Sergio Bosi‘s recording of works for solo clarinet (Naxos 8.573090) written by 20th-century Italian composers includes music by Nino Rota, who is better known for his music for stage and screen than small-scale chamber works. Rota’s film scores (he wrote around 150) include many collaborations with the director Franco Zeffirelli; also with Francis Ford Coppola for his trilogy The Godfather, Parts I and II. Rota’s contribution to Bosi’s disc is a world première recording of his Lo Spiritismo nella vecchia casa.

The Franco-Swiss pianist Alfred Cortot was one of the most distinguished soloists of his era who made some of the first electrical recordings produced by Victor Records in 1925. You can hear these pioneering takes of works by Chopin and Liszt, plus others, on Naxos Historical 8.111261. This month’s Grand Piano release, however, documents Cortot the arranger (Grand Piano GP641) with a programme that includes music by J. S. Bach (Toccata and Fugue in D minor), Fauré (Dolly Suite) and Franck‘s Violin Sonata. Pianists familiar with playing the accompaniment for the latter will be intrigued to hear how the three challenging staves get rolled into two.

Another of the greatest virtuosos of his time was the Polish-American pianist Leopold Godowsky (1870-1938). While his technically challenging show-pieces are well-known to concert pianists, and his transcriptions are in the current repertoires of many players, this new disc of music for violin (Naxos 8.573058) will be a fresh discovery for many. Although virtually unknown today, the works were performed by some of the elite violinists of Godowsky’s time, including Jascha Heifetz; this particular recording closely follows Fritz Kreisler‘s fingering and bowing for the 12 Impressions.

Rossini‘s fame as an opera composer dominated the scene at the start of the nineteenth century; his 39 stage works ranged from Italian comedies to more epic works for the world of French grand opera. They also dominate the memory when trying to recall what else contributed to his overall output. He famously retired when he was only 37, indulging himself in his passion for food and cooking which has been handed down to today in menu appearances such as Tournedos Rossini. He also amused himself in the last decade of his life by writing the Péchés de vieillesse (Sins of Old Age) that can be heard on this month’s Volume 5 of his complete piano music (Naxos 8.573050). The 24 miniatures include allusions to Bach, Chopin, opera and the music-hall; one was even written overnight to help a friend out of a financial difficulty.

Although he doesn’t figure among this month’s new releases, Arnold Schoenberg similarly wore a completely different hat before formulating his twelve-tone system of composition and alienating many who were not ready for his revolution in sound. Anyone unfamiliar with the works from his pre-dodecaphonic days will enjoy exploring this other side of the coin.

His Verklärte Nacht (Transfigured Night) was originally written for string sextet but is often played in a version for string orchestra, as on the cited disc (Naxos 8.554371). Dating from 1899, the music never quite uproots from the D minor tonality in which it starts, but the extreme, post-Wagnerian chromaticism probably upset its first audiences as much as its programmatic subject matter: a woman confesses to her new lover that she is carrying another man’s child; he both accepts and forgives the situation. The music hits a rare intensity of emotion.

The following year, the leopard began to change its spots when Schoenberg veered towards his new and controversial process of composition, but not before he had embarked on his mammoth, two-hour cantata Gurre-Lieder (Naxos 8.557518-19), a work he was to abandon for seven years before its completion date in 1913; during that intervening period, he wrote his first atonal compositions. Gurre-Lieder is scored for speaker, five solo singers, three 4-part male choruses, an 8-part mixed chorus and an orchestra that requires two dozen each of woodwind and brass, with a large percussion section plus strings to match. If you do not know the work, you should set aside an evening to be enlightened.

After that massive aural experience, you’ll probably need a delicate refresher, so try an unusual tot of Mozart in his Adagio for Glass Harmonica, K. 356 (Naxos 8.555295). If you’re interested in learning more about the history of this once very popular instrument, you’d better set another evening aside.

Mendelssohn F(elix) might appear on safer ground, but not if his sister Mendelssohn F(anny) is around; that is, before she changed her surname to Mendelssohn Bartholdy or, after marriage, to Hensel. If you’re new to her music, you can sample her compositional style in a new release this month of her songs, containing settings of both German and English texts (Naxos 8.572781).

Schumann, Robert, is more easily differentiated from his wife Schumann, Clara, while Schuman, William, falls short of an ‘n’ to escape confusion. If Schuman isn’t yet in your lexicon, you can enjoy a representative selection of the 20th-century American composer’s orchestral writing on Naxos 8.559254.

For your convenience, Johann Strauss I and Johann Strauss II can be heard in their entirety and by their separate identities on 79 discs in the Marco Polo catalogue, while Stravinsky father (Igor) and his pianist son (Soulima) can be heard as a pair on Naxos Classical Archives 9.80666.

Josef and Anton Reicha, the 18^th/19th-century cellist uncle and composer nephew; siblings Henry and Daniel Purcell; Leopold, Wolfgang Amadeus and Xaver, three generations of Mozarts – the list goes on.

One of the surnames that frequently crops up, and possibly confuses, is common to a trio of musicians called Rubinstein – Anton, Nikolai and Arthur. Let’s try and unravel their identities here for anyone in need of clarification.

Anton (1829-1894) and Nikolai (1835-1881) were brothers, born in Russia and pivotal figures with regard to the establishment of the country’s music conservatoires, an area in which it was underdeveloped in comparison with its European counterparts; in fact, musicians had little social status compared with those involved with the visual arts. They lived at a time when the development of Russian nationalism in music was being knocked into shape by the Russian Five (Balakirev, Borodin, Mussorgsky, Rimsky-Korsakov and Cui). Incredibly, they were all largely self-taught and so their music characteristically reflected a passionate commitment to their cause, rather than the fruits of regulated, academic studies.

Anton Rubinstein founded the St Petersburg Conservatory in 1862 and was at musical loggerheads with this set of five maverick composers who claimed to be the real promoters of a Russian spirit in the evolving musical scene. This differential is apparent not only in the music, but also often in the titles of their pieces:

Anton Rubinstein: Symphony No. 6 (Marco Polo 8.220489)
Mili Balakirev: Russia (Naxos 8.550793)
Alexander Borodin: In the Steppes of Central Asia (Naxos 8.557456)
Modest Mussorgsky: Boris Godunov (Naxos Historical 8.110242-44)
Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov: Scheherazade (Naxos 8.572693)
César Cui: The Buccaneer (Marco Polo 8.223400)

Nikolai, Anton’s younger brother, was co-founder and director of the Moscow Conservatory in 1866, where Tchaikovsky was engaged to teach harmony. Between them, the two brothers and their cerebral institutions were a formidable challenge for the more impulsive style of the Russian Five. To the dismay of the latter, Rimsky-Korsakov became a turncoat when he accepted a professorship of composition post at the St Petersburg Conservatory, despite his lack of formal training.

Although Anton was noted both as a composer, conductor and pianist, brother Nikolai was recognised more singularly for his piano skills, which brings us to the third Rubinstein – the legendary Polish pianist, Arthur Rubinstein (1887-1982).

The lack of indulgent excesses in his playing made him perfect as an interpreter of Chopin, as can be heard on a number of discs from the Naxos Classical Archives, including 9.80969-70 for the mazurkas, and 9.80909-10 for the nocturnes and scherzos. He toured extensively, both around Europe and America, his way paved by acclaimed recordings such as that of the Tchaikovsky First Piano Concerto (Naxos Historical 8.111271). He became an American citizen in 1946; he died at the age of 95, having given his last recital at London’s Wigmore Hall in 1976, aged eighty-seven.

And the giant of the piano lives on still, having allowed the Tel-Aviv Arthur Rubinstein International Piano Master Competition to be named in his honour. The triennial event will be held next in 2014. At the inaugural competition held in 1974, Rubinstein headed an international jury who awarded the first prize to a certain Emanuel Ax. Their judgement has indeed been vindicated.

Looking back over Colin Davis’ career saw a change in his directing style that developed from abrasive firebrand to something much more statesmanlike. The profession itself has similarly seen radical changes over the centuries, as conductors turned from being mere timekeepers to interpretative gurus.

The baton gradually became one of the trappings of office, although many of today’s conductors, such as Pierre Boulez (aged 88), prefer to dispense with it altogether. In contrast, Sir Adrian Boult‘s extension of the arm had an unusually long reach that mirrored his life (he died aged 93).

Back in 1687, the French-naturalised favourite of King Louis XIV’s musical patronage was the Italian-born Jean-Baptiste Lully. He was keeping time for a performance of his Te Deum (Naxos 8.554397) by moving a pointed staff up and down in the air when he misjudged, impaled his foot and suffered the inevitable demise once gangrene had set in. Rolled up pieces of paper were an alternative and less dangerous means of communication.

In instrumental ensembles, it fell to the concertmaster to indicate the beat with his bow; or the harpsichordist would take the role if that instrument was being used. Soloists in classical concertos would serve the dual role of performer-director, a practice that is often revived for modern-day performances and requires some nifty exchanges between waving the hands in the air and over the keys.

Beethoven seems to have abandoned the practice around the time of his Third Piano Concerto, while symphonic pieces adopted a stand-alone director in the early part of the 19th century. Thereafter, conductors gradually began to attract reputations for their skills in both direction and interpretation; these included the composers Berlioz and Wagner. From the following generation, a less happy reputation concerns Mahler‘s autocratic direction of his orchestral musicians at the Vienna Court Opera that developed into the sourest of relationships.
Thereafter, the advent of the recording industry established a more tangible pantheon of conductor giants, starting with Arthur Nikisch (1855-1922), with whom Brahms had been most impressed. Arturo Toscanini (1867-1957) and Wilhelm Furtwängler (1886-1954) followed him into the recording hall of fame, establishing international reputations with their respective strengths. The Naxos Music Library enables us to compare and contrast all these men’s approaches to Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony and his Egmont overture: Nikisch (SYMP1087-88) exhibiting a flexibility not found in the insistent recording by Toscanini (IDIS297-98) and a less urgent Furtwängler (Naxos 8.111003).

The music world had to wait a long time before women conductors were accepted into the inner sanctum. Today, however, their presence is well established and admired in many countries, not least the United States. JoAnn Falletta and Marin Alsop are two such pioneers who have recorded extensively for the Naxos label.

This year, Alsop received the accolade of being invited to direct the BBC’s legendary Last Night of the Proms on September 7, which will include three pieces by fellow American Leonard Bernstein. As a foretaste of Alsop’s facility with his music, you can try out her recording of his Mass (Naxos 8.559622-23). Falletta, too, has recorded a number of discs in the American Classics Series, including one of music by George Gershwin (Naxos American Classics 8.559705). Hearing it in tandem with Toscanini’s recordings of Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue and An American in Paris (Documents 290850) makes one rue having had to wait for so long for women to have their say on the rostrum.

As regards the daily paths trodden by conductors, detailing both the ups and downs of life outside the immediate spotlight, another American Naxos artist, Leonard Slatkin, has given a fascinating account of his own musical journey in Conducting Business. Published by Amadeus Press and subtitled Unveiling the Mystery Behind the Maestro, the book takes the wraps off both his own life and the music industry, as well as providing pointers for anyone aspiring to follow in his footsteps.

Let’s give the final word today, however, to the British conductor Sir Thomas Beecham, remembered by many as much for his wicked aphorisms as for his many recordings, from the self-mocking:

“The English may not like music, but they absolutely love the noise it makes.”;

to the self-deprecating:

“There are two golden rules for an orchestra: start together and finish together. The public doesn’t give a damn what goes on in between.”;

to the self-evident:

“Great music is that which penetrates the ear with facility and leaves the memory with difficulty. Magical music never leaves the memory.”

In the world of music, associations with the night carry a further range of emotional attachments, as can be heard on one of this month’s new releases from Vox Humana, a new chamber choir based in Dallas, Texas (Naxos 8.572511). With the cover title Into the Night, the individual tracks variously explore night as a representation of mortality and depression, of a time for religious reassurance and of incomparable peace, and of an optimistic future once the nightly shades have lifted.

In addition to the machinations of bogeymen, it’s also a time for lovers and lullabies, as encapsulated in the two Nachtmusik (Night Music) movements in Mahler‘s Seventh Symphony (Naxos 8.550531). Bartók also had the tag of ‘night music’ applied to his music by others, a practice he was happy to tolerate. In comparing two movements from his Piano Concerto No 1 (Naxos 8.550771, track 2) and Piano Concerto No 3 (ibid, track 8), you can decide which is the one describing things that go bump in the night, and which the one you could use to put your baby to sleep. The elegiac central movement of his Concerto for Orchestra (Naxos 8.572486) might have you swinging between the two possibilities.

The French and English term for night music, nocturne, is most closely associated with Chopin, who wrote 21 short pieces for piano under the generic title (Naxos 8.554531 and 8.554532); their cantabile melodies are supported by flowing accompaniments in a relaxed poetic vision of a nocturnal atmosphere. So popular are they nowadays that many suppose he invented the form, but Chopin took his lead from the Irish composer, John Field (1782-1837), who wrote 18 pieces with the title between 1814 and 1835 (Naxos 8.550761 and 8.550762).

Field’s effect on the world of music didn’t stop there. He was as much a performer as composer, travelling to London, Paris, Vienna and St Petersburg where his keyboard skills were much admired. He decided to settle in Russia in 1803 and his influence as a teacher contributed to the development of the Russian school of piano playing. His Air russe varié and Kamarinskaya give a hint of the folkloric works that were soon to be kindled by the father of Russian nationalism in music, Mikail Glinka (whom Field taught) and developed by the Russian Five later in the century; and maybe beyond, in light of the fact that Rachmaninov‘s grandfather also took lessons from Field. Listen to Rachmaninov’s Three Nocturnes (Naxos 8.553004) and make the link for yourself.

Field’s European influence was felt by many besides Chopin. Despite their representing the antithesis of the emerging virtuoso flamboyance that was becoming all the rage, Liszt published an edition of Field’s nocturnes, prefacing it with a gushing eulogy. Friedrich Wieck, Clara Schumann‘s father, was also one of the many devotees of Field’s refined style of playing that attracted a significant following in Europe and which Wieck passed on to his daughter.

The Irishman’s influence continues to be felt in the works that adopt the mantle of the nocturne. Examples include Dave Brubeck‘s Nocturnes for piano solo (Naxos 8.559301), written in a relaxed jazz style that are within the grasp of younger players, and Britten‘s Nocturne (Naxos 8.557199 ) featuring a tenor solo, strings and seven solo instruments to explore the texts dealing with themes of night, sleep and dreams.

Regional flavours predominate in the Spanish composer Lorenzo Palomo‘s Andalusian Nocturnes for solo guitar and orchestra (Naxos Spanish Classics 8.557135) while Kurt Weill‘s Lady in the Dark – Symphonic Nocturne (Naxos 8.557481), based on the music from the 1940 Broadway musical strays from the veiled emotions envisaged by John Field a century beforehand. By the same token, the classical-period nocturnes that pre-date Field’s vision of the genre smack more of aristocratic evening entertainment than an emotional response to the time of day. Mozart‘s Serenata Notturna (Naxos 8.557023), for example, is best heard with a glass of champagne in hand rather than your head on a pillow.

The turning of the seasons has given many composers a handy framework for new compositions. Vivaldi’s set of four violin concertos needs no introduction (Naxos 8.550056). They set the trend for others to follow: the formula can be found, for example, in Glazunov’s ballet music (Marco Polo 8.223136), Tchaikovsky’s suite for piano (Naxos 8.550233), Haydn’s oratorio (Naxos 8.557600-01), Spohr’s symphonies (Marco Polo 8.223454) and even The Four Seasons of Buenos Aires (Naxos 8.572271), in which Piazzolla makes a number of cheeky references to Vivaldi’s originals in his vivid set of tango movements.

Spring is perhaps the season that carries the most excitement, with its rising sap and air of rejuvenation. Shakespeare caught the feeling in ‘When daffodils begin to peer’ from The Winter’s Tale. Here’s the opening stanza:

When daffodils begin to peer,
With hey! The doxy over the dale,
Why, then comes in the sweet o’ the year;
For the red blood reigns in the winter’s pale.

The Renaissance composer Anthony Holborne, a contemporary of Shakespeare, underlined the mood of this moment (Naxos 8.570708) in his setting of the words; music, of course, was an important element in the Bard’s works, given the absence of sets and lighting.

Daffodils have come to symbolise the fleeting freshness of spring. The English composer Arnold Bax used the image when he was infatuated with an aspiring pianist destined to become one of the finest keyboard players of her generation. Thirteen years his younger, Harriet Cohen was only nineteen when Bax dedicated a short piano piece to her. The maiden with the daffodil (Naxos 8.557769) is marked ‘Fresh and innocent”, probably an understatement of the passionate and convoluted affair he was to continue with her for over forty years.

May Day, the first day of the month, carries a number of associations – from national holidays to political protests. Those who studied at Oxford University, however, will remember it as the day when they rose (unusually) at dawn to go and hear the choir of Magdalen College continuing the time-honoured tradition of singing from the top of the college’s Great Tower to welcome the new season, before joining in (very unusually) with other traditional practices such as Morris dancing. That particular country jig also makes an appearance in the Courtly Dances from Britten’s opera Gloriana (Naxos 8.557196 track 6), while the tradition of choosing a May Queen is central to Britten’s earlier comic opera, Albert Herring (Naxos 8.660107-08). Maypole dancing can be found all over Western Europe, as reflected in Maypole Dance, one of Bartók’s 44 Duos for Violin (Naxos 8.550868) or Jacob Weinberg’s Klezmer-style The Maypole (Naxos 8.559403).

Not all associations with the month smack of such bucolic bliss, however. In Germany, witches are said to meet with the Devil on May 1, Walpurgisnacht, at the Brocken Peak. Joachim Raff used this bit of folklore as the basis of the second movement of his Eighth Symphony that is subtitled ‘The Sounds of Spring’ (Marco Polo 8.223362).

There are plentiful examples of such background music suitable for this special time of year; if you get through all the above and still want to feel under the seasonal weather, there’s always Bright Sheng’s Spring Dreams (Naxos 8.570601), Beethoven’s Spring Sonata for violin and piano (Naxos 8.550283) and Delius’ On hearing the first cuckoo in Spring (Naxos 8.557143). Not to mention, in the centenary year of its first performance, Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring (Naxos 8.557508).

A number of people on the fringes of the art, however, have made their name out of music’s rib-tickling potential, whether intentional or not. It was the sheer personality of Florence Foster Jenkins, certainly not her musical ability, that went on to inspire four plays about her life. Her singing voice had such little feeling for timing, intonation or the pronunciation of foreign languages that her recitals packed in disbelieving audiences and challenged critics to only allude to the truth, rather than get out the machete. It’s unclear whether she knew the full extent of her limitations or the honest opinion of her audiences, but her thick-skinned survival was certainly made easier with put-downs like: “People may say I can’t sing, but no-one can ever say I didn’t sing.” Murder on the High Cs (Naxos Nostalgia 8.120711) will tell you all you need to know about the Dire Diva, but make sure you are sitting down first.

Born in London in 1911, Anna Russell was a voice student at the capital’s Royal Academy of Music, but she went on to find fame more as a comedienne after moving to her mother’s native Canada in 1939; the therapeutic benefits of laughter are borne out by the fact that she lived until the grand old age of 94, dying in Australia in 2006. From her base in North America she went on to make her mark in burlesque, becoming hugely successful by trading off her deadpan humour, as can be heard in her famous recording of How to write your own Gilbert and Sullivan opera. But she is probably best remembered for her revisionary account of Wagner’s magnum opus in The Ring of the Nibelung (An Analysis), “the only opera on earth that comes in a giant economy package,” as Russell introduced it to her audience. The Rhinemaidens are dubbed “a sort of aquatic Andrews Sisters,” Wotan chief of the Gods is “a totally crashing bore”, and Valhalla “a sort of celestial White House.” With alternating subterranean, earthly and heavenly scenarios in the plot, it earns Russell’s tag as “a vertical opera.” YouTube will oblige with the rest of her illustrated lecture.

