My reviews of Harmonia Mundi HMM931833 (Dvořák – Violin Concerto – Trio Op. 65 – Isabelle Faust et al.) and Nimbus NI 6433 (Schumann – piano music – Feltsman) have been posted to the April 2023 print and online issues of Stereophile magazine; here’s the link to the webpage:
https://www.stereophile.com/content/april-2023-classical-record-reviews
Yes, I’m late. I don’t just mean that I’m posting this link a month after the reviews appeared, though that would be quite late enough. (The Bernie Sanders post kept stalling me.) After the fact, I found out that the Harmonia Mundi disc is just a straight-up reissue of a twenty-year-old release; the company didn’t even bother changing the catalogue number! I knew it wasn’t brand-new — conductor Jiří Bělohlávek died in 2017 — but I figured it’d just been sitting in the can for a while. Had I been using an actual hard CD and booklet, I might have caught this, but I reviewed the digital downloads, where I admit I don’t read the e-booklets carefully. This is, in fact, the second time I’ve run into this situation with Harmonia Mundi: when I requested a hard copy of Rachmaninov’s Vespers, the representative told, or reminded, me that it was just a straight rerelease: was I sure I wanted it? I still did, though I knew not to propose it for Stereophile.
The whole business was a mild embarrassment for the magazine — and for my editor, and for me — when an astute reader pointed this out. Since Harmonia Mundi — or, rather, parent company PIAS — generally provides critics with links to downloadable files on a regular basis, I’ve favored their material for review. Going forward, I suppose I’ll just have to check back with the publicity people to make sure the “new releases” are exactly that. Sigh. Anyway, enjoy (or not). As a second commenter remarked, the Dvořák piece is still a good review (i.e., well-written, not the colloquial sense of a “good review” as favorable).
March sales (not much), with a story
We’re back to my old pre-pandemic pattern: slow, scattered sales most of the year, with September and January surges, not unlike the virus. The saving grace this year has been that at least an item or two every month goes at the higher end of the scale: twenty-five to forty dollars, say, rather than ten (which, after Amazon commissions and fees and the ever-increasing shipping costs, doesn’t leave all that much for me, the beleaguered seller).
There’s a bit of a story behind that single eBay CD. It’s not the sort of thing I’d have bought; neither was it a review copy, at least not one that was sent to me. Twentyish years ago, I occasionally worked in Hell’s Kitchen. (The neighborhood’s official name is “Clinton,” like the former President and his wife, the not-President, but hardly anyone outside of city government seems to call it that.) At that pre-gentrification time — when it could really have been Hell’s own kitchen — there was a decrepit, random record store, One Love Records, on Tenth Avenue, run by an old Black fellow. The stock seemed both random and (ahem) randomly organized, and he didn’t seem to have much classical, but sometimes I’d run across something both interesting and cheap(ish). Once, when I bought one or two items, he slipped a copy of High Energy Rock, Volume III into my bag. It had no booklet, no endpapers — like a record in a plain brown wrapper. At home, I tossed the disc onto a shelf somewhere and forgot about it
Fast forward to, say, six or seven years ago, when I was going through the shelves and found it again. I figured I might as well hawk it online. But how to describe it? As I mentioned, my copy had no documentation (it was “undocumented”!), and the Internet wasn’t all that helpful. It’s funny about information on the ‘Net: new stuff gets posted immediately; older stuff is regularly archived by people with the necessary wherewithal; but much of the 1990s has basically slipped through the cracks (including, for example, the entire publication history of Listener magazine). The releasing company, Manhattan Production Music, does have a website — I cribbed its logo for my listing — but it didn’t include this release. An earlier site I found described each song, but each description was cut off in the middle of the first sentence! (I’m not proud: I used them, anyway.)
Given the resulting undescriptive description, I’m amazed that, after all these years, the disc finally found a taker. He used the “Best Offer” option, and by now I was thankful to have an offer at all, but, again, I didn’t clear much. Still, there it went.
Amazon books:
- Apprehended: The Trials of Dickie Lynn
- Boss Tweed
- Signs on the Horizons
- A Spy Amongt Friends
- The Très Riches Heures of Jean, Duke of Berry [And thanks to the editors for getting the French plural right!]
- Vehicle and Traffic Law of the State of New York, 2018 edition
Amazon CDs:
- Bruckner Symphony 2 (Eloquence)
- Vivaldi Cantate per soprano (Naïve)
eBay CD: High Energy Rock III (Manhattan Production Music)
At the moment, I’ve not been relisting my other eBay items — I have to check on what I’ve already weighed to determine the postal rate — but my substantial Amazon listings are still up, under my seller name SteveDisque. Happy browsing!
Stephen Francis Vasta 