For once the CD album cover photo (by Magnus Arrevad) sums up its contents very accurately: Anna Zassimova in black dress storm-tossed in a bleak evening landscape. She carries a hat, the interior of which seems to contain a cyclone all its own…
Samantha Edge has, from her base in Oxford, been doing superb work recently in championing the music of Florence Price and here she extends her reach to a further group of black women composers of the last century…
The one thing I expected from this young team of soloist and conductor was a load of romantic passion but that doesn’t seem to be their thing at all…
Who would have thought it but ebay has come to the rescue of 17th century French harpsichord music! By sheer luck Christophe Rousset, one of the finest contemporary exponents of the genre, saw an advert for a manuscript volume and snapped it up in 2004…
This release on the Dutch group Matangi’s own label is all too depressingly timely. It comprises of quartets written in the Soviet Union by composers who were always under stress from the censorious regime…
I was surprised to find I had a tenuous personal connection to one of these pieces, in that I spent several childhood summers at Kilravock Castle, hard by Culloden, where some of the music of Thomas Erskine was discovered in manuscript…