Russell’s humour, however, only serves to sharpen the incomprehensibility of The Ring to many music lovers who wobble over the work’s huge story, contained in four operas that last a total of around 15 hours, which Wagner intended to be performed over three days. Such people would love to get more familiar with the iconic work, but baulk at the amount of narrative and musical undergrowth that stands in the way. Now, almost two hundred years to the day since Wagner was born, help is at hand. Naxos has developed an App (Wagner’s Ring Cycle) that will guide you through the threads of the storyline and the dozens of musical clues (leitmotifs) that continuously aid the listener in recognising who’s who, what’s what and where’s where.

The App contains a wealth of background information to the creation of The Ring, and has already attracted positive critical reaction, such as this comment from Charlotte Gardner in Sinfini Music:

“If you’re either looking to investigate this cornerstone of the operatic repertoire for the first time, or to increase an existing musical and historical understanding of it, then you’d be hard pushed to find a better way.”

As a closing thought, I wonder how many fans of The Ring are familiar with some other, less well-known Wagner operas. Do the following ring a bell?

Der Bärenhäuter (The Man in a Bear’s Skin, Marco Polo 8.223713-14)
Banadietrich (Marco Polo 8.223895-96)
Schwarzschwanenreich (The Kingdom of the Black Swan, Marco Polo 8.223777-78)
Bruder Lustig (Brother Lustig, Marco Polo 8.225245-47)

The con is that they were written by Siegfried Wagner, Richard’s son, composer, conductor and director of the Bayreuth Festival from 1908 until 1930, the year he died. While the subject matter continues his father’s exploration of the mysterious mediaeval world of German legend, Siegfried’s style is more in the tradition of his teacher, Engelbert Humperdinck. Let’s allow him the final word for today:

“I was given the name Siegfried by my parents, but I have riven in two no anvil, slain no dragon and stridden through no sea of flames. In spite of this, however, I hope that I am not completely unworthy of this name, since fear is not my failing.”

Vasily Petrenko’s Award-winning survey of the Shostakovich symphonies with the RLPO, now reaches the eighth instalment with the release of the epic ‘Leningrad’ Symphony.

Here he talks to Edward Seckerson about the work.

Album details…
Catalogue No.: 8.573057

The work was an inspiration to those who were trapped in the appalling conditions of the German siege against Leningrad that ran from 1941 to 1944. That spirit of defiance has now made the unlikely journey through time and across musical genres to this year’s Ivor Novello Awards, Britain’s annual event that recognises and rewards excellence in song-writing and composition. A sample of the fourth movement of Shostakovich’s Leningrad symphony underpins Ill Manors, which has been nominated for Best Contemporary Song. The hit was recorded by London rapper and songwriter, Ben Drew, aka Plan B, who found his equivalent inspiration for the song in the shocking social unrest that played out in the 2011 London riots. Shostakovich’s name is up there in the credits of contributing artists awaiting the announcement of the winners on May 16.

Fortunately, such cross-fertilisation between classical and popular music hasn’t always been born of strife. A bit of track-hopping reveals how some favourite classics have readily translated into easy listening and a wider audience.

Kismet, the 1953 Broadway production that won the Tony Award for Best Musical, mixes original numbers with adaptations of music by Borodin. Strangers in Paradise (Naxos 8.120847, track 8) has its roots in his Polovtsian Dances (Naxos 8.550051). Grieg’s music was similarly borrowed for the operetta Song of Norway: you can judge for yourself how well Freddy and his Fiddle (Naxos Nostalgia 8.120879, track 3) stands up against its original incarnation as the Norwegian Dance No. 2 (Naxos 8.556658).

Chopin’s Polonaise in A flat (Naxos 8.550360 track 6) morphed into Till the End of Time, a popular song from 1945 (CCLCDG1080, track 16); the following year, the Ronde des Princesses from Stravinsky’s ballet The Firebird (Naxos 8.550263) found its way into many people’s hearts and homes through Lauritz Melchior’s recording of Summer Moon (Naxos Historical 8.111239, track 17).

Returning to Vasily Petrenko, his success to date with the Shostakovich symphony cycle is in no doubt; there has been a plethora of positive critical comment, of which this reaction to Volume 5′s First and Third Symphonies from Steve Schwartz of ClassicalCDreview.com is typical:

“Gripping. Oh, dear Lord! These two accounts of early Shostakovich not only succeed in their own right, they stand among the very best ever.”

The accolades say as much about Petrenko’s bond with the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic as his understanding of the composer. He was appointed chief conductor in 2009, and one of his recent initiatives for audience-building has been to hold coffee concerts, held at noon and performed informally. It’s reported that a measure of their success has been that the Norwegian consul, the Archbishop of Liverpool and the city’s national treasure of a comedian, Ken Dodd, were all spotted in the audience at one performance. The idea, however, is not as modern as might seem.

When J. S. Bach was working in Leipzig between 1723 and his death in 1750, he diluted the focus on his duties at the choir school serving the St Thomas Church after ructions with the principal, instead putting more energy into the Friday evening secular music occasions held at Gottfried Zimmerman’s Coffee House. The conviviality of the venue appealed to performers and audience alike, and it is assumed that this is where Bach’s Coffee Cantata (Naxos 8.550641) was first performed. Written in the mid-1730s, it’s scored for soprano, tenor and bass, with flute, strings and basso continuo. The story-line involves a father trying to wean his daughter off her dependency on the black stuff, but ends with the trio telling us that coffee-drinking is indeed an addictive habit!

And so it seems to have continued, with the steamy liquid continuing to hook both consumers and composers. Pour yourself a cup, sit back and enjoy listening to some pieces that have taken inspiration from the brew:

Irving Berlin’s Let’s have another cup of coffee (Naxos Nostalgia 8.120842, track 10)

Ella Fitzgerald’s performance of Sonny Burke’s Black Coffee (Naxos Jazz Legends 8.120774, track 3)

Jazz violinist Stephane Grappelli’s take on Buddy G. de Silva’s You’re the cream in my coffee (Naxos Jazz Legends 8.120570, track 19)

and Alan Bullard’s Coffee and croissants (Naxos 8.572503, track 22) for recorder and strings, a chic waltz that will have you on the banks of the River Seine in a trice.

Rosemary Brown was an English medium and near-novice musician who famously claimed to have communicated with the spirits of composers such as Liszt, Brahms and Chopin in the 1960s. She was suspected by some of pilfering and recycling their extant ideas when she produced a stream of compositions purportedly dictated to her from the other side. Remarkably, the sceptics never outshouted those who were happy to suspend disbelief and saw her more as a remarkable conduit than a poacher.

By the turn of the century it was a computer that was worming its way into the minds of the great masters to extract their ideas. EMI (Experiments in Musical Intelligence) is the musical software invented by the multi-talented American David Cope that has produced stylistic facsimiles of great composers, from Bach to Mahler, although the difference between computed and composed remains discernible – for now.

Copyright laws didn’t kick in until around 500 years after the 13th-century Latin hymn for the dead, Dies Irae, was penned, but whoever the composer of the plainsong tune was, he probably wishes he could have notched up an indulgence for every occasion it’s been performed subsequently.

While Berlioz used it in the demonic finale of his Symphonie Fantastique (Naxos 8.572886), written in 1830, the tune plays its calling card right from the start of Liszt’s Totentanz, originally written for piano and orchestra in 1849 (Naxos 8.570517) and subsequently re-worked for piano solo (Naxos 8.572491). The plainchant is still in demand today, as can be heard in the 5th movement of Michael Daugherty’s Metropolis Symphony (Naxos 8.559635), written in 1993.

Rachmaninov adopted the tune in a number of works, including his Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini (Naxos 8.554477). The Paganini tune on which this ever popular work is built has in turn been borrowed by others, notably by Brahms in his two books of fiendishly difficult piano variations on the theme (Naxos 8.550350), and those for piano duet by Witold Lutosławski (8.553423).

God Save the Queen, the British national anthem that dates back to c.1745, was brazenly co-opted by other countries as their own national song, including Russia, Prussia, Switzerland and even the United States, before The Star-Spangled Banner became the official anthem in 1931; hence the reason why Ives’ Variations on America (Naxos 8.570559) sounds as though it was born on the wrong side of the Atlantic.

Staying on the right side of decency, however, is self-plagiarism, which has been practised by some of the finest composers to produce moments (or movements) that can disorientate the listener. JS Bach excised the opening movement of one of his secular cantatas, Tönet, ihr Pauken! Erschallet, Trompeten! BWV 214 and transformed it note-for-note into Jauchzet, frohlocket, auf, preiset die Tage!, the opening movement of his Christmas Oratorio (Naxos 8.550428-30).

Mozart similarly recycled the Kyrie and Gloria from his Mass in C minor (Naxos 8.554421) to expedite the completion of Davide penitente (Naxos 8.570231), a commission he received from the Viennese Society of Musicians in 1785.

Over in London, Handel had wowed London audiences with the first entrance of the sorceress Armida in his opera Rinaldo in 1711 – the sound effects, sense of stagecraft and musical impact can be experienced on Naxos 8.660165-67, track 10. Armida then continues with the aria Molto voglio, molto spero. The piece had travelled well, having first been tried out by the title character in his opera Agrippina in Venice two years earlier.

A couple of centuries later, Mahler scattered a sense of déjà vu more liberally throughout his first four symphonies, making extensive use of themes from his song-cycle Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen (Naxos Historical 8.111300) and his anthology of folk song settings in Des Knaben Wunderhorn: the song Das himmlische Leben permeates his Fourth Symphony, most noticeably in the last movement (Naxos 8.550527).

One of our new releases this month continues to remind us how Rachmaninov befriended that previously mentioned ancient melody, Dies Irae, right up to his later works. Keep your ears on alert for it while enjoying the performances of his Third Symphony and the Symphonic Dances (Naxos 8.573051) by Leonard Slatkin and the Detroit Symphony Orchestra.

Album Details…
Catalogue No.: Naxos 8.573051

This was a man who straddled generations and geographies: born in Russia in 1873; uprooted by the Russian Revolution in 1917; landed in the United States a year later.

Leonard Slatkin, currently conductor of the Detroit Symphony Orchestra, was born only ten months after Rachmaninov died, and his latest release continues the spirit of the great Russian master in two fine performances of works from his later years: the Third Symphony and the Symphonic Dances (Naxos 8.573051).

Rachmaninov considered his Third Symphony one of his finest works, but the First Symphony (Naxos 8.550806), writtensome forty years earlier in 1896, received such bad critical reaction that it sent him into a bout of depression from which he emerged only with some considerable difficulty. The critics at that time, however, made little comment about the poor quality of the performance. It is very strongly suspected that the conductor on that occasion, the composer Alexander Glazunov, was inebriated, which helped put the noose around both the première and Rachmaninov’s self-confidence. Glazunov was writing his own Sixth Symphony (Naxos 8.554293) at the same time and with the same hands as wielded the baton on that unfortunate occasion. Comparing the two works in that context is an interesting exercise.

Rachmaninov had already been knocked sideways in 1893 by the sudden death of Tchaikovsky, whom he knew personally; the more positive outcome on that occasion, however, was that his grief found heart-on-sleeve expression in the substantial Trio élégiaque No. 2 (Naxos 8.557423), headed “To the memory of a great artist,” that brims with challenging piano writing and radiant melodies.

When Rachmaninov eventually emerged from his depression following the initial failure of his First Symphony, it was the success of his Piano Concerto No. 2 that restored him. At any first rehearsal of the work, the orchestra’s front desk of second violins will be on the look-out for how the soloist will negotiate the work’s opening eight chords that have a wide spread of notes for the left hand. They require the player to stretch the interval of a tenth, which is not feasible for players with smaller hands; they have to split off the lowest note first to compensate. Rachmaninov had no such problem. He was a large man (with “a six-and-a-half foot scowl” as Stravinsky remarked) and had suitably large hands to control the notes.

So, it’s interesting – and maybe surprising – to listen to several versions of those opening bars and hear how the pianists take different approaches: playing the chords as a block; splitting off the lowest note; and applying a mixture of the two.

• Artur Rubinstein (Naxos Historical 8.111289)
• Jenő Jandó (Naxos 8.550117)
• William Kapell (Naxos Historical 8.110692)
• Sergei Rachmaninov (Naxos Historical 8.110601)

Like many composers of note, Rachmaninov wore the three hats of composer, conductor and performer throughout his life. During his years in America, however, which incorporated spells in Europe, his lifestyle depended more on performance than composition to pay the bills. Fortunately, we are able to re-live those times through a number of studio recordings that he made.

You can appreciate Rachmaninov’s virtuoso piano technique and distinctive tone both on the disc of his own works (Naxos Historical 8.111397) and another featuring music by Chopin, Schumann and Liszt (Naxos Historical 8.112020). He can also be heard as the soloist in his four piano concertos (Naxos Historical 8.110601 and 8.110602) and in the rôle of accompanist in violin sonatas performed by Fritz Kreisler (Naxos Historical 8.110968).

There’s also the opportunity to hear him conducting his Third Symphony (Naxos Historical 8.111357) before slipping into a comparison with our new release of the same work in Leonard Slatkin’s hands. Rachmaninov himself would surely have appreciated these latest developments in technology, technique and talent. Today’s critics did, hailing Slatkin’s first disc in the series that featured the Second Symphony performed by the Detroit Symphony:

“…here is a performance warmed by musicians who clearly love this symphony … hearing his performance one is convinced that his musicians are truly inside the music emotionally.” (BBC Music Magazine)

As a quick coda, let’s take a glimpse back to one of the first works that anointed Rachmaninov’s future as a composer and already bears the characteristic melancholy that was to colour much of his future output: the Prelude in C sharp minor, Op. 3, No. 2 (Naxos Historical 8.111397, track 3). Written when he was only 19 years old, this recording demonstrates his goal of perfection in the recording studio – it was the 23rd take of the piece!

The subject arose following the release this month of our world première recordings of works by GRAMMY^® Award-winning composer Michael Daugherty (Naxos 8.559749). Opening the disc is Mount Rushmore, a dramatic oratorio inspired by the monumental sculpture of four American presidents carved into the Black Hills of South Dakota: George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Theodore Roosevelt and Abraham Lincoln. Daugherty’s irresistible slabs of sound that permeate the work tally with the bold stone carvings they represent.

The work is followed on the disc by Radio City, continuing the physical thread by taking the noted entertainment complex located in the Rockefeller Centre in New York City as its title. It was from there that the legendary conductor Arturo Toscanini made live broadcasts with the NBC Symphony Orchestra from 1937 to 1954, an episode in American cultural history which Daugherty’s symphonic fantasy captures.

“In the final movement of Radio City, I have composed music that captures Toscanini’s tempestuous temperament, his musical intensity, and the frenzied tempos of his performances,” Daugherty explains. The performance by the Pacific Symphony under Carl St Clair certainly achieves all of this and, if you want a bit of the ‘real thing’, check out Toscanini’s Radio City broadcast of Verdi’s Otello (Naxos Historical 8.111320-21), performed by the NBC Symphony Orchestra and Chorus. It’s a particularly compelling experience, given that Toscanini himself played cello at the opera’s first performance at La Scala, Milan in 1887.

Ravel‘s Tombeau de Couperin might just fall into our definition of music for monuments, ‘tombeau’ being French for ‘tombstone’ and a generic term for pieces written to commemorate the death of someone of importance. It was a common form of composition in the 17th century and Ravel revived the practice as a memorial to friends of his who were killed in World War I. Subsequently re-scored for orchestra, its original version for piano solo can be heard in its entirety on Naxos 8.550254, while the great British pianist Phyllis Sellick, a young girl at the time of its composition who became known for her affinity with Ravel’s music, can be heard playing the Toccata from the work on Naxos Historical 8.111217.

Turning things on their head, there are monuments dotted around the world that commemorate the lives of composers, usually with a simple portrait sculpture of the subject, but few are as arresting as the structure built to commemorate Jean Sibelius‘ contribution to the music of Finland. Located in Helsinki’s Sibelius Park, the Sibelius Monument is a fascinating piece of abstract sculpture, made up of some 600 hollow steel pipes. You can take an audio-visual tour that combines music of Finland’s greatest composer with its stunning scenic landmarks on Nordic Landscapes, part of the Naxos Musical Journey series (Naxos DVD 2.110320).

What has proved to be one of the most exciting structures of the past half century, however, now with us in radio-wave spirit only, is the Voyager Spacecraft; launched in 1977, it’s now believed to be approaching the edge of the solar system. As 12 April is marked by the United Nations as the International Day of Human Space Flight, we thought we’d take a small liberty by highlighting this example of an unmanned venture on the same day.

No music was written specifically to mark Voyager’s mission, but a number of classical pieces are inextricably bound up with it in the form of on-board recordings that help represent the diversity of our civilisation’s culture, in the event that the craft ever connects with another.

If you would like to let your imagination roam to the frontiers of space with this music, follow the links to the pieces that were selected:

• J. S. Bach, Brandenburg Concerto No. 2, First Movement (Naxos 8.554607, track 5)

• J. S. Bach, Partita No. 3 in E major for violin solo, Gavotte en rondeau (Naxos 8.557563-64, disc 2, track 12)

• J. S. Bach, The Well-Tempered Clavier, Book 2, Prelude and Fugue in C (Naxos 8.550970-71 disc 1, track 1)

• Mozart, The Magic Flute, The Queen of the Night aria (Naxos 8.660030-31, disc 2, track 8)

• Beethoven, Fifth Symphony, Movement 1 (Naxos 8.550289, track 1)

• Beethoven, String quartet No. 13 in B flat, Op. 130, Cavatina (Naxos 8.554593, track 5)

• Stravinsky, The Rite of Spring, Sacrificial Dance (Naxos 8.557508, track 20)

* Radio City Music Hall credit: CC-BY-SA-3.0/Matt H. Wade at Wikipedia

Closer to our time, history is kinder: to mention the name of manager George Martin in the same breath as The Beatles, for example, would raise few puzzled looks; Lang Lang and his dad are also a well-documented management casebook. Further back in time, memories get misty.

Among this month’s new releases, however, is the intriguing and illuminating story of how Gioachino Rossini got a leg-up into the Hall of Fame from a surprising source. Rossini’s refined world of bel canto opera might not have spawned such an extensive personal catalogue without the unlikely help of a roguish gambler called Domenico Barbaja. A casino mogul, an illiterate loudmouth and a cantankerous bully, he was also the most influential opera impresario of the 19th century. It was he who lured Rossini to the all-important opera scene in Naples in 1814, launching him onto the stellar path he was to follow for the rest of his creative life.

You can hear examples of the works both he and other significant opera composers wrote for Barbaja on this month’s new release Bel Canto Bully (Naxos 8.578237). Better still, you can put the music into the context provided by Philip Eisenbeiss’ new biography of Barbaja (Haus Publishing, ISBN 978-1-908323-25-5), for which this is the companion disc.

