![Francesca Dego, Royal Scottish National Orchestra, Sir Roger Norrington - Mozart Violin Concertos, Vol. 2 (2022) [Official Digital Download 24bit/96kHz] Download](https://imghd.xyz/images/2022/10/06/utzprs3g8mgla_600.jpg)
Francesca Dego, Royal Scottish National Orchestra, Sir Roger Norrington – Mozart Violin Concertos, Vol. 2 (2022)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 01:07:56 minutes | 1,20 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Digital Booklet, Front Cover | © Chandos
Following their critically acclaimed first volume of Mozart’s violin concertos (CHAN 20234), Francesca Dego and Sir Roger Norrington complete the set, once again with outstanding support from a reduced Royal Scottish National Orchestra. This cycle not only represents the first time Sir Roger has recorded these concertos, but the present album is also his final recording project. All five concertos were written before Mozart was twenty; nevertheless, his rapid development as a composer is evident in the progression from the first to the fifth, which has an unusual Adagio section within the first movement, an extensive slow movement, and of course the extensive ‘Turkish’ episode in the final movement (probably based on Hungarian folk music). Whilst given on modern instruments with metal strings, these are performances immersed in Norrington’s lifetime of experience in period performance practise. As The Sunday Times noted of the first album: ‘Pairing the veteran Mozartian Norrington – a pioneer of historical performance practice – with the young Italian-American soloist Dego proves inspiring in what promises to be one of the freshest of recent cycles of the Mozart concertos.’
(more…)
Sir Roger Norrington, Zürcher Kammerorchester – Haydn: The Paris Symphonies (2015)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/88,2 kHz | Time – 02:44:41 minutes | 2,68 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Sony Classical
The conductor Roger Norrington remains the bad boy of historically informed performance, which is noteworthy for a man 81 years old when this box set was released in 2015. With this set of Haydn’s so-called Paris Symphonies, composed in 1785 and 1786 and first conducted by the sensation of black Paris, the Chevalier de Saint-Georges, Norrington lives up to his reputation with unorthodox readings that are either brilliant or perverse, depending largely on your own individual reaction. A balanced account might point to several factors. Most prominent is an idiosyncratic approach to tempo, particularly in the slow movements. Before you shell out the price of this three-CD set, try to sample the “Allegretto” movement of the Symphony No. 85 (CD one, track six) to see what you’re getting into: Norrington and the admittedly brilliantly compliant strings of the Zurich Chamber Orchestra blaze through it in a mere four minutes and 51 seconds, including all repeats. Several (although curiously not all) of the other slow movements and slow introductions are comparable. Norrington perhaps puts too much stock in Haydn’s tempo markings, which in an era before the standardization of the metronome were notoriously subjective and variable. The flat, vibratoless strings that are Norrington’s trademark are here throughout, creating a standard sheen into which Norrington injects crescendos that are nowhere to be seen in Haydn’s scores. It’s tempting to conclude that those scores serve merely as a starting point for further creative work in Norrington’s hands, but in other respects the performances do catch lots of detail that others miss. The wind instruments are deployed to the rear of the divided strings, and their parts emerge nicely in a kind of sinfonia concertante-like texture, especially the oboe in several places. Norrington’s control over his orchestra is unquestionable, and his concept is both original and executed in a thoroughgoing way. It’s just a question of whether you accept it.
Read more