Updates from the world's leading classical music label
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 (8.557611) features British composer Michael Tippett’s piano sonatas, specifically the neo-classical First Sonata which, in Tippett’s own words, is “a young man’s Read More …
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 Ondine label (ODE1041-2) is a movement from Cantus arcticus by Finnish composer Einojuhani Rautavaara (1928–2016). It’s a highly original orchestral work that incorporates recorded Read More …
Scottish father, Welsh mother, born in England, polyglot, highly intellectual, educator, composer, phenomenal pianist and a fantastically original musical mind. Introductions such as this don’t crop up too often, so take time out to listen to this podcast about Ronald Stevenson’s highly engaging piano music as performed and introduced by Peter Jablonski in conversation with Read More …
Florence Price’s abiding interest in the literary arts helps explain the extraordinarily large number of vocal compositions in her catalogue – well over one hundred – as well as the fact that she occasionally supplied texts of her own for these pieces. Conductor John Jeter discusses with Raymond Bisha his latest album of Price’s music Read More …
Choreographer Christopher Wheeldon’s ballet The Winter’s Tale (after Shakespeare) was first performed by Covent Garden’s Royal Ballet in 2014. In this podcast, the score’s creative unfolding is described by composer Joby Talbot, prior to a 2025 performance of the ballet in New York City. The presenter is Raymond Bisha. View album catalogues: OACD9054D OA1159SE Read More …
Collected for use in the chapel of Cambridge University’s Peterhouse college in the 1630s and hidden during the Civil War, the Peterhouse Partbooks represent one of the most important manuscript collections of sacred choral music from the period. In this podcast, Raymond Bisha presents performances of those works by the Peterhouse choir, affording a snapshot Read More …
Although the music of Polish composer Zygmunt Noskowski (1846–1909) is less well known than that of his teacher (Stanisław Moniuszko) and his students (Karol Szymanowski and Mieczysław Karłowicz), Noskowski was nonetheless the primary exponent of modern symphonic music in Poland for most of the 19th century; he also introduced the idea of the symphonic poem Read More …
In this podcast, Raymond Bisha unearths captivating performances of horn concertos by Rosetti, Vivaldi and Telemann. Did the latter have a few Steins of Alsterwasser to hand when depicting concertising frogs and crows? Listen on… This podcast is also available on YouTube. View album catalogue Catalogue No.: VOX-NX-2689 LISTEN TO THE PODCAST
Valentin Silvestrov was forced to leave his native Ukraine after the Russian invasion of 2022. His music has a prescient quality that unerringly seems to express the fate of his homeland. Raymond Bisha introduces the world premiere recordings of his intimate Violin Concerto and the heartfelt, single-span Eighth Symphony. Notable for their economy of expression Read More …
You may not have heard of him, but if you have had any exposure to early music, chances are you have heard him: In this first installment, Werner Ehrhardt, the founder and leader of the early music ensembles Concerto Köln and L’arte del mondo, sits down with Jens and Joe for a chat about his Read More …