King Ludwig II of Bavaria (1845-86) could hardly be thought of as an impresario in the manner of Barbaja, but the influence he had on Richard Wagner was similar, his patronage providing him with the comfort zone in which creativity could blossom. Wagner’s most significant legacy from that arrangement came in Der Ring des Nibelungen (The Ring of the Nibelung), the 4-opera mythical saga which would have had a difficult birth without the financial and physical security that Ludwig’s support provided.

If you’ve never managed to fully grasp the narrative and musical complexity of The Ring, rest easy, because Naxos will be coming to your rescue next month with a handy aid to its appreciation, so watch this space… Meanwhile, if you’re new to the masterpieces, why not ease yourself into the experience by listening to the operas’ preludes and opening scenes?

Das Rheingold (The Rhine Gold) (Naxos 8.660170-71)
Die Walküre (The Valkyrie) (Naxos Historical 8.110058-60)
Siegfried (Naxos 8.660175-78)
Götterdämmerung (Twilight of the Gods) (Naxos 8.112066-69)

Tchaikovsky similarly benefited from the patronage of Nadezhda von Meck, the wealthy widow of a Russian railway magnate, whose financial support carried him through a number of his creative years. One of this month’s new releases is a recital of Tchaikovsky’s piano works (Naxos 8.573086) performed by Andrey Yaroshinsky in the Naxos Artist Laureate Series. As the winner of numerous international competitions, Yaroshinsky also reminds us of the extent to which performers’ careers continue to be managed in their early stages by the exposure arising from such competitive opportunities.

The 19th century also has interesting examples of composers promoting each other in a sort of pay-it-forward fashion. Robert Schumann played a significant part in encouraging the genius he recognised in the young Johannes Brahms, inviting him to co-write a work for the famous violinist, Joseph Joachim: Schumann asked Brahms (then only 20) and Albert Dietrich (a student of Schumann) to provide a movement each for the four-movement work, which has become known as the F-A-E Sonata. Fast forward to the three violin sonatas from Brahms’ mature years (Naxos 8.554828) and one can’t help thinking how different things might have been without that initial act of support on Schumann’s part.

Antonín Dvořák subsequently found himself on the receiving end of Brahms’ generosity, who both recommended the young Czech talent to the publisher, Simrock, and even undertook the menial task of proof-reading Dvořák’s scores later in life when he was away in America during the last years of the 19th century.

From that same era of Czech music, we can recommend another of this month’s new releases of orchestral music by Zdenĕk Fibich (Naxos 8.572985). Although Fibich never enjoyed the same celebrity status as compatriots Smetana and Dvořák, following his death in 1900 a group of his appreciative students made a concerted effort to redress the balance for audiences of the 20th century and beyond, right up to this disc. An example, in this case, of pay-it-back.

The 72-hour period is typically observed by the faithful from a meditative standpoint, but not always from inside an ecclesiastical building, as in the case of Wagner’s opera Parsifal (Naxos Historical 8.110221-24), during which the legendary title hero experiences the Good Friday Spell in Act 3 (disc 4, track 7), when nature suddenly appears transfigured by love and the regaining of innocence. The cited performance is the first complete recording of Parsifal, made in 1951 at the Festspielhaus in Bayreuth by a cast of distinguished soloists and the Bayreuth Festival Orchestra under Hans Knappertsbusch – so it probably doesn’t get more religiously authentic than that.

Also connecting with the Easter theme is a new release this month of Penderecki’s Piano Concerto (Naxos 8.572696), featuring soloist Barry Douglas and the Warsaw Philharmonic conducted by Antoni Wit. It carries the subtitle Resurrection to reflect the hymn-like melody that gradually rises to the foreground before emerging with striking power at the work’s overwhelming climax, delivered by a huge orchestra that includes triple wind and a whole battery of percussion. A previous release in the series of Penderecki’s orchestral music includes his Horn Concerto (Naxos 8.572482), which received unreserved praise from some quarters:

“…the Horn Concerto of 2008 is drop-dead gorgeous…get this stunningly played and recorded disc, as well as the others in this important and worthy series…any of Antoni Wit’s Penderecki recordings for Naxos deserves recognition: they are uniformly superb.” (David Hurwitz – ClassicsToday.com)

Having passed away ten years ago this month at the grand age of 99, the spirit of Goffredo Petrassi rises again in this month’s new release of his music (Naxos 8.572411) including the Quattro inni sacri (Four Sacred Hymns), works he described as “music of today for the faithful of today.” The last in the set, Salvete Christi vulnera (Hail, wounds of Christ) is made particularly evocative by Petrassi’s skilful handling of the colours and textures weaving around the baritone’s powerful solo line.

For many, the approach to Easter just wouldn’t feel complete without hearing a performance of The Crucifixion, an oratorio by the English composer John Stainer. The work was written for St Marylebone Parish Church in London where it has been performed every Good Friday since its première in 1887. You can access a complete performance of the work by the Choir of Clare College, Cambridge directed by Tim Brown on Naxos 8.557624.

Alternatively, you can just dip a toe into the work by listening to a single item, God so loved the world, which is included on another of this month’s new releases, Psalms and Motets for Reflection (Naxos 8.572540). The disc is a spiritual cocktail that not only combines choral elements from Protestant, Catholic, Eastern Orthodox and mediæval traditions, but also draws on a mix of repertoire from around the world, ranging from German Johannes Eccard’s 16th-century When to the temple Mary went to the eddying lines of Scotsman James McMillan’s A New Song, written in 1997. The choir of St John’s, Elora is directed by Noel Edison.

All of which leads to our final new release (Naxos 8.573092) of sacred music composed by Mozart while in the service of Archbishop Colleredo at his court in Salzburg when still only 17 years old. The two short mass settings and Regina Coeli “lift the spirits and are a joy to perform,” in the words of Andrew Lucas, who directs the St Albans Cathedral Choir.

“It was therefore an easy decision to choose to record these examples of our core repertoire,” says Lucas, “and to have the luxury of performing with musicians using instruments from the classical period, who give a truer picture of balance, blend and colour of the instruments and voices in this truly exuberant music.

“I love these settings which, to me, already reveal Mozart’s greatness and are a foretaste of even greater things to come.”

Finally, if you have a spare 30 minutes for reflection, why not settle down and listen to the seasonal chorale preludes J. S. Bach wrote for use during Passiontide and Easter (Naxos 8.553032), as included in his Orgelbüchlein (The Little Organ Book).

To redress the balance a little this week, we take comfort in those works that offset the repression of war with a sense of release when it’s over.

Almost a century ago, Heitor Villa-Lobos set his reactions to the conclusion of World War I in the second and third of his twelve symphonies, subtitled respectively War and Victory; the score of No. 4, Peace, was sadly lost. The pair features on one of this month’s new releases (Naxos 8.573151). It’s an all-Brazilian affair, with the São Paolo Symphony Orchestra conducted by Isaac Karabtchevsky; the works were commissioned by the Brazilian government following the end of the country’s involvement in the war.

The Victory symphony may be more reflective than triumphalist, but Villa-Lobos used a huge palette of instrumental sound to set down his thoughts and exercise his brilliant orchestration skills. Aside from unusual instrumental combinations (the opening of the third movement, for instance, has bass clarinet, contra-bassoon and bass saxophone supporting the melody on cor anglais and viola), you may need a dictionary to hand to become acquainted with instruments such as the saxhorn, clarone and bombardino (no relation to the Italian cocktail!).

Among the more rejoicing post-war works that have been longer established in the annals, several were inspired by Napoleon’s failed bid to subjugate all before him.

Written to celebrate the defeat of the French forces by the British at the Battle of Vittoria in 1813, Beethoven’s Wellington’s Victory (Naxos 8.550230) is a jolly piece of frippery that was originally conceived for performance by a huge mechanical device, the panharmonicon. The machine was the brainchild of Johann Mälzel, who also invented the metronome.

Beethoven subsequently scored the piece for traditional orchestral forces, quoting English and French tunes rising above the artillery of timpani shots. The work was first performed in 1814 alongside Beethoven’s less well-known partner work, the choral fantasy Der glorreiche Augenblick (The Glorious Moment – Naxos 8.572783). Written in a similarly patriotic vein, the optimism of the times comes to life through the text, as when the city of Vienna is given human expression through the voice of a solo soprano:

The highest event I see happening
and my people will bear witness,
when a shattered continent
comes together in a circle again,
and brothers at peace together
embrace mankind set free.

Performed more frequently, and written in 1880, Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture (Naxos 8.550500) opens with more serious tones to depict Russia’s repelling of Napoleon, but ends with those unique sounds of triumphant canon fire, resounding bells and fusillades of brass that have become universally familiar. We shouldn’t let the truth spoil perception, but Tchaikovsky had his reservations about the piece, complaining to his patron, Nadezhda von Meck, that he was not a “concocter of festival pieces.” He confessed that his loud musical spectacle had little artistic merit “because I wrote it without warmth and without love.”

Looping back to those constructional challenges Mälzel must have experienced with his panharmonicon reminds us that the world’s largest mechanical device in existence before the Industrial Revolution was, in fact, the organ. One was even used as a demonstration of western ingenuity and a sweetener by the early Jesuit Matteo Ricci when trying to persuade the Emperor of China to tolerate his Catholic mission there around 1600. It was a bells and whistles affair, literally, with the capability of producing sounds of nature in addition to more musical tones, somewhat akin to the modern Wurlitzer.

The more conventional sounds of a modern organ, however, can be heard in another of this month’s new releases. It’s of music that was also seeded in the years of World War II, the time when Helmut Walcha began his set of chorale preludes that stands as a successor to the magnificent collection composed by JS Bach some two centuries earlier. In this third of four volumes (Naxos 8.572912), Delbert Disselhorst showcases the colours and sonorities that only an organ, two hands and a pair of feet can capture. While we’re on this subject, let’s give Beethoven the final word:

“If he is a master of his instrument, I rank an organist amongst the first of virtuosi. I, too, played the organ a great deal when I was young, but my nerves would not stand the power of the gigantic instrument.”

The lavish backcloth of pyramids, palaces and temples was used to even greater effect by filmmakers for the story of Cleopatra – in Cecil B. DeMille’s 1934 cinematic version, for example, and the 1963 technicolour production directed by Joseph L. Mankiewicz, starring Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton.

The country has been experiencing less glossy times recently. Following the overthrow of Tunisia’s Zine El Abidine Ben Ali in what is now known as the Arab Spring of revolutions, Egypt became the second country to overthrow its government with the removal of Hosni Mubarak from power just over two years ago.

The scenes of protest in Cairo’s Tahrir Square live on not only in the memory, but also in the music of Mohammed Fairouz, whose concerto Tahrir for Clarinet and Orchestra featured in a documentary produced by PRI’s The World* a year after the bloody scenes played out. Fairouz wrote the piece in memory of those who were killed during the protests. The documentary reached an estimated audience of 75 million.

BBC World News reported an even greater number of 200 million for its follow-up piece on Fairouz as he collaborated with Shakti Mohan, a dancing star in India. She joined him in New York (where he now lives) to devise a choreographed routine for a new piece that Fairouz was creating for string quartet and Klezmer clarinet.

Fairouz’ melding of Middle-Eastern modes and Western structures has become an increasingly familiar and respected presence on the contemporary music scene:

“… an important new artistic voice” – New York Times
“…[a] postmillennial Schubert.” – Gramophone
“One of the most talented composers of his generation” – BBC World News

The Arab-American composer’s distinctive sound world is now featured in Native Informant (Naxos American Classics 8.559744), one of this month’s new releases. Fairouz’ Cairo-Tahrir nerve still tingles in the central movement of his suite for solo violin that gives the disc its title. “The movement, For Egypt, is a lamentation of both intimate sadness and outright grief at the loss of civilian life in the 2010-11 Egyptian Revolution,” Fairouz says.

This theme of struggle alternates with more robust and optimistic tracks, however, on the 6-work recital of instrumental and vocal chamber music, all recorded here for the first time and discussed in our latest podcast, with Fairouz in conversation with Gail Wein:

“I think what’s always fascinated me,” Fairouz says, “is this concept of story. “You can walk on the streets of Cairo and find people reciting poetry out loud and people will be assembled around them in cafes and people will be crying, moved to tears by this concept of reading poetry out loud; it translates very, very naturally into the recital.”

Before we sign off on Egpyt, let’s remember a couple of associated works that have happily brought more pleasure than pain.

Saint-Saëns’ Piano Concerto No 5, Egyptian (Naxos Classical Archives 9.80478) featured in the 2011 BBC Promenade Concerts, with Stephen Hough as soloist. Its nickname derives not only from its point of origin (it was composed in Luxor, Egpyt) but also from its integration of regional melodies. Saint-Saëns also manipulates exotic colours from the piano in the slow movement, notably the peculiar resonances of the qunan, or Arab zither. Hough raised the roof when he returned to the platform after his brilliant Proms performance to play an encore wearing a fez!

From a biblical perspective on the country, Handel’s oratorio Israel in Egypt (Naxos 8.570966-67) is as much a delight for its vibrant choruses as its ingenious word-painting with Handel’s use of mercurial, buzzing strings to imitate flies in He spake the word, thundering brass and timpani in He gave them hailstones for rain and the comical rhythmic and melodic jauntiness in Their land brought forth frogs. The cited recording is by Kevin Mallon and the Aradia Ensemble, who can be heard in another of this month’s new releases: Handel’s Concerti Grossi, Op 6 (Naxos 8.557358-60), described by Mallon as “the best of their kind.”

“I adore Handel,” the American-born conductor says. “He enjoyed success as a very young man – volatile, vital, boundlessly energetic. These works are perfectly put together in structure, and I like to think we reflect this in our performances.

“Music in [that] time was intensely fresh. One of the things I like best about the early music movement is that we always try to bring this music forward as though it had been written yesterday.”

Why not sample the 3-disc set today, while it’s at its freshest?

*PRI’s The World is a co-production of WGBH/Boston, Public Radio International and the BBC World Service.

Album Details…
Catalogue No.: 8.559744

“Freed from the shackles and tatters of the old tradition and prejudice, American and European women in music are now universally hailed as important factors in the concert and teaching fields and as … fast developing assets in the creative spheres of the profession.”

More than seventy-five years on, it’s interesting to consider how her words still carry substance, and a pleasant task to examine just how well female musicians are represented in the Naxos catalogues, both in terms of composers, conductors and performers. To cut to the chase, the short answer is: significantly.

One of this month’s new releases is Volume 5 of the complete Beethoven Piano Trios recorded by the all-female Xyrion Trio (Naxos 8.572343). With the American Record Guide having been “impressed with every recording” in previous volumes, this new disc, which includes Beethoven’s towering Archduke Trio, is well worth sampling.

The recording was made in Sandhausen, Germany, at the auditorium named after Clara Wieck, aka Clara Schumann, who was a distinguished pianist and composer in her own right, not just the supportive wife to Robert Schumann. Her delightful Variations on a Theme of Robert Schumann (Naxos 8.553501) are a good starting point for anyone unfamiliar with her output.

There are some fascinating works to be found among the recordings of contemporary female composers in the Naxos catalogue and, as an experience of some vivid stylistic and geographical contrasts, the following are well worth exploring:

• From the American composer Jennifer Higdon, her disc of highly colourful and accessible chamber music, that includes Voices, the Piano Trio and Impressions (Naxos American Classics 8.559298)

• With her Chinese parentage and Canadian upbringing, the Asian hues in Vivian Fung’s disc entitled Dreamscapes exemplifies her highly imaginative sense of coloration (Naxos Canadian Classics 8.573009)

• Having emigrated from Russia to America in 1990, Alla Pavlova’s symphonic works are her hallmark; Nos 1 and 3 form a good pair for an introduction to her stylistic imprint (Naxos 21st Century Classics 8.557157)

Female conductors are found in increasing numbers nowadays; pre-eminent among them are two who have made numerous recordings for Naxos, with more in the pipeline: Marin Alsop and JoAnn Falletta.

Alsop is currently music director of the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra, a post she took up in 2007. She’s also the recently appointed principal conductor of the Sao Paulo Symphony Orchestra, with whom she recorded Prokofiev’s Symphony No 5 and The Year 1941 (Naxos 8.573029), the first volume in a complete cycle she and the orchestra will make of Prokofiev’s symphonies. The disc found itself in the Critics’ Choice list last month: “…exceptional account of Prokofiev’s Fifth Symphony…partnered by a revelatory performance of The Year 1941.” – BBC Music Magazine

Falletta is music director of the Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra with whom she recorded a Gershwin disc for Naxos that includes the Piano Concerto, the Second Rhapsody and the I Got Rhythm Variations (Naxos Blu-ray Audio NBD0025). It, too, was the focus of attention from BBC Music Magazine: “A sizzling Gershwin collection.”

Her February release of music by Duke Ellington (Naxos 8.559737) was similarly well received (“…big band jazzy jolt … total conviction…” MusicWeb International), all of which strongly suggests that her new disc of music (Naxos 8.573034) by EJ Moeran with Northern Ireland’s Ulster Orchestra, of which she is the principal conductor, is a treat in store for April.

The Naxos catalogue of outstanding female instrumentalists and singers is bursting at the seams, but perhaps it’s female pianists who figure most in the collective memory. Naxos gathered them together in recordings of performances made in the first half of the twentieth century, from 1921-1955. The five volumes of Women at the Piano echo with famous names in a comprehensive anthology of historic keyboard performances. Here’s a quick dip into the contents pages:

Volume 1 (Naxos Historical 8.111120)
Myra Hess – Poissons d’Or (Debussy)
Harriet Cohen – Paean (Bax)
Marguerite Long – Alfama (Milhaud)
Moura Lympany – Les Jeux d-eaux a la Villa d’Este (Liszt)

Volume 3 (Naxos Historical 8.111217)
Yvonne Loriod – Les Sons Impalpables du Reve (Messiaen)
Phyllis Sellick – Le Tombeau de Couperin (Ravel)
Clara Haskil – Variations in F minor (Haydn)

…and the list goes on!

One living pianist who corners a considerable chunk of the catalogue all for herself is the Turkish artist Idil Biret: witness the dedicated Biret Solo Edition (5 vols), Concerto Edition (5 vols), Archive Edition (14 vols) and Beethoven Edition (19 vols), all of which can be found on Naxos Music Library and ClassicsOnline.

I started with a quotation that has stood the test of time, so let me end with another that will probably endure for a while yet:

“I said: ‘Well, gosh, can’t we find some women that are also qualified?’ And they brought us whole binders full of women.” (Mitt Romney, 2012 US presidential debate)

And, in response, we brought you: “Binders full of women … composers.” (ClassicsOnline 9.00149, 2012 preferential release) where you can become acquainted with a whole raft of female talent, including Sofia Gubaidulina (Russia), Eve Beglarian (USA), Phyllis Tate (England), Elisabetta Brusa (Italy) and Cecile Chaminade (France).

Enjoy!

In addition to his achievements as a conductor and composer, the famous painting of Leopold Mozart performing on violin with his young son as accompanist, while little sister Nannerl looks on, also reminds us that the father was a hugely influential teacher of his instrument; the treatise he wrote on violin pedagogy was widely respected long after his demise. Wolfgang Amadeus rather hogged the limelight subsequently. Similarly with J S Bach’s sons: Wilhelm Friedemann, Carl Phillipp Emanuel and Johann Christian all stepped up to the limelight when the style of their father’s music became passé.

The world of classical music continues to throw up father-and-son pairings, however. One thinks of Yehudi Menuhin and his pianist son, Jeremy. They were recorded together in a selection of Beethoven’s violin sonatas, which you can hear on the Naxos Music Library  (EMI Classics 0724356978959).

