Valentina Lisitsa. April 6, 2015 Dear fans, DEAR FRIENDS! I have a confession to make and a huge favor to ask all of you. I really REALLY need your help now. Maestro Gekic's CDs&DVDs are available at The Genius reveals unknown.

• Search Rapidshare Files Megaupload
• Files Rapidshare Movies

Alan Oke (Mao) and the amazing Kathleen Kim (Madame Mao) Like many people, I like almost exactly half of what John Adams has written. Still, that's a better average than with many contemporary composers. And it's also interesting to see what compositions have weathered well. Among these I would place Nixon in China. Alice Goodman's libretto manages to balance two perspectives creatively: the impersonal, global scale of the political action and the personal level of the characters who, though they are among the powerful elite of the world, are in the end just people.

Pat Nixon's small-townness, Nixon's own nostalgia for the simpler days when he was a serviceman in the war, the ominous black presence of Kissinger, and – my own favourite – the weary solitude of Chou En Lai. Adams conducted the opera on the Proms this year, and this recording is from the BBC transmission. It takes a minute to settle down – be patient. But it rapidly becomes deeply involving.

There really isn't a weak link in this performance, but I have to point out the contribution of Kathleen Kim, whose brilliant, terrifying performance as Madame Mao is the high point of the performance. You should read the. It will help, especially in the poignant, intimate Act III. 5th of September, 2012 320KBS mp4 from BBC web stream, no re-encoding Kathleen Kim soprano (Madame Mao) Alan Oke tenor (Chairman Mao) Gerald Finley bass-baritone (Chou En-Lai) Robert Orth baritone (President Nixon) Jessica Rivera soprano (Pat Nixon) James Rutherford bass-baritone, New Generation Artist (Kissinger) Stephanie Marshall mezzo-soprano (Secretary) Louise Poole mezzo-soprano (Secretary) Susan Platts mezzo-soprano (Secretary) BBC Singers BBC Symphony Orchestra John Adams conductor Paul Curran stage director. Now that Valentina Lisitsa has brought out the Rachmaninoff second concerto, people are going to be stampeding around the internet trying to find a bootleg. Well, good readers, this isn't it!

This is actually the piano part of the concerto, without the orchestra. And it's simply extracted from YouTube videos.

I like it, though, because you get to hear the piano part without the orchestra (I know this concerto so well I can hear a phantom orchestra playing anyhow!). And the playing is wonderful! Lyrical far more often than rhetorical, with the technical difficulties of the music playing second fiddle to the musical argument. The sound is pretty good considering this is just 128kbs mp3. Please bear with the awful sound of the bass octaves early in the first movement.

There is, you realise, a limit to what you can encode at 128 kbs! So enjoy, and go out and buy the concerto.

Van Otterloo (27 December 1907 – 27 July 1978) is remembered as a conductor, and especially as a champion of new music, but he was also a composer. His second symphony, which remained incomplete, was completed by his son-in-law, the composer (and I regret that the link is to the Dutch Wikipedia – nothing in the English one!). Ketting, in fact, worked on his father-in-law's symphony in the period before his own death in 2012. So the work is in some sense a valediction from both of these two well-loved figures in Dutch musical life. The work received its first performance at Vredenburg Leidsche Rijn, on the 6th April 2013, and was broadcast live. It's a gritty work, hard-driven outer movements and a sombre slow movement at its centre.

How to change language in the witcher enhanced edition system. Thanks for any advice.

While it does manage to find a major chord in its final bars, there is a sense more of defiance than triumph. I have found myself listening to it with a sense that this is more than conductor's music. There is a complex personality underlying the music that makes me curious to know more of his work. Radio Filharmonisch Orkest, James Gaffigan 192kbs mp3, tracked and tagged. Ronald Brautigam has made a formidable reputation for himself as a specialist in early pianos. He has already traversed the Beethoven, Haydn and Mozart piano sonatas for BIS, and his only lapse to date seems to have been his Beethoven concertos, marred by the utterly insipid conducting of a dull Englishman.

