What else would you expect? 

Coming soon - Mirga conducts the Massed Military Bands of NATO Forcces  (repertoire - immaterial)

Thank you very much for this music  :-)

Aivazovsky was the Crimean Turner - his seascapes are held in high esteem.

Good to hear!  If only his executors would ease-up on their excessive Performing Rights demands, his music might be heard more often  (as I frequently mention here).

Thank you for this suggestion!  There are, indeed, many recordings ofrare piano concertos of the 20th century. I was very happy to find Krenek's PC No 2 there  :)

I would seriously advise all members against downloading anything from the 'mediafire' site.  It's a screed of spam and viruses. Took me two days to clean my computer after making that mistake,  A pity, because this work sounded interesting.  But not interesting enough to infect my computer with malware.

I have my own doubts about that (see earlier). I am not sure music is well-served when recorded in a slapdash fashion by a no-name orchestra from a provincial town in Bulgaria. Especially when you can hear distant aircraft flying overhead during the pianissimo moments.  The music is placed at an automatic disadvantage.  Some would say 'we're lucky to have any kind of recording', of course. Then again, people said we were lucky to have ersatz chicory 'coffee' to drink during post-WW2 rationing, too....

I think you've been admirably clear on the various merits of styles of collecting, Colin  :-)  I entirely understand and sympathise with the rationale behind your collection, although it's not been the way I've approached music appreciation myself  :)

Another aspect of multiple interpretations opens up - within a particular repertoire - with questions of 'Historically Informed Performance'.  I am old enough to have collected vinyl (!) back in the days when a new release from Concentus Musicus on Das Alte Werke was an immediate but necessary drain on my student funds.  Of course, those sterling performances were the ne plus ultra of their day - but have since been superannuated by still finer and subtler interpretations.  Reproductions of historic instruments have become objectively better over time  (it's easier, ehem, to play in tune on them!), and performance practice has moved on.

I was abruptly reminded of how much progresss has been made two weeks ago, when Minkowski arrived here with his Musiciens du Louvre for an all-Rameau program (played, ehem, live in the Tchaikovsky Concert Hall). Not only was the lustrous quality of intrumental timbre in full evidence - we had all the benefit of knowledge about notes inegales ('bending' the groups of quavers and semiquavers into a less 'four-square' pattern - CPE Bach discusses it at length...)  I was still carrying around in my mind the well-intentioned (but horribly out-of-tune) recordings made by Jean-Claude Malgloire in the 1980s, which gave a raucous and rustic rendering to Rameau.  But suddenly we had the full suavety of the Court Of Versailles, and the mismatch between baroque finery and Malgloire's bucolic antics faded away.  (Of course, William Christie does an even better job on this repertoire than Minkowski - but the cost of moving Les Arts Florissants to Moscow for concerts, including ballet and singers, is prohibitive, and they've stopped coming these days).

To take up your point about non-operatic music...  I could easily see a persuasive case for owning recordings of Bach's keyboard works from through the 20th century...   the generation of formidable pianists who played them...  then the first generation of Early Music performers (Tureck, even Dolmetsch..) in parallel with 'informed' performances on pianos by Gould and co...  then on into the next generation of harpsichordists  (Hogwood and his generation) in parallel with modern Bach-playing pianists like Andras Schiff...   and then the super-fashionable 'new harpsichordists' like Jean Rondeau (love him or loath him).

Personally I am glad we no longer have to endure Couperin on the joanna  :)  But we would lose something if we jetissoned those pioneering recordings, which paved the way for Rondeau and his contemporaries to fly Couperin's flag for him   :)   Some evidence of a Meeting Of Minds can be seen today - Alison Balsom can be found playing Brandenburg 2 on the modern Bb trumpet, but she can play it just as well on a valveless baroque natural trumpet too - and does :)

Perhaps because there are unmissable moments amid others which are less satisfactory?  (Let's not get into performances which have flaws - that's a separate issue).

As you know, I mostly listen to opera only. I can think of numerous opera performances where the orchestral playing and conducting is first-rate - but the soloists are not the cast I would have chosen (even though they may be very famous).  The converse is also true - a top-rate soloist accompanied by a duff orchestra  (increasing the situation with recordings made on-the-cheap with 'good enough' E European orchestras) - who frankly are not good enough, and should never have been recorded for posterity.

These are the reasons I have never collected, and never plan to start - I doubt I have more than 200 discs* in total, and I rarely listen to more than a tiny handful. I don't like the medium of recorded music - it deprives the music of the adrenalin and fascination of a live performance. I have probably spent (wasted?) just as much on going to live concerts (often involving travel to other cities) as I might have done on cds.  But I believe I've had the better bargain out of the expense  :)  Verdi's OTELLO in an immersive production by Birmingham Opera, with a cast of no-name soloists, remains one of the best musical experiences I've ever spent cash on :)  Another would be the legendary WNO HOUSE OF THE DEAD with Michinson & Clark, conducted by Mackerras, or Jurowsky's Glyndebourne MEISTERSINGER or Josephine Barstow in the ENO LADY MAC. 

And my happy memories take up no shelf space whatsoever  :)  It's a different approach to appreciating music, but it works well for me. You appreciate it more, when you know that when the curtain comes down, it will disappear into the ether.

This week I'm going to Handel's ORLANDO. The tickets have cost us more than a box set of The Ring, but for me, it's a better spend.

* of which at least half were given to me by the performers, so I dare not discard them.

Yes, dreck. 

Can't you read?

On a different forum (the BBC R3 Messageboard - closed down by the BBC in a cost-cutting exercise). the member formerly known as 'Sydney Grew' once started a trolling exercise with a topic called 'Composers Variously Rated'.

The gist of this drivel was that it was possible to arrive at as 'scientifically proven' rating scheme for composers - whereby Beethoven and Bach were (without dispute) 'Level One', and so on and so forth down the ladder, until we had Litolff In Level three, but anyone who had ever written an opera but wasnt German (e.g. Saint-Saens) in Level Five  (graded-down for not writing  symphobies or fugal oratorios for Choral Societies)

The topic belonged n the bin from the very outset.  So do topics about putting synphonies into tiers - based purely on the personal bigotry of the assessors. The entire thing simply works to the glorification of self-appointed Cultural Commissars of a Stalinist bent.

I appeal to the moderators to close this topic - which has no place on these message-boards, and frankly should never have started.

And he was absolutely right.

Ignorant dreck.

Napravnik was Czech, although he spent most of his working career (conducting, primarily - especially for Tchaikovsky) in Russia.

Thank you for that huge inpur of information about Suchon and his opera.  I fear very few people will have heard this work - which is their loss, as it is a fine piece of work (in my view!)

Dear Mr Escamilla

Are you a professional liar, or do you just do it as a hobby?

There's nothing amiss with charm. It's a quality we badly lack these days, so we could use every bit that we can find :)