You might think that, because we spend our days at the Halls, we are chock-full of all manner of musical insight. Often, this is true. But faced with a long holiday shopping list, a year’s-worth of new album releases, and general seasonal chaos, we can be quite as much at a loss when it comes to musical gift-giving as everyone else. Fortunately, we have resident experts who can help. And so, in need of some last-minute stockingstuffers, we trekked upstairs to chat with John Slavik, the Music Store manager here at Roy Thomson Hall, for some sage advice.
We’ve got quite a few goodies here in the store, but I would say that my favourite is the new Magdalena Kozena release of the Ryba Czech Christmas Mass. Kozena has a wonderfully silken voice which really shows off in the “3 Pastorellas” that open the CD. Another great recording is John Rutter’s A Christmas Festival. It’s a big seller, and it has quite a beautiful cover too! (Not that that affects the sound, but it’s always a nice touch.) Rounding out the holiday-themed choices would have to be Chet Baker’s Have Yourself a Jazzy Little Christmas: it’s very fun and smoothly jazzy. (And a bargain at $9.95!)
And! We have a great recording of Prokofiev’s Peter and the Wolf ! This one has the very flexible Shakespearean (and Canadian) actor Colm Feore narrating. It is a Windsor Symphony Orchestra production; CBC recording engineer David Burnham tells me that this is one of his favourite recordings of the piece, and I quite agree. (I will also always have a soft spot for the Boris Karloff version. You might remember Karloff as the voice behind The Grinch Who Stole Christmas – the CD of which is also for sale here – in which he sounds warm and cuddly and not at all like the Frankenstein for which he’s usually remembered.)
You might also want to take advantage of the Chandos sale that The Music Store has running until the end of January: 30% off any Chandos label recording. There are so many titles that I barely know where to start… I think that the Richard Hickox/ London Symphony Orchestra recording of Britten’s War Requiem (which the Toronto Symphony Orchestra played this past Remembrance Day) is extremely moving. It comes on two Super Audio CDs (SACDs) that transfer that rich, warm, golden Chandos sound exquisitely – but don’t worry if you don’t have an SACD player, as the discs also play on standard CD players.
I’m also a huge fan of the Chandos recording of Shostakovich’s Concerto No. 1 for Piano, Trumpet and Strings. This features Shostakovich’s sons – Dmitri Jr. on piano and Maxim conducting – along with I Musici de Montreal. A spectacular performance with some neat family associations to boot. Full of bright, vibrant orchestral colour, and yet it still has that edge of Soviet stress and angst coursing through it – one isn’t sure whether one should smile or weep. That’s the brilliance of the best of Shostakovich though.
John Slavik is the Music Store manager at Roy Thomson Hall.
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