Here he is on a Streicher piano of 1847 playing Brahms' first concerto. The piano is to my ear informed by the Erard and Playels of the day. Certainly, it has the muscle to handle the orchestral balance, and the more singing bass register and faster decay mean that the piano writing comes across as more lucid, less congested. I have always felt that Brahms has an undeserved reputation for thick piano writing, based on the grumbly noises that emerge from a modern Steinway. Just remember that not even Steinway pianos sounded like that when Brahms was alive. Indeed, even the sound of Rachmaninoff's own Steinway reveals a leaner, more precise sound than you hear from modern examples.

Leaving you with a feeling that we listen to classical piano music on a piano that essentially post-dates more or less the entire repertoire! Anyway, here it is. I'm curious to hear what listeners make of it.

Brahms: Piano Concerto No. 1 in D minor Op. 15 Ronald Brautigam, Piano J.B. Streicher, Vienna 1847, Nederlands Symfonie Orkest, Jan Willem de Vriend Recorded 5-April-2013, Muziekcentrum Enschede. Here, through the kindness of others, is the first of a little clutch of recordings that will add substantially to the trove I've been gathering as a tribute to Mihaela Ursuleasa, whose untimely death at 33 was deeply felt in the musical world. Here's a splendid recording of Beethoven's third piano concerto, recorded in Bucharest on the 4th of May 2010. With the Romanian Radio Chamber Orchestra conducted by Horia Andreescu.

Not only do you get the concerto, at 320 kbs, but two encores, including one that Ursuleasa had made her calling card, the mercurial Joc Dobrogean. Beethoven: Piano Concerto No 3 in c minor Encore - Paul Constantinescu/ Joc Dobrogean – veloce (quasi una Toccata) Encore - Haydn / Sonata No.

59 In E Flat Major, Hob. XVI/ 49/ III. Finale Mihaela Ursuleasa, Romanian Radio Chamber Orchestra, Horia Andreescu. This was my introduction to the music of Morton Feldman. Not quite knowing what to expect, I put on the CD of Kildegard Kleeb, whose cool, luminous reading I still like a lot. And that was it: next time I was in London, I bought the score and started exploring the curiously mediculous and yet almost empty score.

The rhythmic notation is utterly precise, designed to avoid any sense of a continuing pulse. The consequence of this is that you have to read the piece counting semiquavers at a manic speed in order to hear the rhythmic patterns exactly as Feldman wrote them. It's quite a tiring piece to work on, believe me! The excellent and cosmopolitan gave a concert here about a year ago in which he replaced the advertised programme with a radically different one. The reason was, he said, that he had encountered Feldman, and was completely rethinking his relationship with sound. As a pianist, he explained, you are constantly thinking about the attack of each note, weighting it, delivering it. But the body of the note is the sound that continues on, beyond your control.

Because it's beyond your control you tend to pay less attention to it, but once you start listening, your whole relationship with music changes. I have to say that the effect was noticeable on his playing. And yes, he did play some Feldman. Though not this vast work, lasting over an hour I warn you. The recording is live, which means, alas, that some Dutch people with terminal lung cancer are, apparently, cared for in their last moments at concerts rather than, as is usual here, at a hospice. But the concentration and energy of a live performance give this recording a special edge. This is music that is actually happening as you hear it.

De Leew's playing is clear and light. See what you think. Recorded 6 June, Muziekgebouw aan 't IJ. It's that man again. A searching performance of Richard Strauss' Metamorphosen for 23 solo strings. I have gone through periods of detesting this work as self-pitying and periods in which I think I understand. I seem to be in one of the latter at the moment.

The end is especially successful – Runnicles, apparently, in rehearsal urged the players not to let the audience know when the music was over. And it works. The man can get utter commitment from every player, which you need to bring off a work like this. And now, time to pack for my holidays!

Back in August. Shostakovich String Quartet No.

