Been busying myself these last few days with pursuing gigantic discographies (Erato including Japan-only releases – an Ali-Baba cavern for the record collector -, Harmonia Mundi, Olympia, Concerto Köln… ) which I will eventually publish… or not, because their very nature is to be ever-unfinished entreprises.
AND, because establishing discographies lead to (its very purpose) buying, I’ve been spending lots of time trying to catalog and organize the… dozens? more like hundreds… of CDs entering my collection. Hence my reviewing silence these last few days.
I HAVE been listening to music though, a number of things that came in, CDs of Telemann’s orchestral music (I’m accumulating a lot in order to be able to do, my next great project, thorough comparative listening. I LOVE the combination of Vivaldi, Handel and Rameau!), Biber’s superb Missa Christi resurgentis by the English Concert under Andrew Manze on Harmonia Mundi, Jón Leifs’ Visions and Images with the Iceland Symphony Orchestra under Paul Zukovsky (really interesting!), Moniuszko’s Religious Works on Olympia, Polish 18th-Century Symphonies on Olympia, Bach arrangements by Robert Groslot on Vanguard (a CD I had long waited to find at an affordable price, and very rewarding – I alrady had and reviewed Groslot’s Scarlatti’s arrangements on the same label and loved them), etc., but not with enough concentration to entail a review. Hopefully those will follow up soon.
But I did review an early Erato CD of Alessandro Rolla’s Concerti, Divertimenti and Sinfonia by I Solisti Veneti under Claudio Scimone, ECD 75397 (1988). No shattering discovery, that. Sounds like concertos Paganini could have composed – but in fact, when you learn that Paganini was a pupil of Rolla, you must conclude that Paganini’s concertos sound like music Rolla could have composed.