Re: purchasing, formats...

On 3/4/2025 3:00 PM, Todd M. McComb wrote:
(And as noted, I do

feel obliged to read notes before commenting on the performance,
because the notes might address something on which I'd comment!  It
just seems like a basic part of not spewing in ignorance, a sense
of restraint of course deprecated in our current world....)
 

Amen to that. Part of the fun of listening to recorded performances is reading about them somewhere somehow (when not following the score on IMSLP). Even though, statistically speaking, liner notes follow a low-mean, high-variance distribution. Meaning, most of them are useless but one can be pleasantly surprised once in a while. As an example based on recent experience, the liner notes for the albums of the early-music ensemble La Reverdie on Arcana are a close substitute for PhD-level essays on medieval esthetics, and greatly enhance the fun and pleasure of listening to the music. Ditto for the Alia Vox notes (and images) for the Jordi Savall albums. The liner notes for Beauty Farm (and Sound and the Fury) on Fra Bernardo as mentioned above are actually quite helpful, particularly as the repertoires explored by these groups are not always well covered elsewhere.