Manchester Camerata is fifty years old this year and it has been a distinguished half century. Before it was started as a project by Ralph Gonley under the auspices of BBC Radio Manchester, the city had two symphony orchestras but no professional chamber orchestra of any great standing…
The main appeal of these chamber versions of Chopin’s concertos, for piano and string quintet (including double bass) is that it makes them available to venues that cannot fit or afford a full orchestra…
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…
It is salutary to listen now to this symphony, written at the height of WW II as the appalling toll of the Nazi siege of Leningrad became clear; salutary because the recording appears as Stalin’s successor psychopath, Putin, is unleashing similar barbaric horrors on the cities of Ukraine…
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…