Mozart – Piano Concertos
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…
Chopin – Piano Concertos 1 & 2
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…
Black Renaissance Woman
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…
Rhapsody – Rachmaninov & Gershwin
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…
Shostakovich – Symphony No. 7
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…
Madame Théobon’s Manuscript
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…
Mozart – Piano Sonatas
We are lucky to have an extraordinary array of mature interpretors of Mozart (we’ll each have our own list) around at the moment and Leonskaja is as accomplished as any. There are some recordings which one knows from the first few phrases are going to be just right…
Outcast – String Quartets
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…
Mahler – Symphony No. 4
There are performances where the conductor is barely discernable, where the music feels everyday and standard, its familiarity enough to make it presentable, the orchestra playing as they always do. Semyon Bychkov simply doesn’t allow that level of complacency, from orchestra or listener…
Handel – Opera Arias
I am a sucker for Handel’s operas. Of all the composers from the first half of the 18th century he managed to combine dramatic force with engaging and memorable melody best…
Mozart – Flute Quartets
There is something luxuriously domestic about this recording. The quartet feel appropriately as if they are in a not particularly grand 18th century drawing room on a pleasant New England Autumn evening…
Full of the Highland Humours
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…