Updates from the world's leading classical music label
The year under the spotlight is 1888. The date, the same as the publication of this blog: 14 August. The featured inventor is Thomas Edison, to whom companies like Naxos owe their very existence. The new technology: the phonograph. Not brand spanking new, though. Edison had got his ground-breaking invention out of the blocks eleven Read More …
As July turns to August many of us will be enjoying the sunshine and thinking of vacations past and present. For music lovers, few melodies conjure the languid spirit of the season as effectively as Summertime by George Gershwin, from his 1934 opera Porgy and Bess (8.110287-88) which is, paradoxically, a tale of hardship and Read More …
The 2015 BBC Promenade Concerts, the world’s largest music festival based at London’s Royal Albert Hall, kick off this week and run for the next two months. The first four weeks of performances sport a wealth of exciting music, opening on July 17 with Walton’s big-boned Belshazzar’s Feast (8.555869) and closing with Messiaen’s Turangalîla Symphony Read More …
I was eleven years old when I paid my first visit to a Madame Tussaud’s waxworks. Lookalike film stars and world leaders held some interest for a youngster, but the much anticipated highlight was a visit to the Chamber of Horrors. The display of instruments of torture had the desired effect on the visitor as Read More …
The ease of global communication nowadays brings home the frequency of natural disasters and their tragic consequences. The only positive offshoot of such terrible occurrences seems to lie in the artistic reflections that composers have made in trying to capture these events, born of the less comforting side of Mother Nature. Picking through the catalogue Read More …
‘New music’ doesn’t have to mean cacophonous ‘modern’ music: it can of course just be music we haven’t heard before. Nor does ‘modern’ music have to be particularly new. Even though we’ve had over 80 years to get used to Anton Webern’s Concerto for Nine Instruments, Op. 24 (1934), it can still seem like the Read More …
This week’s blog turned out to be Plan B. I’d originally looked forward to sharing with you the results of a bit of research into music at airports. Naxos has offices all over the world, but it’s headquartered in Hong Kong. That’s where I work, so I frequently find myself in the city’s rather splendid Read More …
When is a concerto not a concerto? We’re all familiar with the term when it implies a soloist in a tug-of-tunes display, riding atop a generally subservient orchestra; and works such as the Brahms Double Concerto and the Beethoven Triple are a self-explanatory extension of that arrangement. The Baroque concerto grosso also neatly reflects the Read More …
China’s Cultural Revolution (1966–76) was a turbulent decade that took no prisoners in sweeping away the ‘Four Olds’—old customs, old habits, old ideas and old culture. As far as artistic matters were concerned, the dictat meant that western music was suddenly a no-no in the new socio-political order, with practitioners frequently uprooted, relocated and rigorously Read More …
The Day after Christmas Day, Boxing Day, St Stephen’s Day, the Day of the Wren. Wherever you are, and whatever event you may yourself celebrate on 26 December each year, I personally always try to spare a thought for the discarded and dispossessed. I’m thinking, for a change, not of the unfortunate condition of swathes Read More …