The 2 Naxos Audiobook collections of Plutarch’s lives (NA628912 for Greek; NA630212 for Roman) change Plutarch from dry-and-dusty-author-on-shelf to an exciting and vivid observer of history. In the Greek set, the first disc gives the history of Sparta - and you’ll find out that the Spartan life depicted in the recent movie “300″ wasn’t far off the mark. The section on Brutus and Caesar in the Roman Lives gives sense the Shakespeare’s oft quoted “et tu, Brute” when you find out that Brutus was supposed to have been Caesar’s son, and not just a close friend who had turned to the bad side. No wonder those words carry such shock in those few syllables. 

The structure of Plutarch are parallel lives - instead of just the life of Caesar you also get the parallel lives of his contemporaries and friends - and that helps you to place the historic figures in context and to understand living relationships.

These are the books that authors until modern times were familiar with - and you’ll be surprised at how many concepts you thought you knew the source of actually come from Plutarch in the 1st century. Hear about Pyrrhus (track 129 in Greek Lives) and the true irony of a Pyrrhic victory will surprise you. A great and surprisingly wonderful set of audiobooks!

We focus on the great composers and what they produced, but we have to remember that they worked within a very complex and competitive music society.

Mozart listened to Haydn, but he also listened to composers such as Dittersdorf; Bach walked miles to hear Buxtehude; the radical 20th century Viennese composers like Schoenberg and Webern had their roots in the late 19th century composers such as Zemlinsky.

In the 20th century, transnational listening made the world smaller and the music more complex: Takemitsu in Japan influenced composers in the United States, Penderecki in Poland influenced composers in Germany, Maxwell Davies draws his inspiration from sources as disparate as the middle ages and the moderns.