Brahms Piano Concertos Nos. 1 & 2

Brahms Piano Concerto No. 1 and Piano Concert No. 2 concert. Zuben Mehta conducts the Wiener Philharmoniker with Rudolph Buchbinder on piano. Directed for TV by Karina Fibich. Released 2016, disc has 5.0 dts-HD Master Audio surround sound. Grade: NA

Poor Buchbinder is apparently a great guy, pianist, and musical scholar. He has managed to get quite a few recordings made in HDVD, but all of them have suffered, in our judgement, from poor production designs and/or bad cases of DVDitis. This title is also available in a DVD version. In this situation, symphony videos shot by Karina Fibich have in the past earned poor grades from us. We are not optimistic about this title, but there's always hope.

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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.