Jun 4, 2020 | Guest Contributors, Recording Reviews
Guest Reviewer, Ateş Orga British-wise, I grew up pianistically on the likes of Frank Bridge, William Baines, Joseph Holbrooke and John Ireland – once, in a professorial Victorian drawing room in Kenway village, Earl’s Court, black Blüthner concert grand by the...
May 30, 2020 | Recording Reviews
This impressive release, flawlessly produced by Andrew Keener and superbly recorded by Simon Eadon, coupling the sole Piano Quintets of Amy Beach and Edward Elgar, was set down in May last year soon after Harumi Rhodes had been installed as second violin of the Takács...
May 29, 2020 | Recording Reviews
Previously published on May 12 To be honest I blow hot and cold with James MacMillan’s music but I am definitely at the top end of the temperature scale with Symphony 4, given its world premiere at BBC Proms 2015 conducted by dedicatee Donald Runnicles (a performance...
May 26, 2020 | Recording Reviews
Austrian conductor Herbert von Karajan, born 5 April 1908, Salzburg, died 16 July 1989, Anif. The chunky booklet gives all the information a collector wants: recording dates (here from March 1959, Also sprach Zarathustra, to April/May 1978, Le nozze di Figaro) and...
May 23, 2020 | Recording Reviews
Edward Gardner keeps a tight but not inflexible rein on Schoenberg’s Opus 5 (1903), his expansive and sumptuous post-Tristan take on Maurice Maeterlinck’s Pelléas et Mélisande, a play about the doomed lovers that also inspired music from Debussy (an opera), Fauré and...
May 23, 2020 | Recording Reviews
For me the Eroica Variations with final Fugue (Beethoven’s Opus 35) is Annie Fischer (formidable) or Emil Gilels (“wrapped in granite”), both by chance on BBC Legends. Florian Feilmair (born 1989) isn’t quite their equal although he is attractively fluid and lithe,...