14 in F#, Op. 142 String Quartet No. 13 in Bb minor, Op. 138 String Quartet No. 15 in Eb minor, Op. 144 Borodin String Quartet Recorded, Lisbon This performance generated a little bit of controversy, with people either stunned or irritated. Probably the problem stems from the place of the Borodin Quartet in the history of Shostakovich's quartets.

I was one of the youngsters who emerged, almost unbelieving, from a record shop with a box of LPs under my arm that had the then-complete Shostakovich quartets (the first thirteen). It was an EMI set, issued under license from Melodiya, and was ridiculously cheap. Those recordings, in a sort of soviet-realist stereo, were challenging, unsparing and yet had a sort of wild lyricism that flashed through. They are now available again, on Chandos. Time moves on. The Borodins changed lineup (under pretty disagreeable circumstances - a tale of bitter personal antagonism) and the resulting ensemble is quite a different one to the original lineup.

The sound is very distinctive - I always think of polished wood: ebony, rosewood, oak. They make an almost unbelievably beautiful sound when they play without vibrato, and they know how and when to use it.

But there are those who see their warmer, more lyrical approach as a loss of the fire in the belly that unquestionably drove their early recordings. And so to these three quartets. My real interest was in the thirteenth. It's a work I have never been able to fathom, though this hasn't stopped me listening to it.

Does it have a structure? Or is it more like picking your way through the wreckage of something that once had a structure? And, come to think of it, the same applies to the fifteenth, where time seems to have died. The feeling that something will happen slowly gives way to the realisation that this music isn't leading anywhere, isn't following any course. Nothing seems to accumulate. I happen to think that these performances are breath-taking.

There is no using that beautiful Borodin sound to lipstick the pig. Rather there is a collision between the sweetness of the sound and the emptiness of the music. And when violence breaks out (such as the banshee shrieks of the fifteenth) then the Borodins are well able to produce those slicing, jabbing sforzandos. I walked along the canal a few nights ago, with the dog dandling from the lead, listening to number fifteen.

Forty years later, I am less keen to understand what I hear, and more inclined to let it be. I am not the same person who listened all those years ago, and the world is not the same world. The political agenda is no longer relevant to the music, and Shostakovich is another dead composer, whom I miss. All of this gives us different ears. I am constantly astonished by Gabriela Montero's musical mind. It's not just the fertility of her ideas as she improvises, but the instant realisation of these ideas as complex piano music.

All happening in real time. (I used to sneer at the idea of real time. What kind of time is unreal time? Then I developed a teenager, so I can answer that question. Time spent by teenagers in the bathroom is unreal time.) The only danger of her powerful genius at extemporisation is that it has tended to overshadow her stature as an interpreter.

So I am pleased to be able to redress the balance just a little, with an upload of the first Brahms concerto. It is followed, you will be glad to know, by a piece of Montero.

I've had a funny relationship with Brahms. The first funny thing is that Brahms has been unaware of it. In my twenties I became a passionate Brahmsian (having spent my teenage years playing Mozart endlessly). But as I got older I began to find Brahms self-conscious of his role as a Great Composer, and, frankly, self-pitying in an entirely unlikeable way.

I think a turning point arrived when I read an anecdote told by one of the Schumanns' children. Brahms used to visit their house and entertain the children (and terrify everyone else) by doing handstands on the upstairs bannisters.

Search Rapidshare Files Megaupload

Now there, suddenly, is a vision of a muscular daredevil that is at odds with the stuffy grumpy bollox we thought we knew. And I realised that for all its faults, the earlier works have a genuine sense of muscular energy and vitality that are more than enough to make me forgive their excesses. Throughout all of this, the work I have never tired of is the first concerto.

There is something deeply physically satisfying about the piano writing – those opening bars from the piano cause me instantly to forgive the bombast of the orchestral opening, and that lovely bucolic moment when the last movement turns to D major always makes me smile. I grew up on the Arrau/Giulini recording, in which Arrau's poetry constantly challenges Giulini's high-voltage conducting, right from the first bars of the piano entry, where Arrau seems to float timelessly.

