Updates from the world's leading classical music label
The music of Alan Hovhaness, one of America’s most prolific composers, enchants with his signature synthesis of East and West. Influenced by his Armenian heritage and a fascination with nature and spirituality, Hovhaness sought to create music “for all people, music which is beautiful and healing.” Raymond Bisha introduces the latest Naxos album of his Read More …
Vasari Singers, one of the UK’s pre-eminent choirs, have titled their new album The Music Never Ends, referencing Michel Legrand and his celebrated song How do you Keep the Music Playing? And by the end of the album’s twenty-one tracks, you’ll wish it could be so. Raymond Bisha dips into the programme’s multi-faceted offerings, while Read More …
Composer/poet Oscar Lorenzo Fernández was born in Rio de Janeiro in 1897. He went on to become a leading figure in the development of Brazil’s classical music scene, as a composer, conductor, musicologist, and a professor of harmony in the National Music Institute in Rio de Janeiro, as well as other institutions. Along with Francisco Read More …
“I feel that you will achieve your greatest triumphs in [the symphonic] genre for I consider you to have precisely the properties that make a great symphonic composer. This is my firm belief.” Thus wrote Jan Sibelius in 1914 to his former student Leevi Madetoja. Raymond Bisha presents supporting evidence for that foresight in extracts Read More …
This podcast introduces a recently released, diverse programme of works for guitar trio bound by the common thread of music inspired by stories from literature, stage or screen. Performed by the Volterra Project Trio, the album’s seventeen tracks take us from the rhythmic exuberance and tragic beauty of Bernstein’s West Side Story to the evocative Read More …
In their latest #ClassicalDiscoveries episode, Jens and Joe explore Shostakovich’s symphonies – works of daring subversion masked as Soviet conformity. From the banned Fourth Symphony to the sardonic Ninth, they reveal how Shostakovich smuggled private rebellion into public music. Featuring Gürzenich-Orchester Köln’s powerhouse recordings, this is Soviet-era genius at its most explosive. “Quiet in person, Read More …
In his later years, Liszt increasingly pursued his favoured causes by using piano transcriptions of other composers’ works; and his own symphonic poems appeared as transcriptions from the 1850s. In 1865 Liszt famously complained to Hans von Bülow that “I have better things to do with my time than transcribe, paraphrase, and illustrate, and from Read More …
This podcast introduces two works by Karl Weigl (1881–1949), his Symphony No. 3 and the Symphonic Prelude to a Tragedy. Both were written at the beginning of the 1930s but then suffered from decades of neglect. Weigl drew on the sound world of late Romanticism, never abandoning this aesthetic in favour of more progressive contemporary Read More …
Conductor John Jeter has been central to the rediscovery and representation of Florence Price’s orchestral works. In this podcast, he discusses with Raymond Bisha his latest recording of her piano concerto and her two violin concertos, the only works she composed in the genre. The early First Violin Concerto, with shades of Tchaikovsky and undertones Read More …
In their latest episode of their #ClassicalDiscoveries podcast, Jens and Joe take a look at the scintillating music of Charles Koechlin, a fascinating composer and forgotten French symphonist who is impossible to pigeonhole. Neither an impressionist, nor simply a romantic, dramatic, lyric, abstract, or descriptive composer, he combined revolutionary, academic, and eclectic traits. One second, Read More …