This week on the Gramophone website we are celebrating the career and recordings of the great Italian conductor Claudio Abbado. Among the highlights of Abbado Week are two different guides his finest recordings, a comprehensive overview of Abbado’s career and heartfelt tribute from Gramophone’s Editor-in-Chief James Jolly, and a classic interview with Abbado drawn from […]
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“I haven’t been this struck by the orchestral expositions to Chopin’s concertos since Jun Märkl with the Scottish Chamber Orchestra for Ingrid Fliter. Now in the company of another Scottish orchestra, the RSNO, Elim Chan makes equally bold decisions about how the music should go. It’s easy to understand why they ….. ” Continues HERE
Pianist Dejan Lazic explores the genius of the composer and virtuoso Continues HERE
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by Aaron Green Updated October 23, 2017 Vivaldi’s Four Seasons concerto is unmistakably Antonio Vivaldi’s most famous work. Outside of the concert hall, you’ve heard movements of Vivaldi’s Four Seasons in movies like Tin Cup, Spy Game, A View to Kill, What Lies Beneath, White Chicks, Saved!, Pacific Heights, and The Other Sister just to name a few. You’ve heard it […]
Internationally respected authority on classical music, Mr. Christopher Breunig returns to this site. First, a little about him: Christopher trained and practiced as an architect, but over the years contributed music reviews to various publications, including the Sunday Times, Guardian and other specialist journals including International Piano and Classic Record Collector. Britten and Shostakovich It’s […]
From the archives: It’s a bumper year for composer anniversaries. There’s the 100th anniversary of the birth of Benjamin Britten, fabulously gifted and with something odd and dark that fascinates us. There’s the 200th of Giuseppe Verdi, musical voice of an entire nation. And there’s also the 200th of Richard Wagner, one of those […]
Anthony Tommasini writes ….. Jan Lisiecki, pianist; Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Christian Zacharias. Deutsche Grammophon B0016888-02; CD. The pianist Jan Lisiecki, born in Canada to Polish parents, was 16 when he made this debut recording for Deutsche Grammophon and 17 when he made his debut with the New York Philharmonic in December. […]
A 1964 BBC Symphony Orchestra performance of Elgar’s Symphony No.2, conducted by Sir Malcolm Sargent, has recently been issued on CD Killing two birds with one stone, as it were, Sir Thomas Beecham once described Karajan as ‘like Malcolm Sargent, only musical’. There’s a moment at the end of a BBC Symphony Orchestra performance of […]
Aisslinn Nosky. Photograph: Stu Rosner Stephen Pritchard writes … This is the third in the Boston-based Handel and Haydn’s Society’s live recordings of Haydn symphonies for Coro. Symphony No 8, Le Soir, joins their earlier recordings of Le Matin and Le Midi to complete the Esterházy trilogy of 1761. It follows the others in its concerto […]
Tom Service writes ….. There are few parts of the classical music world that do not bear the mark of Boulez’s influence today. Tom Service picks 10 key works that represent the best of the composer and conductor, whose death aged 90 was ….. Continues HERE
The Austrian composer’s operas have long been accused of lousy drama and lacking tunes – how unfair, says John Allison Easier though it may be to put man on the moon than convince your average opera-lover that Haydn’s operas are worth taking seriously, thankfully some opera companies are brave enough to try the latter. Having […]
From the archives The Venezuelan conductor showed how poor children could become musicians. Julian Lloyd Webber explains how he was determined to do the same here. Continue
The premiere Ludwig van Beethoven had in mind should have taken place in the Gothic splendour of Olmütz Cathedral. But the first known performance of his newly uncovered setting of a piece of plainchant took place in a modern, pine-clad lecture theatre in Manchester yesterday. MORE
Rebecca Omordia and Mark Bebbington. Fiona Maddocks writes …. Among Vaughan Williams’s compositional outpourings, only one piece readily comes to mind with a prominent piano part: the song cycle On Wenlock Edge. Thanks to this intriguing disc we realise there was more, the best of it for two players. Arrangements of his Fantasia on a […]
Many orchestral cognoscenti have long considered the Chicago Symphony Orchestra to have the finest orchestral brass section in the world; certainly, it ranks among the top three or four. All hail, then, to a disc that features the CSO brass players in all their refulgent splendor. Various arrangers are responsible for the versions performed here: […]
Hi guys. I’m a novice about classical music and even more so about Wagner. What should I buy to get a reasonable taster? We really don’t know. But we do know a man who does. Mr. Ted Elliot. He tells me the answer can be found HERE