Warlock

Philip Heseltine is such a figure of exotic contradictions, it is often hard to separate his weird occult enthusiasms from his amiable music, written using the pseudonym Peter Warlock…

Royer – Les Talens Lyriques

This is one of those joyous discoveries that make CD collecting such fun. Pancrace Royer (1703 – 55) is, frankly, a composer of whom no-one outside French baroque academia has ever heard…

Beethoven – Piano Sonatas

This is an intelligent survey of the three main periods of Beethoven’s style, ranging from 1798 to 1821, but more importantly looking at how Romanticism developed out of the classical period…

Beethoven – Violin Concerto

Both these versions of Beethoven’s Violin Concerto conclude that the traditional way of doing things is not enough – or perhaps the violinists wanted to carve out their own distinctive voices as relatively young, though well established, soloists…

Barber Bruch

What a clever piece of programming this is! The Bruch and the Barber might seem as if they come from different worlds – the late Romantic European versus the anguished American from the Second World War – but in fact they explore similar territory and they contain some of the most heart-rending music ever written for violin and orchestra…