A late-summer round-up of things “cyber” before the various promised launches of new services kick in in time for Christmas. First up is a free music service that you will probably have heard about if you’ve young relatives or friends (or read last month’s Audio pages). It comes out of Sweden and is called Spotify. It is a peer-to-peer music-streaming service that allows you to listen to thousands of albums with little or none of the buffering you experience on so many streaming sites. The good news is that in many territories it’s free – the only “pay back” is that you occasionally have to sit through an advert (15‑30 seconds and not more frequently than every half hour). That said, I’ve just listened the whole of Beethoven’s Fourth Piano Concerto without interruption. The music is streamed at approximately 160kbps, is compatible with Microsoft Windows and Apple Mac OS X (and, using Wine, with Linux as well) and the DRM doesn’t allow much more than simply listening as it streams – which is perfectly acceptable as a kind of huge jukebox. Obviously the vast majority of the site is dedicated to rock, pop and jazz, but there’s a lot of classical music to found there, and some quite amazing discoveries to be made. (My Beethoven piano concerto recording is a Urania disc with Clara Haskil, the Vienna Symphony Orchestra and Karajan – a splendid performance, really beautifully accompanied. The meta-data is a bit crazy as Simon Rattle is stirred into the mix – prodigy he may be but he was only five when she died.) There are a lot of EMI recordings on Spotify and some from Sony-BMG, and if you fancy sampling our new Recording of the Year from the Quatuor Ebène, it’s there! You can upgrade to the Premium Service for £9.99 per month which gives you a higher bit-rate (320kbps), no adverts, and access to exclusive material (though I doubt whether much goes on in the classical domain). If you are curious about the premium offering and want to try it out, with little risk, you can buy a day pass for 99p – you can create your own playlist and have seamless music to accompany whatever activity you plan. Another destination for interesting music is the Nonesuch website and its radio option. If you like to be entertained in a slightly (but rewardingly) serendipitous way then simply choose one of the genres and let the random track selection take over (there are New Music, Pop-Rock-Alternative, Jazz, World, Classical, Music Theater and Soundtracks to choose from – or you can opt for the Nonesuch Mix and have a little bit of everything). I chose New Music and so far I’ve heard part of Adams’s Doctor Atomic Symphony, a Glass string quartet, Pärt’s Darf ich…, David Byrne’s Mea culpa and Glenn Kotche’s Mobile Parts 1 and 2 (the latter quite a discovery). If you work to music this could be a fun way of having it selected for you without the distraction of speech or adverts, and as it’s drawing on the Nonesuch catalogue you’re guaranteed an interesting mix of music in fine performances – and if it plays something you don’t like, you can always skip to the next track. I’ve recently discovered a splendid new area of the New York Philharmonic’s site that will eat into your time if the history of this great orchestra interests you. From the home-page (nyphil.org) follow the links at “About Us” and then click on “Performance History Search”. It contains the programme details of every concert given since December 7, 1842, and you can also find details of the concerts given by the New Symphony, founded in 1878 by Leopold Damrosch and which merged with the Philharmonic in 1928. This is a real treasure trove and a fascinating way to track a particular work’s engagement with the New York audience. Given the NYPO’s long championing of Mahler’s music, I did a search on the Fifth Symphony. The first movement was given in 1911 and then the whole symphony for the first time in 1926 under Mengelberg (London had to wait until 1945 to hear the whole work, but it had encountered the Adagietto as early as 1909). Then for the next few decades (basically until 1960) the work was entrusted to Mengelberg, Bruno Walter, John Barbirolli (who only did the Adagietto) and Dimitri Mitropoulos. Interestingly many of the timings of the various movements are given and for a work like Mahler’s Fifth where the Adagietto, in particular, has tended to spread with time it’s fascinating to see that Barbirolli took it at a flowing 10 minutes, Mitropoulos took 12 minutes, Bernstein – who you’d have expected to “go slow” – did it in 11 and that the slow coach, back in 1990, was Leonard Slatkin at 12'24". All that said, it’s probably best not to get too carried away as many are presumably the publisher’s estimates rather than a real performance timing. But the total timings are certainly interesting, though can Gustavo Dudamel really have differed by 12 minutes on two successive nights earlier this year (even given that one was billed as a Rush Hour concert – if so there was some rushing going on in the hall too)? Mahler’s Eighth has been given six times, and not surprisingly first by Stokowski! The biggest gap fell between the sixth performance (James Levine in 1976) and the most recent (Lorin Maazel in June this year). This site is a fascinating resource and one that many other ensembles would do well to emulate, though it must have taken a lot of research. I know I shall be responding to its siren call quite often! Mention of Maazel’s Mahler reminds me that the NYPO has made available all 10 symphonies (though Maazel doesn’t venture beyond the Adagio in the Tenth) as downloads, all recorded during his seven-year tenure with the orchestra. You can get hold of them from iTunes, Amazon.com, eMusic, HD Tracks, Classical Archives and Instant Encore (some only to purchasers in the States). Easily the most cost-effective place to get them is eMusic as a substantial work like the Ninth Symphony only runs to four movements, and that’s a fraction of the monthly credits you get with even eMusic’s basic package of 24 downloads for £9.99 (the first five symphonies notch up exactly 24 downloads – a real bargain). Now I’m not a huge Maazel fan: I find him extraordinarily variable – brilliant and engaging one minute, utterly cold and calculating the next (and sadly both extremes often during the same piece), but there is some terrific music-making in these performances, and there’s no gainsaying the quality of the playing that the NYPO delivered when he was in charge. I think the stand-out performance in the cycle is the Sixth. An added treat, if you read music, is to follow the First Symphony using Mahler’s annotated score (the score from which Mahler conducted the US premiere in 1909, and which was later used by Bruno Walter and Leonard Bernstein – you’ll encounter their timings along the way). The scanning and presentation is terrific with a quick page-turn at a click of the mouse. You can zoom in or out and move the page around. A really great job, on a site that’s fast becoming a model for an orchestra in this multimedia age. There are also some fascinating videos of Maazel talking about Mahler on the New York Phil’s YouTube pages – and whatever one thinks of Maazel as a conductor he’s a very engaging and charming talker. And each symphony has its own downloadable programme notes – so you’ll need to go back to the NYPO’s site if you get your music from eMusic or one of the other retailers who don’t offer the facility to download PDFs. A splendid 30-disc box of “Sacred Music” arrived the other day from Harmonia Mundi, and thanks to a gross overindulgence on its contents I thought I’d put together a Requiem Mass download playlist this month…

The Essental Download Playlists No 27 – Ten Requiems Guerrero Orchestra of the Renaissance / Noone (Glossa) eMusic Victoria McCreesh (Archiv) iTunes, DG Webshop Mozart Christie (Erato/Warner Classics) iTunes Cherubini Muti (EMI) iTunes, Spotify Brahms Ein deutsches Requiem Klemperer (EMI) iTunes, Spotify Berlioz Grande Messe des morts C Davis (Philips) iTunes, Passionato Verdi Pappano (EMI) iTunes, Passionato Fauré. Duruflé Best (Hyperion) iTunes Delius Hickox (Chandos) classicsonline, theclassicalshop, Passionato Rutter Cleobury (EMI) iTunes

James Jolly