GRAMOPHONE: A world first video stream-on-demand with audio track in lossless studio quality The Berliner Philharmoniker’s Digital Concert Hall (DCH) – which has been broadcasting around 40 concerts live from the Philharmonie every season since 2008 and then offering them in a constantly growing concert archive – notches up another technological milestone with the introduction […]
Classical
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GRAMOPHONE Liszt’s piano music, with Alexander Ullman Alexander Ullman’s new album featuring Liszt’s Piano Concertos Nos 1 and 2 and the Sonata in B Minor, is released today on Rubicon Classics. For this week’s episode of the Gramophone Podcast, the Award-winning pianist joined Editor Martin Cullingford to explore this extraordinary music, its beauty and its […]
GRAMOPHONE: Arranging The Four Seasons for solo harp Harpist Keziah Thomas talks us through recreating Vivaldi’s evocative imagery on her own instrument As a child of the 80s, my first encounter with The Four Seasons came from my favourite cassette in my grandfather’s meticulously indexed drawer of classical music albums, ‘Hooked on Classics’. Vivaldi’s music […]
Howard Popeck: Certainly. Now forgive me for saying this, but it is possible to over-analyse the wonder of music, the magic and the emotion. It’s a danger, but somehow I sense you aren’t going to fall into the trap. The most wonderful book on the sheer unadulterated joy of classical music without the usual patronising […]
Mozart’s last concerto presents unique challenges to those recording the work, finds Nalen Anthoni Valedictory or visionary? Is there a choice? Could Mozart, who finished this concerto about eight weeks before he died, have been anything other than valedictory? Yet in his letter from Vienna to Constanze in Baden, written at midnight on October 7, […]
From the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland, celebrated pianist Joanna MacGregor OBE begins this week of lunchtime concerts, highlighting unjustly neglected works alongside their more celebrated contemporaries. Sofia Gubaidulina: Chaconne Errolyn Wallen: I wouldn’t normally say Gabriela Ortiz: Suy-muy-key Stevie Wishart (arr MacGregor): Proem, Prelude and Fugue Freya Waley-Cohen: Southern Leaves Trad arr MacGregor: Sometimes I […]
https://www.allmusic.com/album/britten-saint-nicolas-a-ceremony-of-carols-mw0003420606
For the first 10 months of 2022, it seemed that British musical life was returning to some kind of normality. But that was to reckon without the decisions of the one organisation in this country whose sole reason for existence is to nurture and encourage the arts throughout England. It was generally accepted that there […]
A musician is halfway through a public performance when they realise they might not make it to the end. Their body is fighting them, they’re in extreme pain. But stopping is not an option so they push on. No one would know. But boy does the musician know it. When they come off stage, they […]
Rafael Payare conducts the BBC Philharmonic in two of the ground-breaking works which heralded the twentieth century: Schoenberg’s Verklärte Nacht and Mahler’s Fifth Symphony. http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b08h0l2c
The charismatic New Zealand soprano Dame Kiri Te Kanawa looks back at her life in song through forty years of classic performances from the BBC archives, from her first TV performance on The Harry Secombe Show in 1971 to her appearances on Top of the Pops to sing the rugby anthem World in Union in […]
After a lifetime conducting Bach, John Eliot Gardiner has written an in-depth study of a genius touched by God. He talks to Ivan Hewett. Continue reading HERE
The ‘tremendous’ Third Symphony is both great music and a force beyond music. How, asks Richard Osborne, have conductors met this challenge during the work’s 90-year-long recorded history? Continues HERE
THE GUARDIAN / Andrew Clements The pianist Lars Vogt died in September last year. His cancer had been diagnosed in 2021, and he was already ill when, against doctors’ advice, he had travelled to Bremen to begin these Schubert recordings with his longtime collaborators, the violinist Christian Tetzlaff and his cellist sister Tanja. They began […]
https://www.theguardian.com/music/2023/feb/19/eno-the-rhinegold-review-wagner-richard-jones-martyn-brabbins-coliseum
Genre-hopping can enrich players and audiences alike. If anyone doubts the astonishing range and quality of classical music recordings being made today – and, I hope, regular readers of these pages would harbour no such perception – then they should really take heed of this month’s releases. There’s always a slight seasonality to release schedules, […]
Today we welcome Rosie Purdie The issue of opera and its appeal to a wide and diverse audience is one that opera makers are painfully aware of. It’s no secret that nowadays the majority of audiences who go to the opera are in the 60-plus age bracket and, although valiant attempts are being made to […]
THE GUARDIAN / Andrew Clements Faust/Les Siècles/Roth(Harmonia Mundi)Performed on original instruments, the composer’s neoclassical works – particularly his Violin Concerto, brilliantly played by Isabelle Faust, come into sharper focus t was through their recordings of Stravinsky’s early ballets a decade ago that François-Xavier Roth and the period instruments of Les Siècles cemented their international reputation. […]
THE GUARDIAN / Andrew Clements Tetzlaff/Tetzlaff/Vogt(Ondine, two CDs)The late pianist is outstanding in these last recordings, accompanied by his longtime collaborators, the violinist Christian Tetzlaff and his cellist sister Tanja The pianist Lars Vogt died in September last year. His cancer had been diagnosed in 2021, and he was already ill when, against doctors’ advice, […]
Stereophile: Over the last several weeks, one newspaper after another has made note of Nielsen Soundscan’s 2006 point-of-purchase data, which showed classical record sales up 22.5%, making it the “fastest growing” category for the year. Hip-hop was down (-20.7%), R&B was down (-18.4%), alternative was down (-9.2%), jazz was down (-8.3%)—soundtracks were up (+19%), but […]