Montero lays her cards on the table here: there is a sense of improvisation, of exploring the possibilities of an idea, but with a sense that this is no mere meandering – she has a very clear idea of where the music is going. I do find her tempo for the first movement sometimes too heavy-footed, especially those rather bombastic octaves that build up to climaxes, but her handling of the lyrical elements is warm and generous – think Katchen. Download and listen to a player who matches the devilry of Brahms very well indeed!

Gabriela Montero, NDR Philharmonic, Hannover, Eivind Gullberg Jensen Brahms: Piano Concerto No 1 Encore: Montero Studio Concert, NDR, Hannover, 13 Feb 2014 320kbs radio recording. A recent flurry of interest over the internet led me to revisit his Chopin studies, in a version lovingly restored by that old scofflaw, Dr Duffy. And listening it it again, I am struck by the unobtrusive but constant ebb and flow of the playing. Behind the clarity and apparent restraint is a flexibility that often manifests itself in ways that would lose you marks in a competition today. Listen, for example, to the central section of Op 10 No 3 – there is no doubt about it: the man is not playing equal notes. He is leaning slightly on the strong beat and shaving the weak one slightly. Or number 7, that bubbles along with a breathtaking lightness – more like our image of Mendelssohn than Chopin.

And no, this doesn't mean that the more stark studies suffer. I find his reading of the last Op 25 study very reminiscent of Cortot's. There is tragedy there, but immense strength too.

Files Rapidshare Movies

Both pianists realise that by simply playing the music, the story will unfold with its own logic. So please enjoy an honest pianist! Here she is again.

This strange mixture of minimalism and Scriabinesque grandiosity. Like most contemporary music, you will either warm to it or dislike it. Langsam revisits the world of Mahler III's last movement – a world frequently revisited since Mahler himself, who revisited the movement when he came to write the concluding adagio of his ninth symphony. And, indeed, the chain of reference goes back further, because Mahler, in his third symphony, was revisiting the work of his fellow-student Franz Rott, who wrote one wonderful symphony before succumbing to paranoid schizophrenia. Mahler had re-used elements of Rott's symphony in his third symphony, and would carry these elements forward to his ninth. In Poleva's Langsam you will recognise, too, a strange emotional world that seems to haunt the former Soviet Union - not nostalgia, or something as straightforward as melancholy. It has a sort of numbness, a glassiness that is hard to put into words, and which I for one cannot put an exact word to.

The remaining works keep the pace up. I wonder how I feel about Poleva. I was going to write that she was a composer for a certain mood, a certain time of day and life. But then, so are most composers. The only composer I know of who is welcome at any time, in any place in my life is Mozart.

Once again, I am not sure about the performer details for these live recordings, but web searches point to Sirenko as the conductor, which makes it likely that the orchestra is the Ukraine NSO. The sound quality is good this time - 320kbs.

Victoria Poleva (1962) «Langsam» for orchestra (1992 / Ed. 2009) «Null» for symphony orchestra (2006) «Nenia» for violin and orchestra (2004) National symphony orchestra of Ukraine, Volodymyr Sirenko (conductor).

I remember listening to a recording of Brendel playing the Hammerklavier, live, and suddenly realising what it was like. It was like someone who knows a cathedral like the back of their hand, taking you on a tour. Now, the problem with tour guides is that they tend to get lost in the detail or lost in personal anecdotes. The best guides are the ones who point out the relevant detail but always in the context of building up a picture of the whole. And that's what Brendel was doing. In the first movement, he slowed fractionally and created just a little emphasis around the modulations that act like gigantic hinges in the movement's structure.

