Handel – Opera Arias
I am a sucker for Handel’s operas. Of all the composers from the first half of the 18th century he managed to combine dramatic force with engaging and memorable melody best…
Mozart – Flute Quartets
There is something luxuriously domestic about this recording. The quartet feel appropriately as if they are in a not particularly grand 18th century drawing room on a pleasant New England Autumn evening…
Full of the Highland Humours
I was surprised to find I had a tenuous personal connection to one of these pieces, in that I spent several childhood summers at Kilravock Castle, hard by Culloden, where some of the music of Thomas Erskine was discovered in manuscript…
Lennox in Paris
Given some of the nonsense handed out to customers as liner notes by big companies recently, it is a relief to have a full and sensible booklet for this issue from the small Willowhayne label…
An Old Belief
The album takes its title from the fourth of Parry’s Songs of Farewell. This is one of those programmes that I suspect works wonderfully in concert but feels too fractured to hang together on disc. There is logic, in that it is the latest edition of the group’s choral pilgrimage that they tour round England’s cathedrals, but it perhaps is best thought of as a souvenir of that progress…
Tormento d’Amore – Arias
As one would expect from a historian of Bostridge’s calibre this is a superbly constructed survey of the way the Venetian operatic style of the early 17th century, developed by Cavalli, spread South to Naples, was followed and adapted there, and came back to Venice reinforced in the 18th…