LATEST ADDITIONS

Steve Hicks : A Thing Made Of Rags (mqa)

B. Willis (Music); P. Miller (Lab) | Nov 27, 2017

Steve Hicks is the kind of guitarist who can keep a crowd entertained for hours. This sweetly varied collection covers popular tunes reaching back to ‘Hungarian Dance No 5’ and ‘Maple Leaf Rag’ and forward into the modern era. His deft interpretation of ‘Funeral March Of A Marionette’ is as much fun as his conflation of Led Zeppelin and Mozart in the closing piece ‘Stairway To Mozart’, but he ventures into darker territory with ‘Bohemian Three-Step’. Here and there, he can’t help quoting melodically related tunes.

AVTech Media Awards

Avtech Awards 2017/2018

Anton van Beek | Nov 24, 2017

Welcome to the AVTech Awards for 2017/18. Here, the UK’s premium AV magazine brands – Hi-Fi Choice, Home Cinema Choice and Hi-Fi News & Record Review – come together to celebrate the very best music and movie hardware you can buy. Every month we test and review more hi-fi, TV and home theatre equipment than any other organisation in the UK, and our annual Awards are informed by this pool of experience. Winning products range from headphones and portable music players to flagship floorstanding loudspeakers; from 4K TVs and projectors to Ultra HD Blu-ray players and AV receivers; from USB DACs and headphone amps to turntables, integrated and pre/power amplifiers and every black box and cable in between.

Hi-Res Downloads

Laura Metcalf & Matei Varga : First Day (mqa)

B. Willis (Music); P. Miller (Lab) | Nov 20, 2017

Cellist Metcalf and pianist Varga coax great drama from eight classical pieces, playing off each other with amazing sensitivity and awareness of the other. ‘First Day’ opens with a composition by José Bragato reminiscent of tango master Astor Piazolla, then segues into the sometimes mournful ‘Variations On A Slavic Folksong’ by Martin? – not a logical choice, but one that makes perfect dramatic sense. The tracks are carefully chosen so that each seems to lead to the next, making the assemblage a musical artform of its own. The overall mood is darkly contemplative but never depressing, with undercurrents of wonder and mystery.

Hi-Res Downloads

Giovanni Guidi, Gianluca Petrella, Louis Sclavis & Gerald Cleaver : Ida Lupino (mqa)

A. Everard (Music); P. Miller (Lab) | Nov 13, 2017

Our ‘MQA-encoded album of the month’ has no bass, rather no bass player – unusual for a jazz album. In practice there’s no shortage of low end in this largely improvisational set, treated to the usual excellent ECM sound quality. The album brings together Italian pianist Guidi and compatriot trombonist Petrella, who have previously worked together in bands and as a duet, and then adds to them American drummer Cleaver and French clarinettist Sclavis. The title track is treated to a considered, contemplative reading, there’s a slow-growing cover of ‘Per I morti di Reggio Emilia’, and the quiet interplay of ‘Rouge Lust’ lets one almost sense each performer step forward to take his place in a conversational series of near-solos.

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Opinion: More Questions Answered?

Paul Miller | Nov 06, 2017

MQA promises to move us closer to the original performance. Paul Miller glimpses beneath the noise. . .

Disc Players Vintage

B&O Beogram CD X

Review: Tim Jarman, | Nov 01, 2017

With components sourced from Dutch giant Philips, does this slick-looking CD player from 1986 still represent the 'last word' in 14-bit sound? We take it to the test bench

The step change in technology that came with the introduction of CD was too great for all but the largest hi-fi manufacturers to handle alone. As a result, those that lacked the resources to design and produce their own machines had instead to buy completed assemblies from either Philips or one of the larger Japanese brands.

Hi-Res Downloads

Ricardo Morales, Mito Chamber Orchestra & Seiji Ozawa : Beethoven: Symphony No. 5, Mozart: Clarinet Concerto

C. Breunig (Music); P. Miller (Lab) | Oct 30, 2017

Recorded live in March 2016 at the Art Tower Mito concert hall, this has a Beethoven Fifth notable above all for fidelity to dynamic markings. The first-movement repeat is given but not that in the finale – where the Piu allegro leading to final Presto is especially well judged and where the piccolo player articulates his tricky phrases without a fluff. There’s wild applause after both works but it’s possible that the Concerto is soloist-directed (there’s no booklet PDF but the Mito concert listings say Ozawa only conducted a part of the programme). One-time Philadelphia principal Ricardo Morales has a reedy sounding clarinet and he makes neat dynamic distinctions piano/mf but it’s all very traditional, whereas the BIS download with Martin Frost is in an altogether more relevant class for today’s listeners.

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Johannes Moser, Orchestra De La Suisse Romande & Andrew Manze : Elgar & Tchaikovsky: Cello Works

C. Breunig (Music); P. Miller (Lab) | Oct 23, 2017

This new coupling faces serious competition from my Jan ’14 ‘Album Choice’ Queyras/Harmonia Mundi – Dvorák fillers there, and with Pentatone the Pezzo Capriccioso and two other short Tchaikovsky transcriptions. One important difference, however, is that Moser plays the original Rococo Variations rather than the Fitzenhagen version which so angered the composer. Moser won a special prize at the 2002 Tchaikovsky Competition for his interpretation. He seems to repeat his success here and there’s much charm in the short pieces too.

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Viktoria Tolstoy : Meet Me At The Movies

S. Harris (Music); P. Miller (Lab) | Oct 16, 2017

The ever-glamorous great-great-grand-daughter of the author of War And Peace claims a Swedish heart and a Russian soul, and has recorded albums with those titles to prove it. Since then she’s most often been heard singing with her life partner, pianist Jacob Karlzon, but she has chosen a guitar trio format for this album of theme songs. Guest stars Iiro Rantala on piano and Nils Landgren on trombone flesh out the lush opener, ‘Calling You’ from the 1987 movie Baghdad Cafe. ‘Marlowe’s Theme’ from Farewell My Lovely has a neat solo from Rantala while guitarist Krister Jonsson really comes into his own when he switches to electric rock guitar – for example on Seal’s ‘Kiss From A Rose’ from Batman Forever.

Hi-Res Downloads

Craig Taborn : Daylight Ghosts

B. Willis (Music); P. Miller (Lab) | Oct 09, 2017

The title implies a haunted existence – by whom or by what we cannot tell from the imploring nature of this collection of often lengthy jazz instrumentals, some murky and meandering (‘Abandoned Reminder’, ‘The Great Silence’) and others quirky and upbeat (‘New Glory’). Taborn and crew tentatively explore a musical netherworld, here and there casting light into the shadows – ‘Ancient’, for example, opens with an extended, almost inarticulate bass solo, before other instruments reluctantly enter the fray. The repeated, intensifying figures near the end of this piece do achieve an intellectual resolution, if not an emotional one, while the sweetly mournful ‘Jamaican Farewell’ has the listless ambience of a sailing venture undertaken on a nearly windless morning. ‘Phantom Ratio’ follows a similar trajectory, while ‘The Shining One’ provides a bumpier ride.

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