5050466-5691-2-7 . And since, in the review, I referred to Scimone’s two recordings of Vivaldi’s Mandolin Concertos, I went ahead and transferred from Amazon.com my reviews of the 1969 recording (with the same Alessandro Pitrelli and Bonifacio Bianchi as on the Italian Mandolin Concertos) and 1983 remake (now with Ugo Orlandi and Dorina Frati). As always, that process of transfer over here involves much more in content… and time! than just copy and paste. I’m hoping to transfer my other reviews of alternative versions of the Vivaldi Mandolin Concerti, by The Parley of Instruments on Hyperion and the extraordinary Il Giardino Armonico on Teldec.
Other than that, these last few months without any activity on Discophage.com, I’ve been still buying an unreasonable amount of CDs with the secret hope of living 1,000 years, with each CD very cheap but 1 million times cheap starts piling after a while, listening to a few but not reviewing (time consuming! Just look at the research behind the oh-so-inconspicuous Erato disc of the mandolin concertos….), busying myself with many label discographies – Harmonia Mundi, Erato, Deutsche Harmonia Mundi, Hyperion, Chandos among the biggies, but also Cascavelle, Tahra, Fnac Music, Continuum, Montaigne, Salabert, Bluebell – so many in fact that I can’t mention them all, but hope to publish them eventually.