Big birthdays and a bounty of JS Bach
This month’s round-up features a great quartet and a pair of pianists
Meredith Monk celebrated her 80th birthday in November and that milestone is marked with The Recordings (ECM 2570), a 13-disc set comprising all of the American composer’s recordings thus far for the label. Monk’s distinct musical world was contained for posterity on these groundbreaking albums, from 1981’s Dolmen Music to 2018’s ATLAS, and it’s supported by a lavish 300page book of original notes, interviews and photos.
The Pražák Quartet also reached a notable milestone recently – indeed the Czech ensemble’s 50th anniversary is celebrated in The Complete Praga Recordings. A disc for each year, this epic collection of recordings takes in albums released between 1992 and 2018, just before the majority of the original line-up decided to hang up their bows. It’s a glorious document of high-quality musicianship across a wide repertoire which features Czech icons, Russian masters, all of Beethoven’s quartets and a complete survey of the Second Viennese School.
Jörg Demus was something of a keyboard titan, the Viennese musician making his mark on a variety of instruments and across a range of repertoire. The Bach Recordings on Westminster (Eloquence 484 2053) reminds us just how insightful a Bachian he was, with 11 discs of piano recordings from the 1950s and ’60s featuring performances of great poise and dexterity. All the big hitters are here, from The Well-tempered Clavier to the Goldberg Variations, plus concertos featuring duo partner Paul Baduraskoda and the Vienna State Opera Orchestra.
There’s more Bach on Andrei Gavrilov
– The Complete Recordings on Deutsche Grammophon (Eloquence 484 2492). This ten-disc survey of the Moscow-born pianist’s thrilling technical skill takes in the nine albums he recorded for DG in the early 1990s, plus a very special album of Stravinsky with piano duo partner Vladimir Ashkenazy. Beyond that, and the three discs of Bach, there are pearls by Schubert, Grieg, Prokofiev, Chopin and Britten.
It’s a glorious document of the quartet’s highquality musicianship