Likewise Dmitri Shostakovich and son Maxim, who shared the piano stool in a recording of dad’s Concertino for Two Pianos op. 94 (Documents 291266). Principally a conductor, Maxim continues to perform his father’s orchestral works, a relationship which is emulated on one of this month’s especially colourful new releases from Naxos.

The Ukrainian composer Ivan Karabits’ Three Concertos for Orchestra (Naxos 8.572633) make for tremendously entertaining listening. All single-movement works, they give a wonderful account of Karabits’ skills in orchestration: the Concerto No 2, for example, deftly weaves conventional orchestral forces with unlikely splashes from harpsichord, celesta and a pair of bongos; there’s even a brief passage for some scripted applause!

Karabits died in 2002. His memory and artistic bequest are honoured in these premiere recordings by his son, Kirill, who directs the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra. He has been their principal conductor since 2009 and brings an authoritative empathy to the performances – like father, like son.

“Yet again, Naxos deserves praise for making contemporary music accessible at reasonable cost, and through excellent performances.”

This recent comment from BBC Music Magazine might well have been directed at the Karabits disc, but it was actually referring to Tianwa Yang’s recording of the complete works for violin and piano by Wolfgang Rihm, released late last year.

Yang is in the spotlight of new releases again this month with an unusual line-up presented in Blu-ray sound quality: Mendelssohn’s staple E minor Violin Concerto: its younger sibling in D minor; and the similarly youthful Violin Sonata op. 4 (Naxos Blu-ray Audio NBD0032).

There aren’t many violinists who play both the E minor and D minor concertos, but Yang is a passionate advocate of the latter, which was rediscovered and given its first modern performance (maybe the first ever performance) in 1951. In a slightly different parental role to that mentioned above, it was Yehudi Menuhin who unearthed the work and became the adoptive father who cradled it out of obscurity.

“Menuhin … didn’t just discover and publish the piece,” says Yang. “He loved the work, played it numerous times and actually made three recordings of it.” The style on the surface may be more classical than mature romantic, “but in some ways it’s actually forward-looking,” she adds. “In fact, there are some ways in which it clearly anticipates some of the most ‘original’ features of the late E-minor concerto.”

As today’s posting coincides with the feast day of St David, the patron saint of Wales, here are a few recommendations for those with a drop of the Celtic in their blood.

Welsh Classical Favourites (Naxos 8.225048) has a handy potpourri of orchestral works representative of Welsh composers, from Grace Williams’ ever-popular Fantasia on Nursery Tunes to Alun Hoddinot’s Folksong Suite. But the ancient land is probably most famous for having produced a jewel casket of opera and oratorio singers disproportionate to its size. Today’s final salute, therefore, goes to some of them, whose recordings can be found on both Naxos Music Library and ClassicsOnline:

Dame Margaret Price (1941-2011)
(BR-Klassik 900305)

“One of the most beloved opera singers of her generation known for her roles in Mozart and Verdi.” The Guardian

Sir Geraint Evans (1922-1992)
(EMI Classics 0724357287753)

“That, perhaps, was the greatest strength of Geraint Evans as an opera-singer, his ability to bring such disparate people as quack doctors and insubordinate servants, amorous knights and pedantic town clerks, even murderous soldiers of limited intelligence, so vividly to life.” The Independent

Dame Gwyneth Jones (b. 1936)
(EMI Classics 0724356529656)

“Every inch the diva, Gwyneth Jones is one of the greatest Wagnerian sopranos of all time.” BBC Wales

Bryn Terfel CBE (b. 1965)
(Teldec 809274439468)

“The Welsh baritone turns in a triumphant Falstaff in what may just be the performance of the year.” The Guardian

If violence has a positive spin-off, however, it’s the creativity that it occasionally prompts. The big 2013 centenary anniversaries bring such associations with conflict to mind: Benjamin Britten (b. 1913) and his War Requiem; Giuseppe Verdi (b. 1813) and the conduit his operas provided between the public and Il Risorgimento, the Italian reunification movement; and the contentious baggage still carried to this day by the music of Richard Wagner (b.1813), who became Hitler’s most admired composer.

This year also marks the centenary of the first performance of Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring in 1913 at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées in Paris. The music and dancing lacerated many ears and eyes in the auditorium, while the barbaric plot turned on the offering of a human sacrifice. Whether or not the legendary riotous atmosphere at its premiere got as far as fisticuffs is debatable, but the noisy reception it encountered certainly prompted the physical ejection of a number of spectators. Both composer and music survived, however, and you can hear Stravinsky himself conducting the work with the Philharmonic-Symphony Orchestra of New York in a recording from the 1940s (8.112070) on the Naxos Historical label.

The world premiere recording of James Whitbourn’s Annelies (8.573070), one of last month’s new releases from Naxos, is the first major choral work to set a libretto based on The Diary of Anne Frank, the penetrating observations recorded by the teenager while hiding from Hitler’s forces during their occupation of the Netherlands during World War II. The sensitivity with which Whitbourn handled such a moving narrative was well received by critics, some of which we would like to share with you:

“…the greatest accomplishment here is that James Whitbourn has created some music of great beauty, without trespassing into the realm of the cloying. Not only does that release one to listen to the work’s oases of soaring melody … with impunity but leaves the integrity of such an important piece of literature, and history, intact.” – Caroline Gill, Gramophone

“… woundingly beautiful.” – The Daily Telegraph

“Whitbourn’s loving imitation of Bachian chorale in Courage and the poignant lyrical intertwining of voices and instruments in Kyrie-Sinfonia are … moments when words and music meld impressively together.” – Terry Blain, BBC Music Magazine

One of this month’s new releases on Naxos also recalls bruises of conflict: Weinberg’s Symphony No 8, Polish Flowers (8.572873) (he wrote 22 in all) may have been written long after the end of World War II – it was premiered in 1964 – but it recalls the composer’s experience of being forced to flee his native Poland following the Nazi invasion in 1939. He eventually took refuge in Moscow in 1943, safe from Hitler but vulnerable to the atrocities Stalin meted out on the country’s Jewish population. Conducting the Warsaw Philharmonic Orchestra and Choir, plus soloists, Antoni Wit directs the world premiere recording of this 10-movement choral and orchestral work that recounts Poland’s past inequities, human degradation and wartime horrors – all the more telling for being forlorn and ferocious in equal measure.

As an antidote to all this artistic doom and gloom, you could retreat to the comfort zone of soprano Dinara Alieva’s new disc of Russian songs and Arias (8.572893). This is Alieva’s first recording for the Naxos label, and she comes with an enthusiastic endorsement from the Spanish operatic soprano, Montserrat Caballé: “… a wonder … a gift from Heaven.”

For the likes of Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven it was all part and parcel of both getting ahead and being financially solvent, but they weren’t unique in possessing this trinity of talents. A couple of blogs ago I mentioned Giovanni Bottesini with reference to his 1880 Messa da Requiem, but he also worked as a conductor and additionally became known as the Paganini of the Double Bass for his virtuoso prowess on the instrument; you can hear modern-day virtuosi doing battle with his works for the instrument in The Bottessini Collection (8.572284).

Last week’s topic of film music threw up the name of Leonard Bernstein, who was similarly multi-talented. He can be heard in the Naxos Historical Archives as piano accompanist for his own Clarinet Sonata (9.81065P) and serving as concerto soloist, conductor and composer in works by himself, Ravel and Copland (9.80397).

JoAnn Falletta and the Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra continue this thread with their new release of music by the American jazz legend, Duke Ellington – big band leader, pianist and composer of more than a thousand works, who died in 1974. From tone poems (Harlem) to stage works (the ballets The River and Three Black Kings) to Afro-American fusion (Black, Brown and Beige), the supremo’s talent gets a good showcasing from Falletta and her players on Duke Ellington (8.559737).

The album is in the American Classics series, and comes with two recommended companion discs featuring the same artists:

• Gershwin (8.559705): “world-class Gershwin; Falletta really swings” – Fanfare
• Copland (8.559240): “wonderfully boisterous … splendidly vivid” – Penguin Guide to Classical Music

While the first part of the twentieth century saw the emergence of the Second Viennese School of composers comprising Schoenberg, Berg and Webern, it was during the second half that Peter Maxwell Davies, Alexander Goehr and Harrison Birtwistle came to be known as the Manchester School. All were students in the UK’s northern city in the 1950s and are credited with carving out a new landscape for British music during the latter half of the century. February’s new Naxos releases features music by two of them.

The disc of music by Maxwell Davies (8.572363) contains his concertos for piccolo and trumpet, with John Wallace as soloist in the latter – you may remember that Wallace performed during the Royal Wedding of Prince Charles and Lady Diana in 1981, accompanying Kiri te Kanawa in Handel’s Let the Bright Seraphim. Here he gives what many consider to be the definitive performance of Maxwell Davies’ Trumpet Concerto.

When Adam Fell is Alexander Goehr’s most recent orchestral piece and joins two other works on this new release (8.573052) that are unavailable elsewhere on recordings: Marching to Carcassonne and the Gabrieli-inspired virtuoso brass of Pastorals.

Finally, while we’re unable to offer a Naxos disc of music for serpent, that curiosity piece of an ancient tuba, we can try and put the asp in diaspora for all Chinese music-lovers around the world as they celebrate the Lunar New Year of the Snake by recommending a pick ‘n’ mix compilation from the ClassicsOnline website:

1.  Dance of the Golden Snake, traditional (8.828006); Chinese music.

2.  I have the serpent bought by Peter Fribbins (GMCD7343); chamber music.

3. Le serpent by Marcel Delannoy (IMV032); vocal.

4. Serpent’s Tooth by Phil Woods (CD93.009); contemporary jazz.

5. A serpent, in my bosom warm’d by Handel (from Saul) (COR16103); opera.

6. Charmeuse des serpents by Arensky (8.225028); orchestral.

7. The Serpent’s Kiss by William Bolcom (8.559244); contemporary piano.

8. Phyton, le merveilleus serpent by Machaut (AECD0982); vocal ensemble.

9. The Serpent by Ned Rorem (8.559084); vocal.

10. The Rainbow Snake by Erik Norby (8.226096); orchestral.

It’s the heavy metal season, and there’ll be lots of it exchanging hands now that we’re in the middle of the annual TV and cinema awards season, that time of year when Emmys, Baftas, Grammys and Oscars pop up like daisies.

Amid all the hubbub of the lead-up, however, it possibly went unnoticed in some quarters that, last Christmas Eve, the English composer Richard Rodney Bennett died in New York, his adoptive home since 1979. He gained a deserved reputation for his music on celluloid, having written over fifty scores for film and television and adding to the distinguished list of composers who have been attracted to the medium. If you’re in the mood for some easy listening, samples of his imaginative writing can be heard on BENNETT: Film Music (CHAN9867) that showcases his knack for serving up evocative backdrops for films such as Murder on the Orient Express, Far from the Madding Crowd and Lady Caroline Lamb.

Dmitry Shostakovich also got up to his elbows in soundtracks for films and stage works that account for some fifty entries in his catalogue. If you were unaware of his penchant for can-cans, carnival music and crazy turns of musical phrase, then check out his score for New Babylon (8.572824-25), the Naxos 2-disc set that boasts the first complete recording of all the surviving manuscripts for the film. Conductor Mark Fitz-Gerald’s two previous Naxos world première recordings of Shostakovich’s film scores for Alone (8.570316) and The Girlfriends (8.572138) have been highly acclaimed.

Releases

While Leonard Bernstein made only a single foray into the film music industry, it certainly made its mark. The American crime drama On the Waterfront was released in 1954 and the soundtrack has lived on in a number of arrangements. One such forms part of a new Naxos release this month from Scott Weiss and the University of South Carolina Wind Ensemble (8.573056), who perform a number of transcriptions of Bernstein’s wide-ranging output, including the Symphonic Suite from On the Waterfront.

Also among February’s batch of new releases from Naxos is a loose strand worth following on three discs featuring Anglo-German-French-flavoured composers, who both fall into a chronological and stylistic sequence and share a motley background of provenance and study.

A descendant of the English aristocracy, Georges Onslow was born in France, subsequently composing and studying both there, in London and in Hamburg. Listening to his three cello sonatas (8.572830), you could be easily persuaded to think they were from the pen of Beethoven, or even a young Chopin. If it hasn’t crossed your path yet, the slow movement of the latter’s Cello Sonata in G minor (8.553159) will take you one step nearer heaven.

Of French descent on his father’s side, Eugen d’Albert had even more of a patchwork pedigree: born to German parents in Scotland, he subsequently studied in both England and Weimar (with Liszt). Written in 1886, his Symphony in F major (8.572805) resonates with the style of Brahms’ symphonic output and gives an early inkling of his eventual rise to become a key figure in German post-Romanticism.

Finally to Anthony Girard’s disc of music for piano, clarinet and cello (8.572993). Although born in New York in 1959, Girard is now a unique voice in contemporary French music with a catalogue bursting at the seams. If you’re unfamiliar with his oeuvre, let this disc take you for an introductory step into Girard’s world of myth, mysticism and minimalism.

Remarks

“…sizzling … refined … sparklingly swaggering…”

 This is how Christopher Dingle of BBC Music Magazine recently arrived at his five-star thumbs-up for JoAnn Falletta’s recording of Gershwin’s music for piano and orchestra (NBD0025). The disc includes the Rhapsody No. 2, which was also originally intended as music for a film.

Falletta herself recalls that it seemed a natural choice to record Gershwin’s music with the Buffalo Philharmonic, “an orchestra of American musicians who understand [Gershwin’s] voice, who never counted the rhythms but swung to them with an intrinsic understanding that seemed part of their physical makeup!”

If you’re on the lookout for a disc that combines the experience of fine sound with fine performances, then this item from the Naxos Blu-ray Audio catalogue should be high on your shopping list.

Album Details…

Catalogue No.: 8.559737

The album will be released in Europe throughout February, and in the US and Asia Pacific from 26 February.

In the world of pop music, a number of albums have gained immortality as much for their cover artwork as for their musical content. Think of The Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (1967), Pink Floyd’s The Dark Side of the Moon (1973) and Nirvana’s Nevermind (1991). Classical albums have generally been more conservative on the exterior. Naxos itself, for example, is a repertoire driven label in headline terms, though its white-dominated frontage does put one in mind of The Beatles’ White Album (1968)!

On the recently launched Grand Piano label, however, there’s an attractive thread to follow, with each cover graced by one of the many figurative paintings by the award-winning artist Gro Thorsen. Grand Piano’s mission is to explore undiscovered keyboard repertoire; its current catalogue tally is 23 discs, of which 14 included world premiere recordings.  With around 20 new releases planned for each year, there’ll be plenty of opportunity to appreciate Thorsen’s artistic style and scope for a while yet. Why not check out the label’s three February offerings, both inside and outside the case! They are:

• Allison Brewster Franzetti’s latest instalment in her critically acclaimed recordings of the complete piano works by the Polish composer Mieczyslaw Weinberg (GP611)
• Duets and duos by Frenchman Florent Schmitt from the Invencia Piano Duo (GP622)
• A double CD of Keyboard sonatas by the German composer Daniel Gottlob Turk (GP629-30) performed on important historical instruments by Michael Tsalka.

February’s new Naxos releases include two works that will act as interesting challengers to a couple of masterpieces that have long blocked out the sun from other comparable works. You’ll be able to judge for yourself whether or not they stand shoulder to shoulder with their historically better-known counterparts.

It would be hard to find an opera aficionado who isn’t familiar with Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas; now there’s an opportunity to compare and contrast the work with Didone abbandonata, Johann Adolph Hasse’s opera seria on the same story (8.660323-25), written some fifty years later in 1742. Previously not to be found in commercial catalogues, now is your chance to hear the work with a tremendous line-up of soloists (including mezzo-soprano Theresa Holzhauser and counter-tenors Valer Barna-Sabadus and Flavio Ferri-Benedetti). Director Michael Hofstetter’s 2011 performance of the work won him the title of Conductor of the Year from Opernwelt.

Performance photos / © Naxos Rights US, Inc. — AT Schaefer (Naxos 8.660323-25)

Bottesini composed his Messa da Requiem (8.572994) in 1880, just a few years after Verdi’s namesake work; Bottesini used similar forces, though it never emerged from the shadow of his compatriot’s knock-out foray into sacred music. It’s now recorded for Naxos, however, by the London Philharmonic Orchestra and Joyful Company of Singers conducted by Thomas Martin.

As a coda to this subject of gifted composers being overshadowed by the giants of their time: Chopin’s success with his Nocturnes owed much to John Field, the pioneer of the form, although the debt rarely gets paid to the Irishman; likewise his compatriot, William Vincent Wallace whose prolific and virtuosic output, however, is now happily recalled on Chopinesque (8.572776), released last autumn. The disc attracted positive reaction, and was December’s Holiday Critic’s Choice from Gramophone:

“…[a] substantial and varied collection, which Rosemary Tuck despatches with admirable grace and aplomb.” (Andrew Lamb)

If you have time for only a quick dip into the Naxos Music Library over a cup of coffee, try track 2, Nocturne mélodique.

Last week’s breaking news concerning the financial difficulties and uncertain future facing HMV again raised the question of whether physical CDs have an impossible future when faced with the easy confidence of streaming and downloading services. Who can precisely foretell the future, however? A friend of mine still listens only to his vinyl collection, having resisted the trend to CD domination. He remarks how it’s too easy to track-hop with a CD, but with vinyl he wouldn’t dream of lifting the needle before a side had ended and he had fully digested every note.

He also told me that, when purchasing an LP as a youth, he could tell its source by sniffing the sleeve! Germany, Holland, the UK—they all carried a distinctive whiff. Modern jewel-boxes presumably aren’t nearly so much fun.

DVDs were supposed to spell the end of cinemas, but the latter have doughtily resisted such a fate. It’s reckoned by some that cinema screenings of operas from houses like the Metropolitan Opera in New York will soon undermine the operations of less stellar companies, but the debate about the advantages of 3-D over 2-D continues apace.

So I asked our chairman, Klaus Heymann, for a comment on the subject raised by those latest ripples from HMV.

“It’s sad to see another chain of record stores go under,” he replied. “The Naxos walls of the two Oxford Street stores have been a great source of pride for me over the years but, like many other record stores, the HMV chain in the UK never managed to adapt to the era of online shopping and online marketing and promotion.

“Still, I’m grateful for all the business HMV gave us over the years and hope that at least some of the stores will survive as outlets for recorded music—classical CD and DVD sales around the world are actually quite stable, and overall physical sales for our group of companies increased slightly in 2012 over 2011.”

It’s been gratifying to see the company continuing to pick up so much critical acclaim, not least for David Hill’s recording of Delius’ A Mass of Life with the Bach Choir and the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra (8.572861-62). It had many critics reaching for superlatives and topped off the year by clinching the Gramophone Holiday Critic’s Choice. Veteran baritone soloist Alan Opie’s fine performance garnered praise from many quarters, and subscribers to the Naxos Music Library can trace Opie’s recording career by streaming through his dozens of opera recordings, ranging from Donizetti’s Maria Stuarda (CHAN3017-18) through to Richard Strauss’ Ariadne auf Naxos (CHAN3168-69) and Harrison Birtwistle’s The Mask of Orpheus (NMCD050).

Two Naxos discs have picked up a Diapason d’Or award this month: the Amar Quartet for their recording of the Hindemith String Quartets Nos 5, 6 and 7 (8.572164); and the Chinese violinist Tianwa Yang for her recording of Wolfgang Rihm’s complete works for violin and piano (8.572730). Yang will be back in February’s new releases with the intriguing pairing of Mendelssohn’s staple E minor Violin Concerto with its younger sibling, the one in D minor (8.572662), written in 1822 when Mendelssohn was still only thirteen years old, but composed with a remarkable assurance and maturity … an accolade that similarly applied to Yang in her teenage years!

