The Zobenigo seal of good sawing

There is a tsunami of lousy recordings of everything; and more everyday. Not only do the likes of Ashkenazy and Koopman insist on recording everything; but, amazingly, they have their fans. (Makes you wonder what the fans hear -- like the crowd who not only pays to hear, but can actually sit through Sting's Dowland; incredible). Yet, few can interpret a work in a way that makes it worth listening to.

To help cut through the garbage, here is Zobenigo’s seal of worthy wood sawing:

for Josquin’s Missa Pangue Lingua by Tallis Scholars for its unalloyed, total, crystalline beauty; for Hilliard Ensemble’s Periton for the liquid, oceanic rhythm (also detectable in their recording of Josquin’s Homme Arme masses), whose swaying eases one’s soul so thoroughly that one forgets completely just how ugly Hilliard’s treble is; (by comparison Huelgas’s recordings of the same music are damned dull); for Preucil, Finkel and Wu Han’s Haydn Trio H. XV 18, perhaps the first Haydn trio ever played really extraordinarily well (you never knew how interesting Haydn actually was); for Stern, Istomin and Rose playing Beethoven Trios while alternating between extraordinary brio and extraordinary sensitivity, all in the right moments -- one should think they have been playing together a century (compare them to Perlman and Ashkenazy's version of the same -- yuck); especially for their rendition of Op. 1 No. 3 (wow); for Harnoncourt’s Concertus Musicus Wien for Telemann’s Double Concerti (as far as I know, Harnoncourt has never recorded anything badly; he needs no seal from me); for Collegium Musicum for Albinoni’s Concerti a Cinque; and for Eugen Jochem + Berliner for Haydn's London symphonies (wow, again).

But the greatest discovery of the last month is Richter and Oistrakh's 1972 performance of Prokof's 1st violin sonata, which starts with an incredible scratchy violin, rasping like an angry bee on a wire mesh, a sound that even the very excellent Gidon Kremer cannot reproduce, over a positively spell-binding carefree piano ground base of the sort Martha Argerich could not bear to hear on a dreamy day, let alone play. (Does Martha have dreamy days? And interesting question. She must. Yet, this is hard to imagine).

Richter and Oistrakh had been playing together for 30 years; and that particular piece god-knows how many times; moreover, they both knew Prokof personally with his difficult personality and unstable moods (do you sometimes wake up feeling like this?) (Say, said David to Svatoslav, shall we play it the way Prokof sounds when he raves about Hollywood capitalists over vodka and pickles?); and had often been asked by him to give world premieres of his various works. This is not only an amazing technical virtuosity, but also a depth of understanding of the music which will knock you flat: I had been listening to the Kremer/Argerich recording of the same piece with greatest pleasure for years now; and still think it is a great recording; but the nuance, sensitivity and depth of the Oistrakh/Richter recording simply leaves these two geniuses -- in the dust.