(try looking at what I did by quoting this message!)

Hoseasons is a type of idyll, a lost paradise that is forever distant but a locus for yearnings. It represents a type of Arcadian world that is the stuff of which dreams are made, and as such, as an ideal, it can act as a guiding light in all moments of one's life.

Ian - what ARE you on?!!  And can I have some?!? 

The last time I read anything like that it was about Elgar...

Xenakis - complete works for percussion (3 CDs, relatively new on Mode), played by Steve Schick and friends. I've had to listen to Schick's performance of the solo piece Rebonds twice in succession because I couldn't quite believe how superhumanly precise his interpretation is. I suppose he must have played it hundreds of times, but still... also there are a few pieces I'd never previously heard like the trio Okho, and which I'd only heard once, for example the harpsichord/percussion duo Oophaa which I found a bit baffling when I first heard it (early 1990s) but makes much more sense to me now, probably because performing standards have improved, despite its still coming over as an extended footnote to the earlier Komboi for the same instrumentation. Anyway, it seems to me that none of Xenakis' percussion music has been recorded in better performances than this and very little of it anything like as well, and the range of it (two solos, one trio, two sextets, two duos with harpsichord, one with oboe and one with voice) ensures that it doesn't all blur into a generalised impression.

Highly recommended, as they say, and not just for the converted.

Been listening quite a bit over the last few days to one pianist I didn't really know that well - Samson François. Just to the 'Great Pianists of the 20th Century' volume on him (have the whole set, but still haven't listened to all of them). Couldn't recommend it more - amazingly individual, subtle and expressively complex Chopin (and mostly my favourite Chopin pieces - Ballades, Impromptus, Second Sonata), Debussy that truly gets to the heart of the ecstatic quality of the music in a way that is not remotely contrived, and perhaps the greatest Fauré playing I've ever heard (just two pieces, the second Impromptu and second Nocturne); one of the hardest composers to do well, can so easily sound either like mantlepiece music, or alternatively sound ridiculous if one tries to apply heavy Teutonic 'expressiveness' to it. François gauges the subtlest of nuances in a way that sounds so startlingly effortless (not remotely precious), has a real feel for the sense of line, and plays the most heart-breaking harmonies so clearly but without 'milking' them. Can't recommend it enough.

Must get the big set of Les introuvables de Samson François - anyone have it?

Would anyone be interested in a thread on Fauré?

Absolutely marvellous stuff. Do you know the Second Piano Quintet? I didn't before being asked to step in to play it at the last moment a few years ago. Incredible, takes that sort of musical language about as far as it could go. Listen to the long progression in the coda of the first movement, or the almost piercing unresolved suspensions in the slow one. Can stand its own in the context of any of the greatest chamber works.

Pascal Rogé does the same in that piece - that A-flat/B-flat ostinato mysteriously becomes C-D in the bass for a bar! Now, those old French editions are notoriously bad, but you would think that one's pretty obvious.

Incidentally, Ravel should come out of copyright for the second time this year (the last time he came out was just before the harmonisation of EU copyright laws, so Peters could not finish their new edition, though they were allowed to keep in print those volumes they had published). Hopefully we should get a new edition of the Valses nobles et sentimentales; I have a theory that there are many errors in the big cadenza of the Left Hand Concerto as well, so people who have had it in their fingers for years may have to 'unlearn' certain patterns! Like with that supposed shift in the pattern in Ondine on about the third line, which it turned out was simply a printing error - one pianist I pointed that out to got rather upset as she had practised that shift for ages!

Pascal Rogé also repeats both notes every time in the ostinato in Le Gibet if I remember correctly (at least on the Decca recording), and there's also half a bar missing. Oops.

Ondine used to have that octave sign missing from the big glissando, didn't it? So there are recordings where a gliss which is supposed to go to the top of the keyboard suddenly drops down the octave...