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…
Il Pomo d’Oro – Mozart & Handel
The Mozart disc feels more like a concert than a CD programme but it is a very good one either way. …
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…
Forza Azzurri!
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…
Claudio Arrau – The Complete Warner Classics Recordings
“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…
Berlioz
This is definitely worth having for Ridout’s Harold and a performance that captures the symphonic grandeur of Berlioz’ Byronic adventure…
Rossini – Messa di Gloria
The hardest thing for people with preconceptions to accept about Rossini’s Mass is how jolly it is. But why not? There is no reason why glorification should be a solemn business…
A Tribute to Pauline Viardot
Aria selections are not my favourite form of CD release but this one has much merit…
Enescu
I first encountered Daria Parkhomenko at the 2018 Enescu piano competition, which she deservedly won, and was immediately impressed by her musicality as well as her solid technique…