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…
Adrian Chandler and La Serenissima are becoming experts at exploring the byways of the Italian baroque and this disc is a delightful example of their series…
“How great that you heard the Brahms at the FTH last week,” Sir Adrian Boult wrote to me on 12 December 1973. “It was such a great experience for all of us – I think he is the greatest of all pianists.” We were talking Claudio Arrau and the performance of Brahms Boult had conducted at the Free Trade Hall in Manchester…
Aria selections are not my favourite form of CD release but this one has much merit…
There is a commitment and intensity to the playing on this disc that is, in my view, a real step forward from the Albion Quartet’s previous series of Dvorak quartets released over the last couple of years…
Perhaps the last thing one expects from this extraordinary disc is to find that it starts with the chimes of Big Ben played on the sheng, in a piece derived from one of Telemann’s a century before that bell tolled…