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…
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…
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…
We either owe a lot to, or can blame a lot on, Giovanni Battista Viotti, depending on your perspective. Viotti was the first major virtuoso to adopt what we now think of as the modern bow and to adapt his style to accommodate it, moving away from baroque practice…