Releases

One of this month’s new releases features the stunning skills of the Russian-born pianist Valentina Lisitsa on a disc of Beethoven, Schumann, Liszt and Thalberg (8.572491). If you’re unfamiliar with the music of the latter, that’s probably because not many people can play it. If his “Grande fantaisie sur des motifs de Il barbiere di Siviglia” is a mouthful to say, it’s certainly a handful to perform, as Lisitsa explains: “The piece takes seven or eight minutes to play, it has more notes per square inch than practically anything I’ve ever played, it’s unbelievably difficult, yet sounds very elegant and light. Only pianists can know how difficult it is to play.”

On a more sombre note, this month’s release of Mozart’s Divertimenti Nos 11 and 17 performed by the Cologne Chamber Orchestra (8.570990) serves as its own eulogy to Helmut Muller-Bruhl, the ensemble’s music director from 1963-2008, who died this time last year. It was the last disc he made and it’s fitting that such deliciously joyful music has been able to set a seal on Muller-Bruhl’s career, to which Naxos owes a debt of gratitude: this conductor-orchestra pairing produced some of our most successful recordings, including Telemann’s Darmstad Overtures (8.554244) that bagged a Cannes Classical Award in 2001.

The Christmas tinsel may now be back in its box but, with over 60-CD recordings on the Naxos label slated for release in the first quarter of 2013, the festive season just seems to keep on coming!

Before we get too lost in this year’s stream of new releases, however, you may like to take a backward glance and check out the successes of the past year by casting a look over the sixty-four 2012 Grammy nominated discs that are available for downloading from the ClassicsOnline website (classicsonline.com). If you’re still hungry for more, there’s also the 25 discs singled out by reputable critics as their picks for 2012, also on ClassicsOnline.

Finally, if you want to measure your preferences against those of the wider market, check out the Naxos 2012 Bestsellers by following this link: http://www.naxos.com/feature/The_Naxos_Bestsellers_2012.asp.

Album Details…
Catalogue No.: 8.570608

Album Details…
Catalogue No.: 8.572987

Album Details…
Catalogue No.: 8.573009

Album Details…
Catalogue No.: 8.559723

Album Details…
Catalogue No.: 8.505228

Album Details…
Catalogue No.: 8.572921

Album Details…
Catalogue No.: Grand Piano GP610

Album Details…
Catalogue No.: 8.572461

1) Use the grouping field

On the face of it, iTunes doesn’t include support for works. Dig a little deeper, and you discover that works are supported in the player, just not on portable devices.

The somewhat enigmatic “grouping” field will help you here. If you use this field for the work title, you’ll be able to browse all recordings of an individual work, though the “Classical” playlist that’s created automatically when you install iTunes.

2) Fix up your data

You can edit multiple fields at once, for example:

Use search to identify all the many versions of Mozart’s name. Select all the tracks you want to edit by holding down shift and clicking on the first and last in a list, or by holding down CTRL (on a PC) or Command (on a mac) and then clicking on all the tracks you want. Then use CTRL+I (Command+I on a Mac) to edit the data for all the tracks at once. Remember to only touch the fields you want to change, as this will overwrite the data on all the selected tracks.

3) Use smart playlists

You can set up rules to automatically create playlists of all the tracks from a certain composer and/or genre, or where the album or track title contains certain words.

Used cleverly, this allows you to create a browse interface tailored to your own personal style of listening.

More instructions here: http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1801?viewlocale=en_US&locale=en_US

4) Use sort artists and compilations

iTunes doesn’t know if it’s looking at one album with tracks by lots of different artists, or tracks from lots of different albums that all happen to be called the same thing.

You can help it in two ways – by using a “sort artist” which is the artist it will use when it sorts all your albums by artist – and by checking the “compilation” box, which tells it that the album contains tracks by lots of different people.

This all works perfectly until until you actually DO have lots of albums with the same title. Then you’re really going to want to…

5) Upload cover art

iTunes will try to find the cover art for your albums online, but there are so many ways of formatting classical data that it rarely has much luck. Still, if you can bring yourself to track down the covers for your albums as you import them, you’ll never be stuck wondering what you’re listening to, and you’ll be able to browse your collection visually, instead of scrolling through lists.

I’ve spent a big chunk of this week on several projects involving classical metadata. Since “the right way to tag classical music” has been an ongoing theme for my entire career, I thought I’d share a few lessons I’ve learned.

1) There is no perfect system

We live in an age where I’ll regularly rely on atomic clocks flying thorugh space at 8,700mph to remind me where I parked my car (this is how GPS works), so you’d think we could build a database to coherently store music, right?

Well, we can, but there are limits to categorisation. When you set about designing a database to store music, you start with the obvious things: you’ll need a list of people, and a list of pieces of music, and perhaps a list of albums or tracks. Then you start joining them up. You tell the database what people did on each recording, so the computer knows who was the composer and who was the conductor. It all starts to look easy, so you decide to store a bit more information. You categorise pieces, add some dates, maybe biographies and sleeve notes.

Then you start to stumble upon exceptions:

• Walter Carlos became Wendy Carlos half way through her career. Are they different people in the database, or do you build a system for people who change their names? Either way, you can handle Cat Stevens’ switch to Yusuf Islam, but you might struggle with the period when Prince changed his name to an unpronounceable symbol, or with an artist who uses different names for different styles of music.
• Stravinsky revised The Firebird several times. These aren’t quite different pieces of music, but nor are they the same. Do we build a system to handle versions of the same thing?
• How much input can an arranger have before they’re effectively the composer? Where do you credit the author of a cadenza? Can the rules you apply to classical music also work with jazz?
• The movements of a Mozart symphony are all easy to identify, but Puccini operas are through-composed, and different recordings chop them up in different places. How do you handle that when identifying recordings of the same aria? What about excerpts from operas that have had final cadences added? Are they arrangements? Who arranged them?
• Overtures are pretty straightforward. We know they go on the beginning of operas. And plays. Except sometimes they don’t. Do we call concert overtures something different?

Anybody who has ever interviewed a band has heard a phrase like “It’s not easy to categorise our music”. Musicians almost seem to conspire against us here: any time a boundary appears between two distinct traditions, it’s only a matter of time before somebody comes along to knock it down. I swear they do it on purpose.

2) The better a system fits, the more complex it is

There are some pretty complicated taxonomies for classical music. Every so often, a well-intentioned and sometimes well-funded utopian scheme emerges to build a database of every song ever written. Many fall at the first question: “what’s a song?”

If your system allows for all the exceptions above, and the hundreds more that will crop up when you add ten million tracks to it, it’ll be pretty complicated.

That’s fine if it’s self-contained, like Naxos Music Library. We control the data coming in (we enter it ourselves, and it’s a big job) and we control the software that displays it (we wrote that too). What happens, though, when you don’t control it all?

3) The more complex a system is, the less interoperable it is

Once you let your data out into the big wide world, you can’t control how other people will use it. No matter how beautifully tagged your tracks are in your software, they might look terrible in somebody else’s. The way we tag MP3 and AAC files for downloads would allow us to add extra fields for “conductor” and “instrument” and “soloist” and “catalogue number”, but what would be the point? We have no idea how, or even if, they might be displayed on a customer’s computer, because we don’t write the software that does that. We could write software that did that, but it would be expensive, and wouldn’t necessarily work with the other music our customers own.

Devising a data scheme that provides detail but is robust to omissions is a major challenge, and all workable solutions inevitably include a certain degree of duplication.

4) It’s tempting to fiddle with the fields, but this is risky

Several people have told me they’ve found the solution to classical tagging in digital collections, and then gone on to explain some variation on “use the album field for the work title, use the artist field for the composer and use the composer field for the artist”. A complex version of this scheme is explained in detail here.

If you apply this system to your entire collection, you’ll notice several things.

• It takes a really long time to do it
• It works really nicely on old iPods
• It makes a total mess of the menus on a new iPod
• It doesn’t play nicely with the non-classical stuff in your collection
• You have to edit every single bit of data on every single track you add to your library

That’s fine for a small collection, but it quickly becomes unwieldy. It’s also a hack: you’re using it for something it wasn’t designed for. Sometimes, that’s fine. In my office, I use binder clips to turn the edge of the suspended ceiling into a picture rail. This is pretty low-risk, because they don’t bring out a new version of the suspended ceiling every few months, and even if they did, it wouldn’t take me long to think of a new way to hang my pictures.

What about all this data? What if iTunes or Windows Media Player or your smartphone gets an update that improves the way classical data is displayed? When they finally fix this, the software’s going to need all the data in the right fields. Then you’ll have to enter it all again.

5) Here’s how most people do it, and why

So what should you do? Well, the future-proof method is to use the fields for what they’re basically intended for, in a way that’s consistent with the way the same data is handled by the people who invested the most in it. iTunes isn’t going to re-tag 15 million tracks just to update their user interface, so at this point, we have an established convention.

Name/Track Title/Song

This is for all the information about the piece of music (except who wrote it). When we deliver something to iTunes, they demand:

Work Title, Catalog Number: Movement Number. Movement Title

So thats:

Symphony No. 5 in C minor, Op. 67: I. Allegro con brio

It’s long, but it’s all there. One day, somebody is going to realise that everything before the colon is the work title, and present it that way wherever the tracks are listed together. That colon is the future of your data.

Artist

This is for the performers. When we put it in a database, we use different fields for the artists. It would be nice if we could tag all the artists independently on downloads, too, but that’s not how any mainstream application reads the data, so we put them in a comma-separated list:

Takako Nishizaki, Stephen Gunzenhauser & Capella Istropolitana

There isn’t an established convention on ordering, so this is really up to you. I suggest putting the most important one first, since it’s unlikely you’ll be able to see the full list all the time when you’re browsing your library.

iTunes and Windows Media Player both support a composer field, so we use that. In iTunes, you can ensure the composer field is displayed in your library by going to View > View Options and checking the “Composer” box.

Composer

Here are some of the many options I’ve seen:

• Bach
• Bach, J.S.
• Bach, JS
• Bach, Johann Sebastian
• Bach
• Bach, Johann S
• BACH
• J.S. Bach
• Johann Sebastian Bach

None of these is perfect. We identify some composers by their last name (Haydn), some their initials and last name (J.S. Bach) and some by their full names (Philip Glass). Sometimes all this isn’t enough, and (as with the Strausses) we have to number them as well. Some names are transliterated differently in different countries, so two albums from different places might not even agree on spellings. It’s all maddening.

So what do you do?

We use the most common form of their full name, and that’s what most stores do as well. Anything else is going to drive you crazy in the long run, especially if you try to browse your collection by composer.

Album Title

The album title is important because it generally contains the composer names, which are otherwise not visible on most mobile devices. SInce most modern jukebox applications will also show you the album art, the combination of the two should give you a pretty clear idea what you’re listening to, regardless of the other data you can see.

If you tag your music this way, you will be able to see everything you need. Your main complaint with most interfaces will be that they don’t show you enough of each field. If the entire classical music community should get together and ask for something from the tech world, it should be this: “Make sure we can always see the composers*, and give us support for long fields. We can figure everything else out ourselves”.

6) While imperfect, it’s still easier to find music on a computer than in a record store

If you’ve followed the steps in (5) above, then you should always be able to work out what you’re listening to, and it should always be possible to find the recording you have in mind.

The trick, here, though is to rely on search, not browse.

In a closed, controlled environment like the Naxos Music Library database, we can be sure we always called composers the same thing, and we consistently applied naming conventions. That means we can give you a nifty browse interface where you can pick the names of artists, composers and genres from a list.

Even with fairly nice data, it just doesn’t work this well once the music has arrived in your library. The artists are all joined-up, and you can rarely sort the track titles by anything useful. Any inconsistencies in composers’ names makes it a total mess.

While a lot of people are working hard to find a widely-accessible solution to this problem, I suggest that, in the meantime, we don’t allow our enjoyment of digital music to depend on them finding an answer any time soon.

When I want to listen to something on my computer, I only ever use search. Even the simple “and-contains” search in iTunes* allows you to make quite specific requests very quickly. While this can be a bit clunky when you’re looking for something among the store’s millions of tracks, it’s an extremely effective way to find things in your own collection, even if it is very large. Type “Mozart” and you’ve got a list of everything with Mozart somewhere in it. Add “Symphony” and you’ve got everything with Mozart AND Symphony somewhere in it. This could include the odd overture, but it has excluded 99% of the irrelevant music, and given you a manageable list. Add the name of an artist, and you’re right there, at the recording you were looking for.

I have a fairly large CD collection at home, shelved alphabetically (by composer and artist). It’s about the size of a small specialist record shop. I’ve taken great care to be systematic about shelving music, because I know that, otherwise, I may never find it again. On my computer, meanwhile, I’ve been sloppy with data. The music just arrived too fast for me to spend much time on it. Still, there is no way I could find a CD on the shelf in the time I can find it on my computer.

This makes me wonder: when people complain that metadata is a serious barrier to downloading classical music, what, exactly, are they comparing it to?

* Spotify doesn’t show you the composers. Just try to find a specific classical recording on Spotify, and you’ll quickly see how maddening this is: the content is all there. You just can’t sort through it. Spotify is, though, a relatively young company, and I think they’ll probably fix this in time. If you want a really good classical streaming experience, you might prefer to use Naxos Music Library or Classics Online.

Album Details…
Catalogue No.: 8.572986

Album Details…
Catalogue No.: 8.572902

Just about every audio system has some wires coming out of it. Whether you bought cheap cables or expensive ones, these are often the most neglected part of any set up.

As a general rule, it’s a good idea to try to keep the power cables away from the audio cables¹. Mostly, though, once you’ve set up your stereo system, you’re not going to look at all these wires. They’ll hang out around the back, getting dusty, and doing their jobs.

Meanwhile, the poor wires on your headphones will be earning their living the hard way. Now, I’m rather fond of headphones. I use them a lot. I regularly use three pairs: a big set for the office, a folding big pair for traveling, and little ones for public transport.

These are all well-constructed and reliable, but the reason they’ve survived many years of extremely heavy use is because I take good care of the wires. In fact, after destroying many pairs of headphones in the past, this has become a little bit of an obsession for me.

The big pair and little pair both have long, straight cables. These easily get tangled up. Whether it’s a pair of headphones, a hair dryer or a computer power supply, the natural thing to do when we want to put it away is wrap the wire around it.

The trouble with this is it twists the cable, and twisted cables tangle really easily. Twisting also weakens the electrical conductors on the inside, and in time causes the thing to stop working.

If you coil the wire in a figure-8 instead, the twists cancel each other out, and the whole thing unrolls every time without any tangles. The way I see it, this will easily double the life of your headphones, which makes it okay to spend twice as much on them. I use a velcro cable tie to keep them in place, and I never have to untangle anything.

This figure-8 thing really is great. It works on just about any appliance.

For longer cables and extension leads, try folding instead of coiling. This also avoids introducing any twists, and it’s much easy to get them undone. Fold them in half, fold them in half again, do it a third time if you need to, and then tie the whole thing in a big loose knot. It won’t be twisted when you undo it.

My folding headphones have a coiled wire like a telephone handset³. This is nice and tidy when you’re using them, but a total liability the rest of the time, because coiled wires get so easily tangled when, for no apparent reason, a few of the coils decide they want to twist the other way now. The phone on my desk does this all the time.

You can fix this, both on your headphones and your telephone, in four steps:

1) Uplug the cable. Hold it up by one end to make sure it isn’t twisted.

2) Gently work any backwards-loops to the end of the wire. They’ll mostly disappear, but the places they used to be won’t quite look right.

3) Being careful to keep the ends of the wire dry, put the twisted sections into a cup of near-boiling water. This will soften the rubber coating, and let the coils return to their natural shape. Dry it and let it cool down before you plug it in.

4) Don’t try to wind up this cable. It’s already coiled. Instead, just drop the whole lot into a drawstring bag when you’ve finished with them, and they’ll reward you with years of service. Obviously this part won’t work for your phone.

If you have any other great cable-management tips to share, please use the comments. Have a great weekend!

¹This is because any wire carrying a current creates a magnetic field around it. Any cable carrying AC creates a constantly changing magnetic field around it, and this will cause a current to flow in any wires passing through that magnetic field. This is called induction. When you turn this into sound, it becomes a 50 or 60Hz buzz or hum.

The hum is pretty quiet, so unless they run past a power station, you don’t need to worry too much about your speaker cables. Mains hum is mostly a problem on cables carrying very quiet signals – particularly those from turntables – into the amplifier.² The problem can be exacerbated if either of the wires is coiled up, since this multiplies the effect of the magnetic field. You can avoid this by coiling any excess wire into a figure-8.

² Most studio gear avoids this problem by using balanced cables, where the signal and its inverse are both sent along adjacent wires. At the other end, the sound is read as the difference between the two signals, which cancels out any current induced along the way. This is particularly important for microphone cables, which carry very quiet signals over very long distances before they’re amplified.

³ For anybody under the age of 18, a telephone handset is like a mobile phone, but it is fixed to the wall with a long twisty wire.

Today, I want to talk about bit rates.

To make sensible decisions about bit rates, it helps to understand a bit about how MP3 encoding works. When your computer makes a CD into an MP3, it has three main ways of making the music take up less space:

1) It throws out sounds you probably can’t hear – either because they’re “masked” by louder sounds, or because they’re only audible to a very small proportion of humans. Done right, this is an elegant exercise in efficiency. Done wrong (or too much) you music sounds tiny, thin and empty.

2) It describes the sound in terms of the shape of the wave, instead of as a big long list of values. If the wave isn’t a very complicated shape, it can do this with virtually no loss of quality.

Here are two MP3s of the same sound – a simple 440Hz sine wave. This is just about the easiest thing to make into an MP3. Although the first file is 10x the size of the second, they sound identical because you don’t even need 16kb to record 1 second of sine wave. Like a stick of rock, the file just says “440hz at -3dBFS” all the way through.

Here it is at 160kbps (mono)

[mejsaudio src="http://blog.naxos.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/Sine-Wave-160kbps.mp3"]

Here it is at 16kbps (mono)

[mejsaudio src="http://blog.naxos.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/Sine-Wave-16kbps.mp3"]

With our nice simple sine wave, there’s no extra data to throw out, so they sound the same. If we give it something really complicated, though, we’ll start to notice a difference.²

Here’s a bit of Debussy’s La Mer³, as a very high quality MP3:

[mejsaudio src="http://blog.naxos.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/La-Mer-Excerpt-320kbps-MP3.mp3"]

That sounds pretty good to me, but here it is again, a tenth of the size:

[mejsaudio src="http://blog.naxos.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/La-Mer-Excerpt-32kbps-MP3.mp3"]

Suddenly it sounds like it’s being played down a telephone. A file this size can happily hold a simple sine wave, but in trying to describe the complex harmony and sonority of Debussy’s orchestration, it has to make some cuts. All the notes are still there, but we’ve lost a lot of what is beautiful about it. When we’re looking for a bit rate that works for us, this is the outcome we’re looking to avoid.

3) Once the fat is trimmed off (1) and the important sounds reduced to their component waves (2), the computer looks for commonly-occuring patterns in what remains, so the information in them only needs to be recorded once.

In our first example above, that means saying “440Hz, -3bDFS” to define the single note, and “ditto” for the rest of the file.

