Many of the composers who spanned the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries experimented with escaping the then traditional boundaries of key signatures. Some, like the Second Viennese School, abandoned them altogether in favour of twelve tone sequences…
The great thing about these volumes by The Sixteen is that they include much more than the obsequious welcome songs, written for minor royal comings and goings from court by a monarch who, after 1660, never ventured much further from Whitehall than Newmarket…
For weeks I was sure I did not want to review this issue, put off by the tiresome and misleading album title, Babel. It refers to the concept behind the programme, namely works that imitate speech through the language of the string quartet…
At first sight the musical worlds of Moeran and Finzi could not be more different from those of Hugh Wood (90 next year) and Sally Beamish (who was born in the year Finzi died: 1956). Yet somehow these works for string trio hang together well…
This serene and instantly accessible music is beautifully recorded and packaged by the French label, Melism, with the CD itself even having a proper sleeve and a booklet that includes Anna Zassimova’s own oil paintings…