RENEE FLEMING: Ravel, Messiaen …

Joel Kasow writes: Two recital albums on Decca have recently come our way featuring two “house”singers. Renée Fleming’s Poèmes shows off the soprano, highlighting the extraordinary vocal beauty in exotic repertoire, thus demonstrating the soprano’s eagerness to lead her fans outside the customary paths. The most familiar item, Ravel’s Shéhérazade, is given one of the […]

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DVORAK: New World Symphony & Slavonic Dances Otmar Suitner & Staatskapelle Berlin / Vaclav Neumann & Gewandhausorchester Leipzig

Patrick Latimer writes: Collateralised Debt Obligations Those that can remember further back than last week will remember CDOs the packaged debts that brought capitalism to its knees in the last decade. Well here is the musical equivalent. Packaged reissues of forgotten performances from the past all nicely presented in a smart card CD holder. Now […]

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Quill

MICHAEL PISARO: Sometimes CD review – US composer enjoys the silence

Kate Molleson writes: Wandelweiser music feels extra appealing at the moment. Maybe it’s because the grace and quiet, honest fragility is a tonic against shouty geopolitical absolutism. The US composer Michael Pisaro pinpoints his encounter with his Wandelweiser stylistic brethren in the early 1990s as the most decisive moment in his career: “This literally saved […]

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MUSIC IS THE

TOKS DADA: ‘It’s my age that’s the talking point, not that I’m black’: Toks Dada, the Southbank’s head of classical music

ERICA JEAL: With its new season opening this weekend, the Southbank Centre’s 32-year-old leader talks about how he’s shaping the venue to reflect classical music today, the magic of live music, and the challenge of keeping the lights – and the heating – on Toks Dada is reeling off the concerts that make up the […]

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GREIG: Chasing the Butterfly: Recreating Grieg’s 1903 Recordings and Beyond, classical CD of the week

From the archives ….. Geoffrey Norris: This is a strange set, but a curiously compelling one as well. The Norwegian pianist Sigurd Slåttebrekk, in collaboration with the record producer Tony Harrison, has closely – not to say obsessively – examined the acoustic recordings that his fellow countryman Grieg made of nine of his own piano […]

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EHNES QUARTET: Beethoven: String Quartet No. 13, Op. 130 & Grosse Fuge, Op. 133

AllMusic Review by James Manheim  [-] Beethoven’s String Quartet No. 13 in B flat major, Op. 130, is textually knotty in a way that few other Beethoven works are. Beethoven originally ended the work with the radical Grosse Fuge, Op. 133, heard at the end of this program by the Ehnes Quartet. It mystified audiences, […]

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BACH: Exploring the genius of JS Bach

Jonathan Freeman-Attwood joins the Gramophone Podcast to discuss Baroque music’s greatest composer This week’s podcast is devoted to exploring the music, life and legacy of the greatest genius of Baroque music – and arguably of all music – JS Bach. Editor Martin Cullingford invited Bach specialist and Gramophone reviewer, the Royal Academy of Music’s Principal […]

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JIMMY HUGHES / WORTHLESS: “As I look around my house and view vast number of shelves, all heaving with ‘worthless’ LPs and CDs, I can see the ….. “

Worthless As I look around my house and view vast number of shelves, all heaving with ‘worthless’ LPs and CDs, I can see the benefit of such an approach. You’re freer and less shackled. I sometimes think about moving house, but can’t face the prospect of shifting all those records. It’s not just a question […]

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ANNE NAYSMITH: Concert pianist who later lived her life on the streets and became a cherished figure in Chiswick, West London

  From the archives Garry Humphreys writes: Anne Naysmith, who has died after being hit by a lorry in Chiswick High Road, west London, has no Alan Bennett to write about her, as he did for Miss Shepherd, who camped on Bennett’s front drive and is immortalised in his play The Lady in the Van. […]

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