With La Mer, the opportunities are less obvious, but if you see time in 44100ths of a second like the computer does, there’s plenty of repetition here. By itself, this third type of compression is lossless – you get exactly the same data out as you put in, but it takes up less space while being stored.

The combination of these three techniques allow us to make the files much, much smaller. Even the highest-quality MP3s are just a fifth of the size of the original files, but they can be much smaller.

The goal is to find the smallest file size that sounds good to you.

Let’s start with a 16kbps file. At this size, you could fit more than five days of music on a single CD:

[mejsaudio src="http://blog.naxos.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/La-Mer-Short-Excerpt-16kbps.mp3"]

I want you to make up your own mind, but I think you’ll agree that sounded pretty bad. This next one is twice the size, at 32kbps. This would let you put 54 hours of music on a CD.

[mejsaudio src="http://blog.naxos.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/La-Mer-Short-Excerpt-32kbps.mp3"]

This one is twice the size again: 64kbps. You’d get 27 hours of this on one CD.

[mejsaudio src="http://blog.naxos.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/La-Mer-Short-Excerpt-64kbps.mp3"]

Next is 128kbps, or eight times the size we started at. You’d get thirteen and a half hours of this on a CD.

[mejsaudio src="http://blog.naxos.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/La-Mer-Short-Excerpt-128kbps.mp3"]

Double that again, and you’re at sixteen times the size we started at. At 256kbps, you’d get six hours and 47 minutes of music on a CD. The Amazon MP3 store delivers music in this format.⁴

[mejsaudio src="http://blog.naxos.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/La-Mer-Short-Excerpt-256kbps.mp3"]

Finally, the highest bit rate supported by the MP3 format is 320kbps. That’s 20 times the size we started at, and 22% of the size of the original. You’d get about five hours and twenty minutes of this on a CD. If you buy music from ClassicsOnline this is what you’ll get.⁵

[mejsaudio src="http://blog.naxos.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/La-Mer-Short-Excerpt-320kbps.mp3"]

You can try all this with your own music, indeed I’d encourage you to. Hook up your computer to your stereo, make some MP3s (and other files), shuffle them up, and try to tell them apart. Remember: bigger is not always better. If you want a fast car, you don’t buy the one that uses the most petrol. You buy the one that goes fastest. If you’re looking for an audio format that sounds good,  don’t go for the one that uses the most data. Go for the one that sounds best, and have fun.

Corrections:

I originally (and wrongly) wrote that the Amazon MP3 store delivered 320kbps files, not 256kbps files. This has now been corrected.

A typo in one of the footnotes said of Variable Bit Rate encoding “there’s no good reason to now use it” which is the exact opposite of what I meant, which is “there’s no good reason to not use it.”

Footnotes:

¹All the files on this page are MP3s. This has become the format of choice for many mainstream download stores (including ClassicsOnline and Amazon) because it works on almost everything. Many of the same basic principles apply to both AAC (used by iTunes) and Ogg Vorbis (used by Spotify). These are both more sophisticated formats that avoid some of the more complex inherent weaknesses of MP3 at the expense of ubiquitous compatibility with all players. In general, either AAC or Ogg Vorbis should sound better than MP3 at a given bit rate, so if getting the best possible sound out of the smallest possible file is a priority for you, I’d suggest you check them out.

²Simple sounds are easier to encode than complicated music, so it tends to be that you only notice that you’re listening to encoded music when something complicated or sudden happens. It’s in these places where the bit rate isn’t high enough. To overcome this, modern MP3 encoders use “variable bit rate” encoding, where a small amount of data is used for the easy bits, and a lot of data is used for the difficult bits. It averages out at the overall target bit rate. I haven’t addressed variable bit rate encoding in the main body of this post because it’s pretty ubiquitous now, and there’s no good reason to not use it.

³This album was produced and engineered by Tim Handley, who has won numerous Grammy awards as a producer.

⁴iTunes also delivers 256kbps files, but in the AAC format¹.

⁵If that doesn’t sound good to you, then you might like to try theclassicalshop.net, eclassical.com or hdtracks.com - all of which will sell you full CD-quality downloads of just about any Naxos record, and many of those from the labels we distribute.

I’ve been putting together a blog post on the way to get the best sound out of MP3s, but there are so many elements to deal with, I thought I’d tackle it in pieces. For this post, I’m just going to talk about the missing frequencies in an MP3.

One of the ways we can fit more music into an MP3 is by discarding the least important information. High frequency sounds have a lot going on very quickly, and they can take up a lot of space, so there’s a lot to be gained from getting rid of them.¹

Still. We don’t want data to be missing. If the range of human hearing is 20-20,000Hz, and everything above 16,000Hz is missing, that feels like a lot. It seems like that would be 20% of the music.

That’s not how frequencies work, though. Every time we go up an octave, the frequency doubles. Going up like this, numbers can get pretty big, pretty fast, and it makes the high frequencies look a lot more important than they really are. If you wanted to make a piano covering the entire range of human hearing², you’d need to give it 120 keys instead of the normal 88. If, halfway through building it, you decided you only wanted it to go up to 10,000Hz, not 20,000Hz, you wouldn’t remove half the keys. You’d only remove 12 of them – seven white ones and five black ones.

In any case, 20,000Hz is the highest anybody can hear, not the highest everybody can hear. Above that, your pets might notice, but you won’t. Our sensitivity to high frequencies deteriorates with age, so for most adults the ceiling is more like 16,000Hz. Your kids can probably hear things you can’t, and your pets can hear things your kids can’t.

If, like me, you’ve spent a lot of time around very loud music, your hearing might top out even lower. I can’t hear much above 13,000Hz.

Try it for yourself: this is a 30-second sweep across the full range of human hearing, from 20hz to 20,000hz. Hit the play button, and listen until it goes quiet: that’s as high as you can hear.³

[If you're reading this in a feed-reader, you might have to scroll to the bottom of the page or visit the site the see the player]

It goes up by 666Hz/Second, so the frequencies are:

Start: 20Hz
1 Second: 686Hz
2 Seconds: 1,352Hz
3 Seconds: 2,018Hz – The highest note in the Queen of the Night’s Aria
4 Seconds: 2,684Hz
5 Seconds: 3,350Hz
6 Seconds: 4,016Hz – The highest note on a piano⁴
7 Seconds: 4,682Hz
8 Seconds: 5,348Hz
9 Seconds: 6014Hz
10 Seconds: 6,680Hz
11 Seconds: 7,346Hz
12 Seconds: 8,012Hz
13 Seconds: 8,678Hz
14 Seconds: 9,344Hz
15 Seconds: 10,010Hz
16 Seconds: 10,678Hz
17 Seconds: 11,342Hz
18 Seconds: 12,008 Hz
19 Seconds: 12,674 Hz
20 Seconds: 13,340Hz – This is where it goes quiet for me ⁵
21 Seconds: 14,006Hz
22 Seconds: 14,672Hz
23 Seconds: 15,338Hz
24 Seconds: 16,004Hz – Very few adults can hear anything above here
25 Seconds: 16,670Hz – A 192kbps MP3 won’t have much above here
26 Seconds: 17,336Hz
27 Seconds: 18,002Hz – A 256kbps MP3 won’t have much above here
28 Seconds: 18,668Hz
29 Seconds: 19,334Hz – A 320kbps MP3 won’t have much above here
30 Seconds: 20,000Hz – Still audible to other animals⁶

There’s an argument that, while these frequencies might be inaudible by themselves, they add character to other sounds in ways that are perceptible to our ears. If this were true, it would be relatively straightforward to prove it and, as far I can see, nobody ever has. It also doesn’t stand up to common sense. Sounds simply don’t become more noticeable when there’s other noises, indeed, the opposite is widely accepted.

So there you go: unless you’re a dog, you can test your hearing and pick and MP3 format that only excludes frequencies you can’t hear. There are, of course, other aspects of MP3 encoding that affect the quality of the sound. Next time, we’ll look at bit rates, fixed and variable, and the effect these have on the sound.

¹The point I wanted to make here is way too nerdy for the first footnote.⁷

²Most notes produced by musical instruments are a combination of several related frequencies, overtones or harmonics. In the piano analogy, I’m only talking about the lowest (and loudest) of these frequencies, called the “fundamental”.

³This is a bit of fun, not a diagnostic tool. If you’re concerned about your hearing, you should see a professional. If you’re interested in playing around with acoustics, though, you should check out the tools at this site. The sound clip on this page is a linear sweep at constant amplitude (-3dBFS). If it seems to get louder and quieter over its range, that’s because your hearing is more sensitive to certain frequencies, (normally around the range of the human voice). This clip is itself encoded as an MP3, but because it contains an extremely simple sound, it doesn’t need to filter out the high frequencies. The MP3 specification is quite flexible on encoding, but all decoders are essentially the same, so I can be confident that your computer will decode the same sound that I get from this file, regardless of the software used to play it back.

⁴The fundamental frequency of the highest note on the piano is 4186.01Hz, but its overtones will extend upwards beyond the limit of human hearing. If you’re interested in this stuff, I’d recommend this video and, if you still want more detail, this one.

⁵I won’t speculate on what happened to the top end of my hearing, but Google Scholar is a good place to explore the considerable research on hearing loss in orchestral musicians.

⁶Dogs can hear up 60,000Hz, mice up to 90,000Hz and bats up to 120,000Hz.

⁷Ok. You’ve been warned. An MP3 describes a complex sound wave in terms of lots of little bits of a sine wave: “At this point, the wave goes up with a bump this tall and this long”. If you want to lose the rest of the day in articles about mathematics on Wikipedia, then it might help you to know that this is called a Fourier Series. The reason I bring all this up is because if you’re encoding music this way, the high frequencies take up a lot of space: at 20Hz, there are 20 wobbles in the line to describe each second of music. At 20,000Hz, there are 20,000 of them. By getting rid of a small number of high frequencies, you can get rid of a very large amount of data. The trick is to find the frequencies you won’t miss.

1) Streaming services are all basically the same

Streaming services are not all the same. They all play you music over the Internet, but that doesn’t make them the same. They use different technologies, have different content, different ways to find music and they don’t even all sound the same. We run four different streaming services at price points from $19.95/year to $300/year per subscriber. There are lots of others.

2) Royalty rates are scandalously low

There’s a big range of royalty rates paid by streaming services. We have deals with services including Rhapsody, Napster and Spotify, but we also have our own streaming services (Naxos Music Library, ClassicsOnline and Naxos.com) so we get to see a lot of the figures. Services pay us between three cents a track and a quarter of a cent per track¹.

Whether or not this is low depends on what you’re comparing it to. If your reference point is a paid download², then yes, it’ll seem low, but the two simply aren’t comparable. A stream is ephemeral, a download is permanent. In this regard, a stream has much more in common with radio than it does with either a download or a CD.

When one of our tracks is played on internet radio in the US, we get about a quarter of a cent per listener³, comparable with the very lowest streaming rates. We get a little over half that from satellite radio, and nothing at all from traditional radio.

The royalty rate correlates closely to the degree of interactivity. At one end of the spectrum, you’ve got the download, which is yours to play whenever you want. At the other end is traditional radio, where fixed playlists and a small number of stations give you very little choice indeed.

This correlation even applies among streaming services, where Naxos Music Library (an academic research tool designed for people who really need to hear a specific track in detail) pays a higher rate than consumer-focussed sites, which are more likely to be used for background music.

3) Streaming services are not for serious listening

This accusation has been levelled at just about every innovation since letting common people into the concert hall. The gramophone reduced serious symphonic works to 7-minute soundbites. LPs lacked the clarity and immediacy of shellac. CDs sanitised the sound and took the tactile ceremony out of listening. The iPod reduced serious symphonic works to 7-minute soundbites. Streaming made us careless consumers who don’t really pay attention to what we’re listening to.

The idea⁴ is that if you don’t have to pay for music before you listen to it, you don’t have much of an investment in it. You’ll pick the singles, skim over the album tracks, and get stuck in an ever decreasing circle of superficial instant gratification.

It’s a plausible argument, but it’s the answer to the wrong question. We’re not looking at a world in which streaming subscriptions become the only way of consuming music – just a world where they’re one of many options. Streaming has been around for about a decade, and it shows no sign of taking over. People still press vinyl, CDs are very popular and downloads have a growing share of the market because they all have different advantages, and each is the best solution to a different problem. The same goes for streaming.

It’s true that streaming services mean you don’t have to make a financial investment in a piece of music before you hear it, but there are foreseeable positives to this too: with nothing at risk but your time, you can take a chance on new repertoire.

Public libraries didn’t turn out to be bad for literacy in the long run. In the same way, we think the wider availability of music will be good for music appreciation.

4) Streaming is bad for artists and/or independent labels

We’re adults. We look carefully at each contract before we sign it⁵. If we thought streaming subscription services were bad for labels, we wouldn’t have started our own and we certainly wouldn’t have signed up with others.

There are some widely-reported examples of artists receiving very low payments from streaming services⁶. It’s worth remembering these payments are made under the artist’s contract with the label, to which the artist agreed as a consenting adult, and that contract may involve the deduction of a proportion of those royalties. You can’t work out what the service is paying the label by looking at what the label pays the artist.

5) It’s all a scam cooked up by the major labels

It’s not a scam. It’s a deal. Consumers should do it if it makes sense to them, labels should do it if it makes sense to them, artists should do it if it makes sense to them. If a lot of people do it, it’s because a lot of people think it makes sense. If it doesn’t make sense to you, don’t do it.

6) It’s the end of the record collection

As a consumer, if you like records, there’s nothing stopping you from buying them. Almost all releases are still available on CD and as downloads. Vinyl is growing in popularity.

For artists and labels, there’s not a lot of evidence to suggest streaming leads to an overall reduction in the sales of other formats. There’s plenty of speculation about how consumer behaviour will change, but the only way to find out for sure is to try it and see what happens. So far, from where we’re standing, it looks good.

Streaming services certainly do change our relationship with the recordings we hear. Unless you’re very young, it’s likely you already own a whole bunch of music, so a service like Spotify or Naxos Music Library becomes an addition to the collection.

For some people, it’s a way to check out recordings before buying them as downloads or CDs. For others, it’s a way to hear the music they don’t like enough to buy. Some might stop listening to their existing collections altogether, choosing instead to create playlists of favourite albums online. No matter how we use streaming services, we’re still actively involved in listening, and in curating a selection of music. It doesn’t look the same, and it doesn’t take up anywhere near as much space, but all the musically significant parts of building a record collection are there.

7) You’ll be locked in

If you spent your life putting together your record collection – if you’ve carted crates and crates of LPs and CDs from your parents house to college to your first flat to your first house to the place you raised your kids, adding all the time to a library of physical objects that together form a soundtrack to every special memory you possess – if this sounds like your collection, you might well be uneasy at the idea that your music might no longer belong to you, and that you’ll lose it if you stop paying for it at a price that could increase significantly at some point in the future.

This is, though, only half the story. You’ve still got your records, and a subscription isn’t going to take them away. Unlike a physical collection, any new playlists you create are stored on remote secure servers, can be easily copied, and will survive fire, flood or burglary in your home. Right now, a Spotify playlist isn’t compatible with Rhapsody, but as the market matures, it will become easier and easier to transport the playlist element of your collection from one service to another.

8) Successful pop artists are holding back releases from streaming

“Because Coldplay does it” is not a good reason to do something. If it was, I’d have a child called “Apple”.

In the film industry, it’s normal to release a film first in cinemas, then for rental, then to buy on dvd, and finally for broadcast on television, giving each platform a chance to play to its strengths. This works well for blockbusters, but smaller movies adapt the pattern to suit their own niches.

We may one day see a similar standard release pattern for music, although it’s unlikely we’ll see one plan work for everything.

In the meantime, you can expect to see more albums held back as our whole industry tries to work out what the ideal pattern looks like for each type of music.

9) Streaming services aren’t sustainable. They’re just trying to build interest so they can sell to Google (or somebody else).

Articles like this one contain a lot of speculation. I can’t speak for anybody else’s business, but I do know that Naxos Music Library is already profitable and continues to grow.

10) The audio quality is bad.

If this is your only objection, then you want to be wrong about this, because this one issue stands between you and great convenience. Research has repeatedly shown that our expectations have a big impact on our perception of the music we hear, so do yourself a favour and enlist a friend to help you with a blind trial. I suggest comparing Spotify on the premium subscription (which streams at up to 320 kbps) with a CD (or WAV/FLAC files) of the same music. Have your friend test you: if you can’t tell one from the other without peeking, sit back and enjoy the music.

Footnotes:

¹Streaming services typically pay out a fixed percentage of their revenue, shared out amongst the labels according to the proportion of total streams apportioned to that label’s content, so if your music was responsible for ten percent of total listening, you get ten percent of the total money. When a service has just launched, most users will be on a free trail, and the pre-stream revenue can be very low. Sometimes there are per-stream minimums built into the deal, but these don’t always determine the sum you actually get, and it isn’t the same every month, so it would be misleading to simply say “we get x per stream.”

² When you buy a track on iTunes in the US for 99 cents, we get 70 cents. We pay 9.1 cents in music publishing (if the work is still in copyright) and that leaves us with about 60 cents, which is somewhere between 20 and 300 times what we might get from a stream. It’s tempting, then, to say that unless users listen to their downloads an average of 20-300 times, they’d be better off with streaming and we’d be better off with downloads. This is an oversimplification: it assumes that users only stream or download, that nobody buys anything after streaming it, and that streamers and downloaders listen to the same amount of music, regardless of cost.

³ More on US rates for digital radio here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SoundExchange

⁴ Gabriel Kahane puts the case eloquently here: http://gabrielkahane.com/?p=358

⁵ The deal terms described in this article are fairly accurate. What isn’t accurate is the analysis, which misunderstands the nature of a monopoly and wrongly presents the terms as onerous, unfair, or impossible to deal with.

⁶ This article describes one example: http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2010/apr/13/spotify-songwriters

Books have been around for thousands of years. They’re a great place to put words. Their batteries don’t run out, you don’t need anything else in order to use them, they can last for hundreds of years and nobody tells you to put them away just before the plane takes off.

Books about music, though, can be a bit frustrating It has been said many times that writing about music is a bit like dancing about architecture. I don’t really think this is either true or particularly helpful* but words alone can struggle to describe the sound of great music.

I’m no choreographer, but clearly a ballet about buildings could benefit greatly from good set design. That’s not usually an option when you’re writing a book about music, but with the help of an iPad, some imaginative computer programming and some Naxos recordings, we’ve got something pretty close.

Download any of our latest books from the iBookstore to your iPhone, iPod Touch or iPad, and you’ll see play buttons alongside the text, allowing you to listen to full-length tracks as you read about the music.

We’ve got full-length biographies of Beethoven, Tchaikovsky, Dvorak, Mahler, Haydn, Chopin and Liszt as well as shorter portraits or Shostakovich and Rodrigo as well as bite-sized profiles of Kraus and Vanhal. The Beethoven bio reached the top of the chart in the  iBookstore’s Music category, and is one of their top picks for the year in their 2011 iTunes Rewind promotion. Check them out today.

*How is anything like dancing about architecture? How is writing about music any more futile than writing about anything else?

ClassicsOnline | iTunes | Amazon

You’ll sometimes hear people use the term “bleeding chunks” to describe excerpts of operas, played out of context. The phrase was coined by Sir Donald Tovey in his 1935 Essays on Musical Analysis Vol. II (1935) p.71, where he wrote, “Defects of form are not a justifiable ground for  criticism from listeners who profess to enjoy the bleeding chunks of butcher’s meat chopped from Wagner’s operas and served up on Wagner nights as Waldweben and Walkürenritt“*.

