Various Artists – Love For Levon (2013)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/48 kHz | Time – 2:22:08 minutes | 1,83 GB | Genre: Rock
Studio Master, Official Digital Download – Source: HDTracks  | Artwork: Digital Booklet | © Time/Life Star Vista

Dozens of luminaries from rock, country, and soul gathered at the Meadowlands’ Izod Center on October 3, 2012, to pay their collective respects in an unforgettable final tribute to Levon Helm. This incredible night was filled with one-of-a-kind performances by greats including Gregg Allman, Mavis Staples, Allen Toussaint, John Prine, Joan Osborne, Ray LaMontagne, John Mayer, Joe Walsh, Dierks Bentley and many others. The iconic artists performed songs associated with Levon Helm and The Band including “Up on Cripple Creek,” “Life Is a Carnival,” “Ophelia,” “The Weight,” “Rag Mama Rag,” “Ain’t Got No Home” and “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down”.

Star-studded tribute to great Levon Helm shows how much good music flies under the commercial radar. – New York Daily News (more…)

Takács Quartet – Franz Schubert: String Quintet D956 & String Quartet D703 (2012)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 63:41 minutes | 1,10 GB
Official Digital Download – Source: hyperion-records.co.uk | Digital Booklet

The matchless Takács Quartet return to Schubert. Their first disc on Hyperion—his ‘Death and the Maiden’ and ‘Rosamunde’ quartets—received unprecedently lavish critical acclaim, acknowledging a new modern benchmark for these works. Now they turn to perhaps the most hauntingly beautiful of all Schubert’s chamber works, the String Quintet—completed six weeks before the composer’s death. Schubert included a second cello in the texture, creating a sumptuously warm sound, a cradling intimacy. Here the Takács players are joined by cellist Ralph Kirshbaum. Also recorded here is the ‘Quartettsatz’: a fragment—of the highest quality—of a String Quartet in C minor abandoned by the composer. (more…)

Kirill Kondrashin, Moscow Philharmonic Orchestra / RSFSR Russian Chorus / Boys Choir of Moscow Choir School (2011)
Prokofiev: Cantata for the 20th Anniversary of the Russian Revolution & Shostakovich: The Sun Shines over our Motherland
Transferred from a Angel/Meloydia 4-Track Tape | FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/192 kHz | Time – 43:27 minutes | 1,67 GB
Recorded 1965 in Moscow, U.S.S.R. | Studio Master, Official Digital Download | Artwork: Digital Booklet

Serge Prokofiev had been deeply engrossed in the writings of Vladimir Lenin when the All-Union Radio Committee approached him with the idea of a patriotic cantata, one that might incorporate “Revolutionary texts.” The germs of the idea began in 1934, but Prokofiev undertook the main body of the ten-movement work in 1936-1937. Prokofiev repressed the score, however, and it did not receive its premier until 5 May 1966 under Kondrashin. The sheer number of forces involved–which can easily involve up to 500 musicians–suggests another reason for the rarity of this colossus. The musical fecundity of Prokofiev’s style–with clear analogies to Alexandre Nevsky and to the G Minor Violin Concerto–mark the piece as an inspired rather than a merely propagandist vehicle. For the prologue or Introduction, Prokofiev utilizes the phrase “A specter is haunting Europe,” the first sentence from Marx and Engels’ Communist Manifesto. The 1966 recording by Kirill Kondrashin omits two movements–Stalin’s Oath and The Constitution–movements no longer “politically correct” during the period of anti-Stalin reaction, since the Soviet government wished to detach itself from his crimes.

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