MOZART. LSO Wind Ensemble play ‘Gran Partita’

Mozart’s Serenade No 10 for Winds, ‘Gran Partita’, third movement, Adagio For many, the third movement of Mozart’s ‘Gran Partita’ Serenade will be forever associated with the film Amadeus, in which the rival composer Salieri is confronted by the full force of the simple genius of Mozart’s music. The London Symphony Orchestra’s Wind Ensemble released […]

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BYRD / BRITTEN: Choral Music CD review – warm sounds, if not always sharply defined

Kate Molleson writes ….. William Byrd was a Catholic in the service of an Anglican monarch; Benjamin Britten was a gay pacifist in second world war England. It never hurts to remember how many of the artists we end up deifying faced some kind of bigotry in their day. This album presents the two composers […]

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RAVEL: Daphnis et Chloé with François-Xavier Roth

The conductor explores Ravel’s Daphnis et Chloé and explains his novel approach to his new recording The new recording of Ravel’s complete Daphnis et Chloé by Les Siècles, Ensemble Aedes and François-Xavier Roth was an Editor’s Choice in the June issue, with Gramophone’s Mark Pullinger particularly beguiled by their novel use of ….. Continues HERE

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SCHUMANN: Scenes from Goethe’s Faust CD review – deeply impressive

Andrew Clements writes ….. Even Schumann’s greatest admirers – and I’d count myself among them – would never claim that his choral music is the most significant or rewarding part of his output. But Scenes from Goethe’s Faust, which he worked on for a decade and completed in 1853, a few months before his final […]

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YO-YO MA: He Stuns Shoppers with Pop-Up Concert in Chicago Mall

 “Holiday shopping can be exhausting. And stressful. But a new video making the rounds on YouTube shows a smiling, if somewhat surprised crowd of shoppers after Yo-Yo Ma begins to perform at a downtown Chicago mall on Tuesday night.  The setting is the Shops at North Bridge, a glossy mall on Chicago’s Magnificent Mile. At […]

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MARIA CALLAS: Shattering ‘Vissi d’arte’ at Covent Garden in 1964

Callas sings Puccini’s Tosca with an unrivalled intensity Maria Callas’s 1953 recording of Tosca, opposite Giuseppe di Stefano’s Cavaradossi and Tito Gobbi’s Scarpia, remains one of the greatest of all opera recordings (go here for an insight into the tempestuous recording sessions). And here is Callas at Covent Garden in 1964, in Franco Zeffirelli’s production. […]

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CHRISTOPHER BREUNIG: Bruckner Symphony 8 MAHLER Symphony 6 Concertgebouw Orchestra / Eduard van Beinum Tahra TAH614-615

BRUCKNER Symphony 8 MAHLER Symphony 6 Concertgebouw Orchestra/Eduard van Beinum Tahra TAH614-615 You sometimes wonder at the seeming profusion of  immaculate copies of complete sets of 78s from which restoration engineers work. The source for 18 acetates of a Dutch Radio transmission of Bruckner’s Eighth Symphony, from April 1955? Eduard van Beinum’s Concertgebouw performance was […]

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DANIEL BARENBOIM and CHRISTOPH WALTZ: In conversation

Barenboim and Waltz discuss the importance of the text in the respective creative disciplines Today’s video is a fascinating conversation between Daniel Barenboim and the actor Christoph Waltz in which they discuss the differences between the texts that they use in performance – for Barenboim the score, for Waltz the script. They also explore how […]

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A daily dose of Hughes; Jimmy Hughes aka James Michael Hughes – “I was shocked! I mean, as anyone who heard the Perlman / Ashkenazy Decca LP when …..”

I was shocked! I mean, as anyone who heard the Perlman/Ashkenazy Decca LP when it was first released has to agree, this recording set new standards at the time. When I first encountered it, it quite literally blew my socks off. A new era in recorded sound had arrived. At least, that’s how it seemed. […]

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The 50 best Johannes Brahms albums

Johannes Brahms’s many masterpieces have a confidence and ebullience, an irresistible lyricism and melodic charm, and show no sign of losing their appeal more than 120 years after his death. There have been many outstanding recordings of Brahms’s music, far too many to include here, but the albums listed below will give you the best […]

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