It’s a striking image, but it’s also an ad hominem argument. He’s not addressing the issue, he’s addressing the people, and he’s wrong. There’s nothing unsophisticated about wanting to hear all the best bits. You might even call it elitist.

We like Wagner’s music, and we have a sense fun, so we put all the best bits on this album, which we’ll be listening to as we delight in the irony that Sir Donald’s essay has been misquoted, relieved of its context (the programme-notes for Bruckner 4), reduced to a soundbite, and, finally, turned into a compilation. We hope you enjoy it.

You can download Bleeding Chunks of Wagner from ClassicsOnline, iTunes and Amazon today.

* Oxford Dictionary of Music, (1994) p. 98

I have, though, run into some strange ideas about digital-only releases, so I’d like to take this opportunity to set the record straight about five major misconceptions:

1) A digital-only release isn’t a proper release

Not true. In the US, more than half of all record sales are digital, with sales of downloads outnumbering sales of both CDs and LPs put together. It might not be what we’re used to, but this is the way most music is purchased now.

In 1992, when CD became the dominant format, nobody could sensibly argue that a CD wasn’t a proper release unless it was also available on cassette, but the argument is basically the same. To dismiss digital releases is to dismiss the reality of the modern music market.

Digital-only releases are recognised as proper releases by every major trade body including Nielsen Soundscan and The Official Charts Company. They have been eligible for the Grammy awards since 2001, and just this year a digital-only release won a major award.

2) A digital-only release is much cheaper to make

Not true. CDs and downloads have many of the same fixed costs, because the expensive parts of releasing a recording are making and marketing the album. Even after you’ve made the master, the CDs themselves account for a small part of the overall budget.

3) Nobody really invests in digital-only recordings

Not true. It’s actually easier to invest in a non-physical release, because you don’t have to gamble on the future of CD retail. We expect CDs to be around for many years, but by committing to a growing sector of the market, we can plan to recoup our investment over a longer period of time. It is true that we invest in different things. We don’t, for example, include digital-only recordings in our sales brochure, because almost all of the thousands of copies are sent to physical retailers. It would be a waste of ink and paper. Instead, we focus on online promotions. Where these are less expensive, we can do more of them.

4) If we expected an album to sell, we’d put it out on CD

Not true. The mix of physical/digital sales isn’t the same for every type of music. Operas sell very well on CD. Chamber music, large collections and contemporary music all sell very well as downloads. An album we expected to sell 96% of copies digitally (and such records do exist) could spend ten weeks at the top of the Billboard classical chart through digital sales alone and still not sell enough physical CDs to justify manufacturing. Our digital successes tend to be a bit more modest than that, but there was no shame in a CD-only release in 1992, and there’s nothing wrong with a digital-only release today.

5) It only makes sense to review CDs

Not true. Most reviews are of the music, not the packaging. Many publications have stuck with music reviews through the changes in format from 78 to LP to Cassette to CD, and this is just one more step. Downloads are more popular with classical consumers than SACD, Blu-Ray, LP or any other specialist format. CD sales continue to fall and download sales continue to grow, and digital-only releases will form a larger and larger part of the entire recorded music business. A publication that ignores these releases is at risk of becoming irrelevant to modern consumers, and that’s not good for anybody. It’s not good for artists, labels, publications, reviewers or, most importantly, the music lovers whose support is so vital to everything we do.

Anyhow, thanks for reading. It’s only fair to leave you with some music. Our latest digital-only release is Liszt’s Via Crucis performed by Alessandro Marangoni, Ars Cantica Choir and Marco Berrini. You can hear it on Naxos.com, Naxos Music Library, ClassicsOnline, iTunes, Amazon and EMusic. It’s a proper release in every way, and I think it’s rather lovely.

CD sales for the first half of 2011 are actually a bit lower than in the first half of 2010. The growth has come from an 11% increase in digital downloads. Where are people buying all this music? It’s not easy to find out. I looked around online and found a lot of stories about where people can download classical music, but not much about where people actually do download classical music. “That’s ok,” I thought. “We must have that information.” I went digging in our royalty reports.

Here’s a graph of our digital sales for the whole of last year. I’m using a full year’s worth of data because different stores report their sales to us at different intervals. In each case, I’m counting wholesale revenue because that’s the thing we can most consistently measure. The chart shows sales for Naxos, but I’ve looked at the data for the other labels we distribute, and the overall picture is very similar:

1) iTunes is #1, and has been since shortly after its launch in 2003. With 225 million users, and just about every recording under the sun, it has become the one-stop-shop of choice for many downloaders. Some critics complain about the search engine and the sound quality. I never saw the problem when I worked there, and it seems like customers agree: if you exclude the streaming services (which are a bit different), iTunes sells more classical downloads than all the other stores put together.

2) At #2, we have Naxos Music Library, which offers a streaming subscription service to universities, libraries and music professionals. It’s one of three specialist classical streaming services in the top ten, and it’s very popular. Ask about it next time you’re in the library – you might already have access (half of all American college students do). You don’t have to be in the library to listen, it’s free to use (the library pays for it), and it even works on iPhones and Android devices. If you piled up all the CDs on Naxos Music Library, they would form a stack 1,400 feet high – that’s taller than the Empire State Building.

3) The third most popular online destination is Amazon’s MP3 store. Amazon is also a very popular place to buy our CDs – great news if you prefer a product you can hold, because Amazon keeps growing and with almost infinite shelf space, we expect all our CDs to be available here for years to come.

4) At #4 is the most popular specialist classical download store, ClassicsOnline. It’s run by Naxos, and it sells classical music from almost all independent labels. If you can’t wait for your local library to get a Naxos Music Library subscription, you can also listen to an even larger selection of full-length recordings on ClassicsOnline for a monthly fee.

5) Next comes EMusic, offering a great many bargains in jazz, rock, and pop as well as classical music for indie music fans. Customers commit to purchase a monthly download allowance which doesn’t roll over, so this store works best if you regularly purchase indie music from all genres.

6) & 7) Rhapsody (#6) and Napster (#7) have been around for along time. They both let you to listen to huge collections of music for a monthly fee. Rhapsody has grown a bit lately, but Napster isn’t as popular as it once was. Neither was really designed for classical music, but they still deliver more classical music to customers than all but two of the specialist classical sites.

8) The new kid on the block is Spotify. This Swedish company made waves in Europe with a free service that allowed users to listen to a lot of music and a few adverts, with the option of paying a monthly fee to lose the ads and access playlists through a mobile device. The free service has some limitations, and it isn’t exactly tailor-made for classical music, but Spotify just made a much-anticipated US launch. Even if it doesn’t change the way you listen to classical music, I’ll expect to see this one in the top five at the end of 2011.

9) Classical Archives is one of the oldest classical music sites on the web. It now offers streaming and downloads from a large selection of recordings, alongside the massive library of midi files that made this site famous back in the days of dialup Internet, when downloading a whole album of high-quality audio would take about as long as listening to the Ring Cycle.

10) Of course, there are lots of smaller digital music stores to explore. Between them, they account for just under 3% of our digital sales. Some are small because they’re new, others because they serve niche markets. HDtracks is one of the more popular destinations for high-quality downloads. Qobuz does a great job with classical downloads for the French-speaking market. eClassical just relaunched with an innovative pricing-by-the-second model. The Classical Shop (run by Chandos) offers a nice selection of independent recordings and high quality downloads. We’ll look forward to seeing these stores grow in the years to come.

Where do you go for music on the web? What makes the perfect record store? Use the comments to tell us what you think.

I spend most days at the office trying to come up with ways to get music onto your computer. I’ll try to sell you downloads and subscriptions, direct you to websites and encourage you to rip your CDs. Before I give you the hard sell on any of that, it’s only fair to tell you how to get that music out of your computer and into your stereo, so you can enjoy it at its best.

1) The 20¢ solution: Burn a CD

You can use iTunes, Windows Media Player or another jukebox application to create a CD from your downloaded music. This won’t help you with streaming music from ClassicsOnline.com or NaxosmusicLibrary.com, but it’s the best solution if almost all your music is on CD and you have a small number of downloads that you’d like to hear in your car or on your stereo. CD-Rs are cheaper in bulk – $7 /£5 or so for a pack of 50, but then if you’ve got fifty albums on your computer, it might be worth exploring some of the other options below.

Pros: Easy. Flexible. Inexpensive for a few CDs.
Cons: Your house or car quickly fills up with CDs. Doesn’t help with streaming sites.

2) The $5 solution: Buy a cable

The easiest way to connect your computer to your stereo is to use a cable. What kind, though?

You’re almost certainly looking for a 1/8 inch (3.5mm) to dual RCA cable. Hosa make a very affordable range of these in a variety of lengths, and they’re available at many large retailers, including Amazon in the US and UK.

It’s possible to spend a lot of money on cables, but in my experience your effort is often better spent on carefully planning where you put them. Coils of excess wire act like antennas for interference, especially if they’re near power cables or transformers, so get a cable the right length. I use nylon cable ties to keep the audio cables away from the tangle of mains leads and power supplies that seem to be breeding in the space behind my computer.

If you’ve spent a fortune on your stereo and want a cable to match, there are many options out there. Just remember that the retail margins on these can be quite high, so once you’ve decided what you want, it’s worth shopping around for the best deal.

If, like me, you find yourself fumbling in the gloom behind your computer in search of the correct plughole, it may help to know that the one you want (the Line Out socket) is almost always green. If there’s a volume control back there, adjust it so your computer is as loud as the other inputs on your stereo.

Pros: Inexpensive, simple, reliable.
Cons: Either your computer has to be close to your stereo, or you need a very long cable.

3) The $20 solution: connect digitally

If you’ve got a sound card with a digital output and your hifi receiver or home cinema setup has a digital input, this is a great way to go. The quality of sound will depend upon the quality of your receiver. There are three common types of digital connector:

S/PDIF (coaxial): a single RCA plug, normally yellow
TOSLINK (optical): uses optical fibre to transmit the digitised music
HDMI: commonly used to for HD video, but also transmits digital audio

Most modern receivers have all three, but computers may have just one or none at all.

As a general rule, these connectors either work or they don’t, so the quality of the cable isn’t very important unless it’s more than about 20ft (7m) long. Be careful with optical cables: they’re great over long distances, but the good ones are made of glass fibres, and they can break if you bend them too tightly around corners. Prices change all the time, so shop around for bargains, and buy online: you can save up to 90% of the high street price.

Pros: High quality sound with no interference
Cons: Your computer and receiver must have compatible connectors.

4) The $99 option: Go Wireless

Perhaps you don’t want your computer in the same room as your stereo. Perhaps you use a laptop and don’t like to be tied down with cables. Either way, it’s time to go wireless. There are a number of options here, but I’m just going to tell you about two:

Apple make a device called the Airport Express. It’s a wireless router with an audio output and a USB socket, so you can connect it to your printer and your stereo. It will receive audio from iTunes, or you can purchase an application called Airfoil ($25), that will send all the sound from your computer to your stereo over your wireless network. It works with any wireless-compatible Mac or PC, and it costs $99. If everybody in your family keeps music on their own laptop, this is a great way to go. I’ve had several of these for years, and they’re great.

Pros: Also functions as wireless router and connects to printer.
Cons: Computers must have wifi. Doesn’t come with audio cable (see 1, above). Who wants their printer next to their stereo?

If your computer doesn’t support wifi, we suggest the Audioengine W1. You get two modules: a “Sender” that plugs into your computer’s USB port, and a “Receiver” that connects to your stereo. Unlike the Airport Express, this device creates its own wireless network. Your computer thinks it’s an external sound card. Your stereo thinks its just another input. Nobody needs to know that there aren’t any wires. I asked two people in our Nashville office to test this. The only thing they disagreed on was who got to take it home.

Pros: Simple to set up. Everything you need is in the box.
Cons: Only works with one computer.

5) The $150-$2,000 option: Go Audiophile

The law of diminishing returns is certainly hard at work in the world of computer audio, but there are still some very real gains to be made above the $150 price-point. The idea here is to bypass the digital-audio converter (DAC) in your computer (or receiver, if you’re using a digital cable) and use a standalone device to turn the bits into sound. It’s not cheap, but it gives you access to high quality circuitry that most computer users wouldn’t want or need, and allows you to play high definition files that a lot of computers can’t handle by themselves.

The headphone output on my laptop is ok, but it distorts when I plug in the really big Beyerdynamic headphones that I use to check new recordings. I use a DigiDesign MBox Micro 2 ($200), which plugs in the USB port and gives me a cleaner, more powerful headphone output. Now, if I hear a crackle or crunch, I know it’s on the record.

If you’re looking for a home system, Kirk McElhearn at Macworld has a lot of nice things to say about the Cambridge Audio DacMagic ($429). You can read his review here.

Audiophile Audition just reviewed a pair of similar (but much smaller) audio interfaces from High Resolution Technologies priced at $149.99 and $499.95. Really, though, if you’re going to spend that sort of money, you want to hear the thing in action before you buy.

In my office, I use an Apogee Ensemble ($1,995). This is a bit excessive for a home system, but its 8 inputs and outputs let me hear (and, if I want, record) anything up to 7.1 channel surround at sample rates up to 192khz. It’s the same technology used in making a lot of our records, so I have a fairly high degree of confidence in it. The ensemble only works with a Mac but Apogee also made a 2 channel converter compatible with both macs and PCs called the Mini DAC.

There are a few more expensive devices on the market, and you might like to try them, but this is where I hold up my hands and say “I can’t hear the difference any more”.

Ok. That’s enough from me. Now its your turn. How do you listen to your digital music?

In this exclusive audio podcast Rutter talks to Edward Seckerson about how a confirmed agnostic became immersed in a world of churches and choral paeans of praise. He recalls his gentle childhood, his doodlings at an old upright piano which was only there because the previous occupants couldn’t get it out of the door. He reflects on why he has never written a musical when his love of the genre and his ear for a good tune dictated he should. And on that note, what it was like to be a tunesmith at a time when it was so deeply unfashionable to be one.

The immensely popular choral composer had his first carol – the Shepherd’s Pipe Carol – published when he was still a teenager and went on to compose more than two dozen others. The royalties got bigger and so did the commissions. His reputation quickly spread Stateside where he still conducts every year at Carnegie Hall in New York. His latest recording for Naxos brings together three large-scale compositions spanning almost two decades. His Gloria was a milestone for him, the first of his pieces to open doors in America. Magnificat is a joyous setting, a kind of Latin American fiesta with “hit” numbers for soprano gently drawing sustenance from the world of musical theatre, and Te Deum springs its own big hymnic surprise at the close.

Album details

Catalogue No. 8.572653

]]> http://blog.naxos.com/2011/04/john-rutter-talks-to-edward-seckerson-about-his-new-choral-release/feed/ 0 Choral,choral music,Gloria,John Rutter,Magnificat,Naxos,Te Deum In this exclusive audio podcast Rutter talks to Edward Seckerson about how a confirmed agnostic became immersed in a world of churches and choral paeans of praise. He recalls his gentle childhood, his doodlings at an old upright piano which was only th... In this exclusive audio podcast Rutter talks to Edward Seckerson about how a confirmed agnostic became immersed in a world of churches and choral paeans of praise. He recalls his gentle childhood, his doodlings at an old upright piano which was only there because the previous occupants couldn't get it out of the door. He reflects on why he has never written a musical when his love of the genre and his ear for a good tune dictated he should. And on that note, what it was like to be a tunesmith at a time when it was so deeply unfashionable to be one. The immensely popular choral composer had his first carol - the Shepherd's Pipe Carol - published when he was still a teenager and went on to compose more than two dozen others. The royalties got bigger and so did the commissions. His reputation quickly spread Stateside where he still conducts every year at Carnegie Hall in New York. His latest recording for Naxos brings together three large-scale compositions spanning almost two decades. His Gloria was a milestone for him, the first of his pieces to open doors in America. Magnificat is a joyous setting, a kind of Latin American fiesta with "hit" numbers for soprano gently drawing sustenance from the world of musical theatre, and Te Deum springs its own big hymnic surprise at the close. Album details Catalogue No. 8.572653 The Naxos Blog no http://blog.naxos.com/2011/03/podcast-vasily-petrenko-talks-to-edward-seckerson-about-his-latest-shostakovich-recording-3/ http://blog.naxos.com/2011/03/podcast-vasily-petrenko-talks-to-edward-seckerson-about-his-latest-shostakovich-recording-3/#comments Fri, 18 Mar 2011 11:08:20 +0000 Naxos http://blog.naxos.com/?p=5202 Read More →]]> The latest instalment in Vasily Petrenko’s highly acclaimed cycle of the Shostakovich symphonies offers a telling flashback to the composer’s youth.

Symphony No.1 – his sensational symphonic debut – is, according to Petrenko, a whistle-stop tour through revolutionary Petrograd with Shostakovich donning the masks of comedy and tragedy in practical pursuit of his already highly developed sense of irony.

As Petrenko explains to Edward Seckerson, the really big influence here is Stravinsky’s Petrushka, (as witness the devilishly flashy solo piano part) and there is something of the feel of a silent movie in the flickering imagery. Symphony No.3 “The First of May” offers a rather more prescribed view of the Revolution with its brassy choral paean redolent of those striking propaganda posters.

Album Details…
Catalogue No. 8.572396

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Catalogue No.: Naxos 8.572461

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Catalogue No.: Cedille CDR 90000 120

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Catalogue No.: Naxos 8.559648

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Catalogue No.: Dacapo 6.220535

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Catalogue No.: Naxos 8.572236

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Catalogue No.: Naxos 8.572264

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Catalogue No.: Cedille CDR 90000 118

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Catalogue No.: Pentatone PTC5186359

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Catalogue No.: Naxos 8.505228

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Catalogue No.: Naxos 8.557667

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Catalogue No.: Naxos 8.572112 and Naxos 8.570714

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Catalogue No.: Nonclassical nonclss006

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Catalogue No.: Naxos 8.570974

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Catalogue No.: Naxos 8.572378

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Catalogue No.: Naxos 8.559677

We’ll present another ‘My Favourite Naxos Recordings’ feature in July 2010. To nominate your favourite Naxos recording, simply email us by Wednesday 30 June 2010.

Please visit the Naxos Staff Recommendations Feature Page and email us today to tell us, in a few sentences, which Naxos CD or DVD most impressed you. Be sure to include the catalogue number.

Album details…
Catalogue No.: Naxos 8.572303

Baptiste Romain playing the vielle (Ensemble Leones)

Introduction: Neidhart and His “Anti-Minnesang”
Neidhart was one of the most popular and cherished Minnesingers of the late Middle Ages, even though (or more likely because) his songs mainly consisted of spoofing classical Minnesang topics rather than serving them. While his contemporary colleagues, the troubadours and Minnesingers, propagated the ideals of courtly love, Neidhart turned the established order on its head. He transferred the settings of his poems from courtly realms into an apparently rustic milieu, his central characters not comprising nobles, but peasants—or so it would seem. Superficially he entertained his audience in an unexpected way, while in his songs village-simpletons try to succeed in the tricky realms of courtly love and, of course, fail. Furthermore, he provided sex and crime through erotic or obscene incidents, as well as churlish brawls or even outright violent fights between protagonists. Hidden underneath these layers, in the background, however, Neidhart offered severe criticism of the privileged classes of Medieval society. The antagonists of his songs, the rural simpletons, he names “dörper”, which can be translated as peasants or “village dwellers”, but can also mean “villain”. However, with closer inspection they are not what they seem to be at first sight. With his songs Neidhart meant to actually address the “in-crowd” at court, the actual audience of his songs – courtiers, who overdress, behave pretentiously, and act against the virtues of moderation that should govern the noble classes. Many a listener may have choked on their own laughter when thinking about the texts.

