Mahler Symphonies Nos. 9 and 10

Mahler Symphony No. 9 and Symphony No. 10 ("Adagio"). Paavo Järvi conducts the Frankfurt Radio Symphony Orchestra. Directed for TV by Michael Ciniselli. Released 2015, disc has 5.1 dts-HD Master Audio sound. Grade: F

Peter Quantrill, writing in the August 2015 Gramophone at page 30, says this recording has an "uneasy Ninth" followed by a Tenth which is "a frustrating appendix to a patchy but rewarding Mahler cycle." Talk about faint praise! And now we know that both of these recordings were done on SD cameras for DVDs and then uprezed for Blu-ray presentation. See our review of the full box for details.

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Here's news about high-definition video disc ("HDVD") recordings of opera, ballet, classical music, plays, fine-art documentaries, and paintings. In the journal below are independent (and hard-to-find critical) reports on hundreds of HDVDs. Pick the best titles for your excelsisphere.

Feb 25. We have just completed one of our most ambitious reviews: Einstein on the Beach opera, the surreal 4 and 1/2 hour cult legend. Kudos, encomiums, and accolades to Opus Arte for giving us this authoritative and weirdly fascinating recording, which we grade A+. Absorbing and learning Einstein is uniquely challenging. We try to help out by providing aids not included in the keepcase materials: an accurate libretto and a list of segments in the opera with correct Opus Arte time stamps. Good luck!

We have some other good grades with an A for the recent Met The Pearl Fishers (Les pêcheurs de perles) and a B- for an earlier The Pearl Fishers from Naples. Also, we recently gave an A- for the new Don Quixote from the Vienna State Ballet.