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Warsaw-born Mieczysław Weinberg, whose parents worked in the Yiddish Theater and died in a Nazi concentration camp, began a close friendship with Shostakovich. Citing their meeting as the time his life was born anew, Weinberg shared with Shostakovich a history of persecution by Soviet authorities. Shostakovich championed Weinberg's work and interceded on his…

Dvořák's Quartet 13 in G major is only a third longer than the popular American, but its broader scale feels unwieldy. The first movement's hearty, open main theme and lighter second are both appealing once you get past a schizophrenic, Punch-and-Judy introduction. In the Adagio, sustained straight tones lead to a warmly harmonized chorale; later, a warmer, cautiously affirmative…

The new-look Jimi Hendrix Experience (Billy Cox on bass; Mitch Mitchell on drums) recorded a remarkable amount of material between June and August of 1970 at Electric Lady Studios in New York City. The sessions were intended to become First Rays of the New Rising Sun, a double album follow-up to 1968's Electric Ladyland. Hendrix would never…

As an inveterate lover of period instruments with the timbral tang of authority, it's hard to imagine that any Mozart aficionado, even those who might initially turn to Khatia Buniatishvili's contemporaneous, modern-instrument recording of Mozart's Piano Concertos Nos.20 & 23 with the Academy of St. Martin in the Fields, will not develop a special…

For one of the wildest and most unpredictable rides you may ever take, skip the Ferris wheel and racetrack and take John Zorn's eight string quartets for a spin. Beginning with Cat O'Nine Tails (1988) and ending with Zorn's last quartet (so far at least), The Unseen: music for the temple (2017), the JACK Quartet's John Zorn: The Complete String Quartets promises to simultaneously pull you in and…

Jason Victor Serinus and I had both been impressed by the sound of Nola's Metro Grand Reference Gold speakers at the 2013 Rocky Mountain Audio Fest, and Jason had repeated that positive…

Steve's whammy arrived amid an e-mail exchange among Stereophile writers concerning a rather clueless column in another publication on the dearth of women audiophiles. After asking how many female audiophiles each of us knew, Steve G. defined what he meant by audiophile: "a person who frets over their system, agonizes over choices, loves gear, and sometimes music. You know, the kind of person…

In Teach Me Thy Statutes, 15 compositions by the prolific Pavel Chesnokov (1877–1944) receive devout performances by the…

In writing reviews for Stereophile, I face a challenge. Whether I'm evaluating an audio component, a recording, or a live performance, I'm confronted by the fact that, when all is said and done, no one fully understands why or how the sound of a particular component, composition, or artist can affect us as powerfully as so many…

Isabelle Faust makes a fine impression in the Dvořák concerto. She answers the orchestra's opening phrases with firm-bowed flourishes, impeccably tuned, both in the "little notes" and when sailing in alt. Without sacrificing polish, she makes the second theme feel shaggy and untamed. The curlicued cadenzas on the lead…