Els Janssens-Vanmunster (Ensemble Leones)

The Frankfurt Neidhart-Fragment and Why it is Worthy of Recording
The Frankfurt Neidhart-Fragment, dated c1300, is the earliest transmission of Neidhart melodies and arguably the earliest source for music of German Minnesang in general. The source comprises eight partly damaged pages of an originally larger manuscript, the fragment containing remains of six Neidhart-songs of which five are transmitted with melodies more or less intact. Due to its poor state and its rather small compass this fragment was never counted among the major sources for Neidhart’s oeuvre. However, it is probably mainly some bad press surrounding the manuscript’s scribe that has led to its neglect among scholars and performers alike. Only later was the value of this musical source acknowledged, but never has it been recorded or performed as a whole even though the melodies prove to be of great beauty and high musical quality.

Marc Lewon singing to the vielle (Ensemble Leones)

Preparing the Recording
The fragmentary nature of the source puts major obstacles in the way of a performance from the original. Some of the songs survive almost complete in the manuscript. Most of them however, show larger lacunas in both/either text and music. Thus, before actually working on the music and performance a playable edition had to be produced from the surviving material. Careful analysis and comparison with concordances was used to fill in most of those gaps in a meaningful way in order to establish a complete version of music and text. The remaining gaps were filled in by composing and improvising the missing bits in the style of 13th century monophonic music and adapting them to the character of the melodies in the Frankfurt Fragment.

Only then could we start with the actual practical work: first by working on the texts, their meanings, their correct pronunciation, and declamation, and then turning to the music, in order to understand the modal structures of the melodies and how the rhetorics of text and melody work together to create the song. Since medieval musical sources contain no information on how instruments were applied this part of the practical reconstruction took a lot of time to grow. We worked with instruments that are known to have been used in the performance of monophonic song—mainly the vielle and the gittern. By developing modal patterns and drones around the monophonic lines we found an instrumental “language” that we employed to accompany the songs as well as create instrumental pieces for the programme. Bit by bit we conceived a musical picture of the pieces which we could put together to form a whole program around this early Minnesang source.

sample page from the Frankfurt Fragement

Recording Neidhart
It was a very satisfying task to record music that had never been recorded and in the case of some of the songs actually never been performed before—or at least not since the Middle Ages. While working on the pieces either individually or as an ensemble we unveiled layer after layer of overlapping musical and rhetorical structures and thus discovered the underlying mechanics that make these songs very special pieces of art. By working as a very small ensemble we ensured that we stayed as close to actual medieval performance practice as possible, since monophonic song was usually performed soloistically or accompanied by one or two instrumentalists at the most. Thus we could divide functions very clearly with our singer, Els Janssens-Vanmunster, performing either soloistically or accompanied by either vielle or gittern, our vielle player, Baptiste Romain, conceiving the instrumental pieces and finding accompaniments for the singers, and me, Marc Lewon, accompanying my own sung performance as well as playing in the instrumental pieces.

Very close attention was paid to the song texts and since functions between the musicians were clearly divided we could listen to each other while recording, thus ensuring that pronunciation and diction was appropriate to the music and the style of the pieces. Our recording technician, Felix Stricker, proved to be very patient with our perfectionism in getting all the aspects of this special repertory right and helped us find a good balance between the rhetoric of the text and the beauty of the music.

Neidhart in Codex Manesse

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Catalogue No.: Dorian Sono Luminus DSL-92111

MORRICONE CONDUCTS MORRICONE

Susanna Rigacci, soprano • Ulrich Herkenhoff, panpipes  • Gilda Buttà, piano • Bavarian Radio Choir  • Munich Radio Symphony Orchestra • Ennio Morricone, conductor

EuroArts 2054698 AVAILABLE IN EUROPE, AMERICAS, AUSTRALIA, NEW ZEALAND, DUBAI, SOUTH AFRICA, HONG KONG.

Morricone is well-known to moviegoers: his soundtracks are invariably warmly melodic and superbly suited to the films they grace. He has composed more than 400 film scores, including The Good The Bad and The Ugly, The Untouchables, Cinema Paradiso and The Mission. Morricone has been nominated for several Oscars. This DVD contains a representative sample of his rich creative output and features a selection of his most famous film music including The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, Once Upon a Time in the West, A Fistful of Dynamite, Once Upon a Time in America, The Mission, Cinema Paradiso, The Life and Death of Richard III, Investigation Of A Citizen Under Suspicion, The Untouchables and lots more.

Morricone’s music also features on several other albums available through Naxos.

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Catalogue No.: Ondine ODE1149-2

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Catalogue No.: Naxos 8.572405

Sessions took place 26–30 April, 2010 at the library of Wittem Monastery (Klooster Wittem), The Netherlands, with Florian B. Schmidt, musical producer. For the Ysaÿe work, the Fine Arts Quartet was joined by the Streichersolisten der Deutsch-Niederländischen KammerPhilharmonie, conducted by Otis Klöber. This CD will be the Fine Arts Quartet’s 10th recording for Naxos.

Fine Arts Quartet Biography & Discography

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Catalogue No.: Delos DE3404

The charismatic St Petersburg-born Vasily Petrenko has really been turning things around at the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra since he took over as Principal Conductor in 2005. With both standards and audiences on the up he has embarked upon his first major recording project – to record all 15 Shostakovich Symphonies for the Naxos label. The two previous releases have received tremendous notices and in this exclusive podcast he talks to Edward Seckerson about the project in general and the latest release – the war-torn 8th Symphony – in particular.

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Catalogue No. Naxos 8.572392

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Catalogue No.: Naxos 8.660241

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Catalogue No.: Naxos 8.572439

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Catalogue No.: Soli Deo Gloria SDG165

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Catalogue No.: Naxos 8.572197

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Catalogue No.: Canary Classics CC08

Philip Fisher. Photo © Rita Castle

Sean Hickey: Philip, you’ve recorded the Handel Keyboard Suites for Naxos. Despite a huge resurgence in the composer’s opera, oratorio and vocal music in the past few years, most people are not familiar with his keyboard music. How did you decide to record this repertoire and why not the obligatory Bach?

Philip Edward Fisher: While Bach’s keyboard works have been established as staples of the piano repertoire for many years, Handel’s seem to have been viewed almost exclusively as belonging to the harpsichord. This has always struck me as strange…the two composers were, after all, exact contemporaries, and these suites in particular translate just as effectively to the piano as do Bach’s. I first came across them more than fifteen years ago, and quickly grew to love them for their great beauty and visceral, down-to-earth qualities that are so unique to Handel’s music. When the opportunity to record for Naxos came along, the project seemed to align itself well with the label’s creative and innovative programming — and it felt to me infinitely more stimulating a challenge than simply to tackle works that had been recorded countless times before, however great.

SH: Fascinating, and we appreciate anyone who looks into the byways of this vast repertoire. It seems silly to put Handel in a category such as this, but it seems many great composers have parts of their output that are neglected, often unjustly. Handel for his keyboard music, Vivaldi for vocal music, etc. Are there more Handel suites and do you have plans to record them?

PEF: Well, I just finished recording the other four suites of the set this past September. That disc is in post-production right now, and soon to be released on Naxos. Those eight suites make up the set that is often referred to as Handel’s “Great Keyboard Suites”. There are quite a few others, composed later in his life, but none of them are quite as substantial in nature as the “great” suites. Having said that, there is some beautiful music to be found there, and I certainly wouldn’t rule out recording some of them in the future.

SH: Given your concertizing and other recordings, it certainly wouldn’t be fair to label you a specialist in the Baroque repertoire, simply because you tackle music from the 17th to 21st centuries. Is there a period that you gravitate toward more than others, and any composers or works from that period that particularly inspire you?

PEF: You’re right that I don’t really specialize in any particular period, and I must admit it’s not something I have felt the inclination to do as yet. I feel a strong connection to a wide variety of works and composers, and I would find it hard to have the level of focus necessary to specialize in a specific style or period to that extent…..although I have tremendous respect for those that do.

I could probably answer the second part of your question differently on an almost daily basis! There definitely are works I feel a deep connection to and particularly love to perform — Rachmaninov’s 3rd Concerto, for example (which I’m excited to be performing with the wonderful Longwood Symphony in Boston this May!) — but in general I am inspired by a huge range of composers and periods, and I’m particularly passionate about immersing myself in contemporary music as well as the classics. I must admit that I don’t really listen to so much piano music….I’m crazy about the symphonic medium — and it’s also not just classical music that can be a tremendous source of inspiration for me!

SH: What can we expect from you next, in terms of performances, recordings and project and what would you like to see happen next in your career? Any conductors or collaborators on your radar?

PEF: Other than the second disc in the Handel set, soon to be released, I’m excited to be recording a disc for the Chandos label this coming summer — a disc of works by the ‘Mighty Five’ handful of Russian composers. It will be an interesting combination of very popular works and rarely-heard gems; a challenge I’m particularly looking forward to.

In terms of future performances, I have a number of concerto appearances lined up, and I’ll be taking a recital program based around the Handel suites and various works by other composers inspired by Handel to a number of venues around the world, including New York, London and Birmingham, UK (where the Handel disc was recorded). As well as playing solo recitals and concertos, I love to collaborate with other performers, and I have been lucky enough to work with many up to this point — so I’m looking forward to many more of those experiences.

Where my ‘radar’ is concerned, I am particularly keen to work with the CBSO, my hometown orchestra! It meant a great deal to me to return there to record the Handel disc, particularly when the Symphony Hall is such a special venue, and it would be an even more incredible feeling to return and work with what is a fantastic orchestra! Stay tuned!

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Catalogue No.: Naxos 8.559607

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Catalogue No.: Naxos 8.572190

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Catalogue No.: Naxos 8.508013

On February 3, The Canadian Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences (CARAS) honored artists from labels ATMA Classique, New Amsterdam Records, and Centrediscs with eight JUNO Nominations.

Artists from ATMA Classique picked up three nominations in the category of “Best Classical Album of the Year: Large Ensemble or Soloist”: Yannick Nézet-Séguin & Orchestre Métropolitain for Bruckner Symphony No. 8 (ACD2 2513); pianist-conductor Louis Lortie and the Orchestre symphonique de Québec for Mendelssohn Piano Concerto Nos. 1 & 2/Symphony No. 5, “Reformation” (ACD2 2617); and Les Violins du Roy for Bartók (ACD2 2576). Soprano Karina Gauvin was also nominated in the category of “Best Classical album of the Year – Choral or Vocal Performance” for her ATMA Classique recording Porpora Arias (ACD2 2590).

Two Canadian composers took home nominations in the category of “Best Classical Composition” for their works on Centrediscs albums. Marjan Mozetich was nominated for his compositions Angels in Flight and the title track of the Centrediscs album Lament in the Trampled Garden (CMCCD 14009). Composer Stephen Chatman garnered a nomination for Earth Songs (CMCCD 14709).

Finally, CARAS honored New York-based jazz artist Darcy James Argue with a “Best Contemporary Jazz Album of the Year” nomination for his New Amsterdam Records recording Infernal Machines: Secret Society (NWAM017).

Naxos AudioBooks titles Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy and Darwin: In a Nutshell, written by Peter Whitfield, have been announced as finalists in the 2010 Audies® Award competition. Nominated in the Classic category, Anton Lesser reads Sterne’s most famous novel with “humor and brio” (Robert McCrum, The Observer). Released in celebration of the 200th anniversary of the birth of the controversial English naturalist, Darwin: In a Nutshell, narrated by author Peter Whitfield, has been nominated in the Original Works category. The winners will be presented on May 25 at the Fifteenth Annual Audies® Gala in New York City.

The Audies®, sponsored by the Audio Publishers Association (APA), is the premier awards program in the United States recognizing distinction in audiobooks and spoken word entertainment. Through The Audies® award competition, publishers are able to enter titles in various categories for recognition of achievement. Finalists are selected and, from that group of finalists, one winner is awarded.

Since 1994, Naxos AudioBooks has offered key works of Western literature in an engaging, faithful manner. Recording classic literature with classical music and exceptional talent has enabled Naxos AudioBooks to develop award winning, state-of-the-art productions.

Naxos AudioBook Audies® Finalists:

Peter Whitfield’s In a Nutshell: Darwin is exactly what it claims to be. In a little over an hour, Whitfield presents a biography of Charles Darwin and an overview of his life’s work. The “nutshell” part of the title may suggest that the production rushes through the facts, but that’s not the case. Whitfield has a pleasant voice, and the prose is smooth and interesting. The audio is a leisurely experience that can be likened to taking a walk while discussing Darwin and his theory of evolution. This is an hour well spent; listeners will learn much, after which they can decide whether or not to delve into the subject in more detail.  – S.D.D., AudioFile

‘I have never done anything so hard’ a very pale Anton Lesser is said to have declared on completing his brilliant new recording of ‘Tristram Shandy’. A classic actor who’s voiced everyone from Homer to Hamlet, Lesser seems only to open his mouth for wisdom to come out. But then the problems with performing Laurence Sterne’s eighteenth-century classic of comic metafiction are well rehearsed. As sidetracks sprout from sidetracks, keeping up with the garrulous hero’s chaotic autobiography is one thing. But how the hell are you supposed to read out loud a blank page, or a squiggle? Here sound effects place you firmly at Shandy’s writing desk, while Lesser’s unflaggingly engaged reading insists on the vivid characterization beneath the stylistic play. Bella Todd, TimeOut

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Catalogue No.: Chandos CHAN 3167

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Catalogue No.: Vienna Philharmonic WPH-L-H-2009

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Catalogue No.: Hanssler Classic CD98.229

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Catalogue No.: Ondine ODE1157-2

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Catalogue No.: Naxos 8.572103

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Catalogue No.: Naxos 8.559651

American composer Jennifer Higdon took home the Award for Best Classical Contemporary Composition for her Percussion Concerto (London Philharmonic Orchestra/Marin Alsop). This is Ms. Higdon’s second Grammy®; she won in 2004 for her Concerto for Orchestra/City Scape which featured the Atlanta Symphony.

Veteran Producer Steven Epstein took home the award for Producer of the Year, Classical, for his work on Bernstein’s MASS (Marin Alsop, Jubilant Sykes, Morgan State University Choir, Peabody Children’s Chorus & Baltimore Symphony Orchestra); Corigliano’s A Dylan Thomas Trilogy (Leonard Slatkin, George Mabry, Sir Thomas Allen, Nashville Symphony Chorus & Orchestra); and Fauré’s Piano Quintets (Fine Arts Quartet & Cristina Oritz).

In 2008, the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra, led by music director Marin Alsop, a Leonard Bernstein protégé, performed a series of sold-out concerts of MASS in Baltimore and in Washington, D.C. In addition to Baltimore and D.C. events, the BSO performed MASS in New York City at Carnegie Hall as part of the citywide festival Bernstein: The Best of All Possible Worlds, and as part of The Weill Music Institute at Carnegie Hall’s Bernstein Mass Project, at the United Place Theater in Upper Manhattan where 500 New York City public school children sang in the chorus of MASS alongside the BSO. These performances and the associated studio recording featured nearly 250 performers, including baritone Jubilant Sykes as the Celebrant, the Morgan State University Chorus, the Peabody Children’s Chorus and a stellar Broadway cast of 20 performing as the “street people.” This year, Ms. Alsop has taken Bernstein’s MASS Project to the Southbank Centre in London, where a nine-month-long series of workshops will culminate in two performances of the work in London’s Royal Festival Hall on July 10 and 11, 2010.

Composer Jennifer Higdon has been hailed by the Washington Post as “a savvy, sensitive composer with a keen ear, an innate sense of form and a generous dash of pure esprit,” the League of American Orchestras reports that she is one of America’s most frequently performed composers. Higdon has received awards from the Guggenheim Foundation, the American Academy of Arts & Letters (two awards), the Pew Fellowship in the Arts, Meet-the-Composer, the National Endowment for the Arts, and ASCAP. In addition she has received grants from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts. Higdon has been a Featured Composer at festivals including Tanglewood, Vail, Norfolk, Winnipeg and Cabrillo. She has served as Composer-in-Residence with the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra (2005-06 season), the Green Bay Symphony Orchestra (2006-07 season), and the Philadelphia Orchestra (2007-08). Her works have been recorded on over two dozen CDs. In Spring of 2003 Telarc released blue cathedral with the Atlanta Symphony, Robert Spano, conducting, on a disc that made the Classical Billboard charts. In 2004 the Atlanta Symphony released the Grammy-winning Higdon: Concerto for Orchestra/City Scape. December 2006 saw the release of a compact disc of Higdon’s chamber music on Naxos (Naxos 8559298), as well as a Grammy-winning recording with eighth blackbird. During the 2008-09 season, Naxos released Higdon’s Short Stories performed by the Ancia Saxophone Quartet (Naxos 8559616) and Koch released a recording of Higdon’s flute and chamber works. The 2009-10 season will feature two releases from Telarc, Higdon’s Dooryard Bloom and The Singing Rooms. She currently holds the Milton L. Rock Chair in Composition Studies at The Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia.

The London Philharmonic Orchestra is recognized as one of the world’s great orchestras, and following Sir Thomas Beecham’s founding tenure the ensemble’s Principal Conductorship has been passed from one celebrated musician to another. The LPO has long been embraced by the recording, broadcasting and film industries as well. In 2005 the orchestra began releasing live, studio and archive recordings on its own label, LPO, which are distributed worldwide.

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Catalogue No.: Naxos 8.572458

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Catalogue No.: Naxos 8.559609

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Catalogue No.: Soli Deo Gloria SDG177

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Catalogue No.: CSO-Resound 901916

Founded in 2005 as the successor of the Cannes Classical Awards, the MIDEM Classical Awards 2010 recognize creativity, innovation of repertoire and artistic excellence in classical music. Each year, a prestigious international Jury made up of the leading specialist magazines, radios and organizations, comes together to recognize top artists and recordings of the year. The Classical Download Award honors a download site which has garnered a devoted following among classical music lovers and aficionados—whether the site be a commercial or a non-commercial one, and whether it be the site of an Orchestra, a Choir, soloist, ensemble or the site of a label or a distributor.

“I speak for the entire ClassicsOnline team when I say that we are most honored and gratified to be recognized by the judges at MIDEM for our efforts,” says Jack Campbell, ClassicsOnline.com General Manager. “We are serious about our website, enjoy giving a good customer experience, and are fundamentally driven by our love of music. We have a great deal of enhancements planned, and it is our greatest goal to become the definitive source for classical music on the internet.”

In November 2008, Naxos announced that music enthusiasts and audiophiles worldwide could now visit www.ClassicsOnline.com (COL)—the leading online, independent classical music store—and begin downloading from the universe’s largest online classical music catalog (currently, 33,254 DRM-free albums) at 320 kbps. ClassicsOnline has continued to be ranked among the best music download sites offering classical music, with writer Liz Coville recently noting, “ClassicsOnline is a satisfying source of music downloads for classical music fans, carrying more than 31,000 CDs and more than 560,000 tracks…” In 2008, San Francisco Examiner writer, professor, and musician Scott Foglesong wrote, “ClassicsOnline is a gracious, friendly store with an excellent search engine and a deep catalog.”

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Catalogue No.: Naxos 8.559620

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Catalogue No.: Naxos 8.554179

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Catalogue No.: Naxos 8.559668