Backtrack of the week. Beethoven.

Each Friday we select a track from a Naxos Music Group album released twenty years ago to provide the accompaniment for five minutes of your downtime. This week’s pick from the Dynamic label (CDS484) presents the finale from Beethoven’s String Quintet, Op. 4, published in 1796. It’s actually an arrangement for strings of an earlier Read More …

Backtrack of the week. Robert Schumann.

Each Friday we select a track from a Naxos Music Group album released twenty years ago to provide the accompaniment for five minutes of your downtime. This week’s pick from the Oehms Classics label (OC571) is Robert Schumann’s dramatic, declamatory setting of a poem by Heinrich Heine, Belsazar (Belshazzar). The song relates the biblical story Read More …

Classical Discoveries – FRANZ SCHREKER: an old-fashioned modernist

In this episode, Jens & Joe tackle Franz Schreker, the missing link between Schoenberg and Zemlinsky – and a composer of wildly Freudian fairy-tale operas that were all the rage between the wars. Deemed too modern in his time, and shocking in Vienna – but loved for both – Schreker was one of the most Read More …

Backtrack of the week. Jennifer Higdon.

Each Friday we select a track from a Naxos Music Group album released twenty years ago to provide the accompaniment for five minutes of your downtime. This week’s pick from the Naxos label (8.559298) is a performance of Jennifer Higdon’s Piano Trio, specifically the second of its two movements, Fiery Red. The American composer herself Read More …

Backtrack of the week. Arriaga.

Each Friday we select a track from a Naxos Music Group album released twenty years ago to provide the accompaniment for five minutes of your downtime. This week’s pick from the Naxos label (8.557628) is a string quartet by Juan Crisóstomo de Arriaga, a precociously talented composer as well as an excellent violinist, who was Read More …

Classical Discoveries: JOHANN STRAUSS II and his Contemporaries

If you wanted to dance with somebody, in 19th century Vienna, Johann Strauss was your best bet to provide the soundtrack. But he wasn’t alone in churning out the waltzes and polkas and operettas – continental “light music” – that the city consumed at such a rapid rate. In this episode Jens and Joe explore Read More …