Jonathan Blumhofer

Classical Music Album Review: Bamberger Symphoniker’s “Liebestod” — Anything But Sleepy

March 12, 2023
Posted in , ,

Don’t let the redundancy of much of this album’s repertoire dissuade you. On all the vital metrics, Liebestod delivers

Classical Album Review: Missy Mazzoli’s “Dark with Excessive Bright”

March 11, 2023
Posted in , , ,

Missy Mazzoli’s scoring is generally airy and virtuosic, yet Dark with Excessive Bright doesn’t seem to add up to more than the sum of its parts.

Classic Music Album: Quatuor Diotima — György Ligeti’s “Metamorphosis”

March 8, 2023
Posted in , , ,

Quatuor Diotima evince a thorough command of György Ligeti’s style, as well as a breathtaking grasp of the demands he makes on the instruments.

Classic Music Album Review: Quatuor Diotima — György Ligeti’s “Metamorphosis”

March 8, 2023
Posted in , , ,

Quatuor Diotima evince a thorough command of György Ligeti’s style, as well as a breathtaking grasp of the demands he makes on the instruments.

Classical Music Album Review: Beatrice Rana plays Schumann

March 7, 2023
Posted in , , ,

Pianist Beatrice Rana, joined by the Chamber Orchestra of Europe and conductor Yanick Nézet-Séguin, plays the daylights out of Clara Schumann’s Piano Concerto in A minor.

Classical Album Reviews: Gianandrea Noseda and Franz Welser-Möst Conduct Prokofiev

March 3, 2023
Posted in , ,

Two takes on the orchestral music of Prokofiev — one impish and unpretentious, the other revelatory.

Classical Album Review: Daniel Barenboim conducts Schumann

January 28, 2023
Posted in , ,

Even if this isn’t the most interpretively satisfying of Daniel Barenboim’s traversals through this repertoire, it is a deeply revealing one that draws on a lifetime of experience with this music.

Classical Album Review: “God’s Time” — Guitarist Aaron Larget-Caplan Plays the Music of J. S. Bach

January 26, 2023
Posted in , , ,

Guitarist Aaron Larget-Caplan new release is arresting for how natural the transcriptions sound: it’s as though they’d been intended for this instrumentation all along.

Classical Album Reviews: Dvořák’s Poetic Tone Pictures, Beethoven’s Diabelli Variations, & “Immensity Of”

December 23, 2022
Posted in , , ,

A trio of reviews of recordings that include sadly neglected pieces by Dvořák, pianist Mitsuko Uchida’s phenomenal Diabelli Variations, and a haunting, arresting round-up of new music by the Departure Duo.

Classical Music Commentary: Top Classical Performances and Recordings of 2022

December 15, 2022
Posted in , , ,

What a great year 2022 was for classical music recordings: the canon, new music, neglected music – all of it was well-represented and from all comers.

Recent Posts

Popular Posts

Categories

Archives