gramophone's address

[Jim Morrison <jim_morrison@sprynet.com>]

Hi folks,

For all those who may not know the web address to gramophone's home page,
here is the link:

http://www.gramophone.co.uk/home/


They have a fairly powerful search engine that lets you search all their
reviews
from march 1983 to the present,
though you cannot find the articles in their print magazine even though the
reviews sometimes
refer to those articles.

For instance, you can find some (maybe all; I'm not sure) of the reviews of
bach organ recordings that
mention gould by going to the search page, filling in 'bach' as the
composer, 'organ' as the title of the recording,
and 'gould' as a text search.

Or say, if you wanted to find what people have to say about mozart and
gould,
type in mozart as the composer and gould as the text search and you'll find
that the intelligent reviewer Bryce Morrison says this about gould's live
recording  1959, Salzburg.

"...you can hear Sweelinck's solemnities offered with rare significance,
Schoenberg's Op. 25 spun off with hallucinatory magic, and Mozart's K330
Sonata played with a truly extraordinary cunning, elegance and artifice.
Here, indeed, is a "sensually charged but intellectually controlled artistic
temperament", an assuaging alternative to later utterances which sometimes
crystallized into pendantry and affectation. This is a disc beyond price; a
crowning touch to Gould's endlessly fascinating discography. "


If you want to read everything that this sensible critic has to say about
gould, type in 'bm' (the reviewer's initials) in the reviewer field, and
then type in 'gould' the text field.  You'll find not only every review
morrison has written on Gould's recordings, but also reviews he has written
on other artists that happen to mention gould.  (Along with one review that
mentions morton gould, but never mind.  I think we can all live with that
minor annoyance.)

One last thing to say about the gramophone site.  I stumbled across one of
my favorite all-time quotes about GG by searching: beethoven, piano
concerto, gould.  Here is the wonderful note concerning gould's rendition of
the fourth piano concerto (which I think is a great recording)

"Throughout, the playing and the wonderfully immediate and full-bodied CBS
recording, give the work a physically thrilling, three-dimensional feel.
This is a performance that spells out the concerto-imagines, articulates and
physically celebrates it-in a way guaranteed to turn body and mind into a
single erogenous zone."


How's that for a positive review?




One again, thanks to Bradley for the harpsichord information.  More from me
on that Handel cd in a few days.



Jim