Jun 20, 2020 | Recording Reviews
The first three of Joseph Haydn’s miraculous Opus 76 String Quartets – this great composer on an exalted roll – enjoy vibrant outings from the Chiaroscuro Quartet, led by Alina Ibragimova, a period-conscious group that nevertheless makes a colourful sound, with much...
Jun 12, 2020 | Recording Reviews
Once you’ve cottoned on that Vasily Petrenko isn’t going to sensationalise and be an interventionist on behalf of this hat-trick of Rimsky-Korsakov favourites (Opuses 34-36) then there is much to relish, not least superb playing from the Oslo Philharmonic and...
Jun 12, 2020 | Recording Reviews
Elsewhere on my Column I review Thomas Adès conducting Beethoven’s first three Symphonies together with music by Gerald Barry and a release of his own pieces including the stunning Totentanz (put Thomas Adès into Search). The latter DG issue, with the Boston Symphony,...
Jun 9, 2020 | Guest Contributors, Recording Reviews
Guest Reviewer, Ateş Orga Following up on Andrey Gugnin’s first Hyperion disc, of Shostakovich, this eighty-one-minute, five-star, successor is a piano-fancier’s delight. If you’re going to revive twenty-one largely forgotten encores – the only...
Jun 9, 2020 | Guest Contributors, Recording Reviews
Arias from I masnadieri, Un ballo in maschera, Il trovatore, I vespri siciliani, Il Corsaro, Attila, Ernani, Macbeth, Luisa Miller, and La traviata Guest Reviewer, Alexander Campbell Operatic recital releases, especially debut ones, can sometimes be a mixed bag. They...
Jun 8, 2020 | Recording Reviews
There was a time when César Franck’s Symphony in D-minor had a regularly increasing discography – including by Ansermet, Barbirolli, Berglund, Bernstein, Boult, Giulini, Karajan, Klemperer, Maazel, Monteux, Munch and Ormandy, to name but twelve luminaries (fourteen if...