Hi-Res Downloads

There’s not exactly a shortage of piano trio albums out there (despite the strong challenge seemingly being staged by accordions in this month’s hi-res selection), and while Martin Tingvall’s trio’s album starts unpromisingly with the low-key ‘Evighetsmaskinen’ (it means ‘Eternity Machine’) – a mid-set track if ever I heard one – it soon hits its groove with the impetus of ‘Bumerang’. That sets the pace for the rest of the album, notably the pacy ‘Skånsk Blues’ and ‘Sjuan’, and while the set has its contemplative, introspective moments – well, it is a jazz trio album, after all! – there’s more than enough here to have the listener coming back for second helpings. True, this isn’t the cleanest-sounding recording ever, with occasionally a bit too much cymbal splash, for example, but it’s certainly punchy and definitely enjoyable – and goes out with bang. AE Sound Quality: 85% Hi-Fi News Lab Report There’s evidence of mixed sample rate content here (trks 3, 4, 7, 8, 11 and 13) while the piano feed carries a deal of spuriae at 26kHz, 28kHz and 33.

Not to be confused with the German DJ who founded Top Dog Records, this Tobias Becker is a young musician who recently completed studies in classical and jazz piano at Stuttgart’s University of Music and Performing Arts. Centred on his self-penned Life Stream Suite, a composition in four parts for 17-piece ensemble, the album is an impressive outing for Becker who has already garnered an impressive CV for his talent as a musical arranger. It’s vibrant and exhilarating big band jazz, redolent of Count Basie at his swingin’ best, albeit interspersed with a 21st century twist here and there. The album’s excellent sound quality, recorded in Bauer Studios in Ludwigsburg, has captured the vivid colours and textures of the Bigband ensemble most authentically.

The latest from a stellar group – drummer Gerald Cleaver, pianist David Virelles, bassist Reuben Rogers, and trumpeter Stanko – December Avenue is a collection of beautifully rendered tone-poems. There is a great delicacy to the musicianship – they are all fully engaged with their bandmates – and each track seems approached as if they have all the time in the world, and all the space they could possibly need to explore it. Even at his most upbeat, Stanko has a sweetly mournful quality. The opposite of frantic jazz, this collection is maturely intelligent, emotionally resonant, aesthetically unassailable, and gorgeously executed, without a hint of cliché.

192kHz/24-bit FLAC, Chandos CHSA5145 (supplied by www. theclassicalshop. net) This appears to be the first Chandos orchestral recording from The Classical Shop at 192kHz/24-bit resolution – like the SACD, it has no extra work so is low-priced. It was produced live in mid-2013 by Soundmirror Inc at Toronto’s Roy Thomson Hall: the first of three Chandos projects with the orchestra.

96kHz to 192kHz/24-bit FLAC, CKD 570 (supplied by www. linnrecords. com) Marking his 70th birthday, this recital reflects both the journeys made by early composers from one country to another and those made by Trevor Pinnock in company with his preferred, rich-toned, 1982 American harpsichord modelled after an 18th-century Hemsch instrument, which he’s been playing for 40 years. We haven’t previously featured a solo harpsichord in this HFN section – recorded at the concert hall at Kent University, Canterbury, by Philip Hobbs in Aug ’14, this programme has pieces by JS Bach (The Sixth French Suite), Bull (his pictorial, galloping The King’s Hunt), Byrd, Cabezon, Frescobaldi, Handel (a floridly decorated Chaconne in G), Sweelinck and Tallis, and ends with three Scarlatti sonatas.

DSD64, SKU TRIOC2011 (supplied by www. nativedsd. com) Well, this album is an absolute riot and all delivered in sparkling sound quality. The fourth album by The Third is an infectious mix of klezmer, gipsy and Balkan folk music, played by the three members of the Dutch ensemble with real panache and enjoyment.

44. 1kHz/24-bit WAV/FLAC/ALAC, Naim CD210 (supplied bywww. naimlabel. com) So what’s with the Hitchcockian title? Well, London-based trio Troyka tells us the title of its new album comes from guitarist Chris Montague’s fear of birds – this ‘escalated into an album set in a fictionalised London: a post-apocalyptic dystopian nightmare in which people have contracted a form of avian flu that is slowly turning them into human-size birds’.