# What albums have you bought this year?



## kskdn (Nov 27, 2012)

Just four for me and my poor grad student collection - In order of how much I like them :

Xuefei Yang - Bach Concertos - really fabulous recording, it was a great and bright soundtrack to my spring and summer. She has a $40k smallman that really sings, and she arranged the concertos for guitar and string quartet. It's very intimate, but still bright-sounding. Only critique is that she included Air on the G for no apparent reason and didn't transcribe the third movement of a violin concerto in E, which is sad because it's a cool movement and the first two sonud so great. Of all these, it's definitely my most-recommended album.

Kevin Mallon (conducting) Handel's Water Music suites and Music fo4r the Royal Fireworks - it was one of those times I heard something on the radio and felt great about what I was hearing. I normally don't go for Handel at all, it reminds me of being a student and listening to all the vocal majors who waited until the last recital to sing their stupid oratorio excerpts. What can I say, he won me over this time, but keep the vocals away from me 

Helene Grimaud - Resonances - *Love* her recording of the mozart sonata, and she plays the Berg much better than anyone else I've heard. Probably worth picking up just for the Berg piano sonata, actually. The Bartok pieces on the end are a bit quiet, almost too quiet to listen to while driving, but still good. I must admit, though, that I heard a guitar and flute arrangement of the latter I quite preferred. I could take or leave the Liszt sonata, but that's my personal bias. Love Grimaud, one of my favorite living performers.

Alfred Hill - String Quartets (#5,7, 9) - Dominion String Quartet - Lesser-known, another radio impulse buy. I work as a delivery drivwer a few nights per week, and this was interesting enough to stand out (it was #5 I heard). Overall, it's not fantastic. I will say that while Hill doesn't seem to have the formal discipline of the great composers, his choice of themes is nevertheless interesting. The third movement of the 5th quartet has a really cool, romantic, somewhat asian-sounding theme, but the cadence points sound like something out of a barbershop quartet and it just baffles me why anyone would put those side by side (and this is coming from someone who loves late Beethoven and Shostakovich quartets). Don't know if I'd recommend buying it, but maybe listen to some samples.


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