Dorothea Herbert’s voice is not yet the finished article, I suspect – there is a dull spot in the middle register and a tremble that never quite settles – but it is thoroughly appropriate for most of this overheated music from the first few decades of the last century…
Malcom Martineau has long been one of Britain’s best accompanists for singers and he is continuing a tradition of a lone pianist exploring the collected songs of a single composer with many collaborators, in the same way that Graham Johnson did with his Songmakers Almanac from the 1970s onwards…
It is every generation’s right to put on record their interpretation of the standard repertoire and Despax is a capable and sensitive pianist who certainly deserves to tackle Brahms’ massive First Concerto, at almost an hour one of the grandest and most taxing works in the genre…
There is a good selection of violinists from Benedetti’s generation who have carried off the shift part time from modern string tradition to period instruments, perhaps Isabelle Faust and Alina Ibragimova principally among them…
Louise Farrenc was a Parisian contemporary of Robert Schumann and her symphonies have many of the same orchestral textures and thematic propulsions. Like Schumann’s wife, Clara, she established herself as a pianist and composer in her twenties…