The title, familiar from Handel’s Messiah, continues of course. Why do all the nations rage so furiously together? And that is the point. Stephen Powell’s tour du monde is a gesture of defiance against international conflict, a celebration of the riches of art song, wherever one calls home…
Although Pancho Vladigerov (1899-1978) is a composer whose music has not sustained a big international reputation, in his native Bulgaria he is highly regarded. Apart from other achievements, in his twenties he was one of the founders of the Varna Summer Music Festival, one of Europe’s oldest and still most distinguished annual events…
The very difficulties that made Debussy’s second book of Preludes seem confusing in 1913 are those that make them so appreciated today. They are clearly 20th century and their disjointed, episodic character, moving in fits and starts between fragmented ideas, looks forward to a sound world in the 1920s that Debussy never lived to see…