They don't just herald the arrival of new material – pointing that out would be rather silly – but they also are the points of inflection, the points where the small-scale and the large scale intersect. I was delighted to feel that I 'got' something about the large-scale shape of the sonata that I had hitherto missed. Like the Hammerklavier, Schubert's unfinished sonata known as the Reliquie poses awful problems for the performer. Unlike most of the unfinished sonatas, there are reasons to believe that Schubert just abandoned the sonata, and the completion of the scherzo has been a puzzle that many people have tried to solve. And, IMO, the awkwardness of the solutions suggest that Schubert realised that the movement couldn't be completed as he had originally envisaged it. What we are left with is a fascinating score – perhaps the most unpianistic of Schubert's works. There are times when he seems to struggle to get a piano sound that will embody his ideas.

And, like the Hammerklavier, the first movement is built around a bold harmonic scheme that requires a lot of skill to make seem logical. It's the sort of thing that Brendel excels. If you've never warmed to the sonata, now is the time to give it another chance. Brendel performs the two completed movements only, but they emerge with a coherence that I find remarkable. I gave up learning this sonata many years ago, and I find myself drifting towards the music cabinet In fact, the cathedral analogy isn't entirely accurate here. I remember waking up one morning with a sudden sense of how to play the first impromptu of the D935 set.

I had never been able to cope with the endless expansion of the major section. It seemed completely out of scale with the rest of the movement. The realisation I had was simple: this isn't architecture, it's narrative. Each episode of the story has to be allowed to take its own time, and the art of the storyteller is to pace it so that nothings seems to linger too long. This is, I think, where Brendel's Schubert scores. A storyteller's perfect sense of the balance between incident and narrative. I've been listening to this over and over again for the last week.

Hans Abrahamsen's piece for soprano and orchestra ' Let me tell you ' is based on a novel by Paul Griffiths that tries to tell the story of Ophelia in Hamlet in her own words. And by 'in her own words', Griffiths means 'using only the 481 words that Ophelia utters during the play'. Abrahamsen's text is extracted from the novel. At the centre of this performance is the remarkable Canadian artist Barbara Hannigan. Hannigan is not just a singer of astounding stature.

She is also a pianist and conductor. She utterly animates this haunting and difficult score. The music, often using the higher voices of the orchestra, veers from ethereal through operatic, into stammering hysterical madness, and ultimately into oblivion (“ Snow falls. So: I will go on in the snow. I will have my hope with me.”).

The tiny vocabulary creates a strangely allusive text in which Ophelia tries to tell us, tries to appear, but remains an insubstantial revenant. It's astonishing. You should be ordering the album now. This post is a live recording, in beautiful sound, taken from the radio. So you can marvel, in addition, at the sheer flawless perfection of the performance, done with no retakes, no breaks. Make no mistake, this is going to be album of the year. Abrahamsen: Let me tell you (2013) Barbara Hannigan, Symphonieorchester des Bayerischen Rundfunks, Andris Nelsons Broadcast, text after Shakespeare by Paul Griffiths 320 Kbs.

Where was Christian Blackshaw all these years? He was born in 1949, and tutored by Clifford Curzon (who wasn't a person for taking on pupils, by all accounts), but absent from the concert platform for many years.

It was only in 2011 that he returned, playing the Mozart piano sonatas in a series of concerts that resulted in one of the finest recordings of the sonatas in recent years. I innocently picked up one of the recitals on Radio 3 and was immediately arrested by the playing (superb control of a warm, rich sound palette) and the interpretation. But no, I'm not posting any of the sonatas. They are available commercially. But to give you a taste of the playing, I'm posting the magnificent quintet for piano and winds. I cannot recall ever loving playing a piece as much as this. Mozart was justly proud of it – he wrote to his father that it was the best thing he had ever written.

I can only attribute its lack of popularity to the forces required. There are very few piano and wind quintets, and even fewer that are first rank masterpieces. This is quietly masterful playing. Just a single example: listen to the coda of the last movement. The piano figuration is simply perfectly judged – if it doesn't make you smile with pleasure, there's simply no hope for you.

Mozart: Quintet for piano and winds - Christian Blackshaw, Royal Northern Sinfonia Winds.