Updates from the world's leading classical music label
George Frideric Handel: impresario, performer, composer. The Great Bear, as he was referred to in his time, remains an Ursa Major of the musical firmament to this day. Raymond Bisha illustrates Handel’s creative genius with Vol. 2 in pianist Philip Edward Fisher’s recordings of his Keyboard Suites. View album details of Handel’s Keyboard Suites Vol. Read More …
Raymond Bisha presents a new recording of Couperin’s Les Nations, a truly international affair with the French composer’s genius expertly realised by Juilliard Baroque, a New York-based Who’s Who of early instrument performers. They bring to life the work’s four extended suites which meld French and Italian styles and are dedicated to four major European Read More …
Raymond Bisha introduces us to the eclectic and exuberant imagination of the American composer Aaron Jay Kernis, whose works are inhabited by a host of influences—musical, historical and personal. This new disc of three of his diverse compositions features deliciously titled works in delectable performances. View album details of Aaron Jay Kernis’ Three Flavors / Read More …
Raymond Bisha introduces the latest Naxos recording of the Elora Festival Singers in performances of Poulenc’s unaccompanied choral works. Transcending a backcloth of geopolitical and personal turmoil, these gems marry a delicacy of form with harmonic pungency, described by conductor Noel Edison as “like putting a stained glass to song.” View album details of Francis Read More …
Charles Ives, Aaron Copland, Leonard Bernstein—names such as these are familiar friends. But what constituted the musical bedrock from which they sprang? In this week’s podcast, conductor JoAnn Falletta discusses with Mark Simmons the vital contribution that composer John Knowles Paine made to the burgeoning roots of American music in the run-up to the twentieth Read More …
There’s certainly something impressively expansive about the American composer Alan Hovhaness. The numbers alone command respect: having lived for almost 90 years, he notched up 434 compositions, including 67 symphonies. Conductor Gerard Schwarz weighs in with an equally admirable discography of more than 350 recordings, nine of them thankfully dedicated to Hovhaness’ music. In this Read More …
Once in a while you hear such incredibly beautiful music for the first time that you just can’t understand why it has remained under wraps for so long. The Violin Concertos Nos. 1 and 2 by the Italian-born composer Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco are a case in point. Originally championed in the 1920s and 30s by no less Read More …
In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the piano music of Robert Schumann was under-appreciated—viewed as bitty, light and flighty, more like parlour music fare. But today it’s recognised as some of the most creative and original piano music ever composed. To Schumann, music represented a state of mind where mood, atmosphere, colour and Read More …
In this week’s podcast, Raymond Bisha introduces the 4-CD collection of the complete piano works of Mieczysław Weinberg—from teenage mazurkas written in his native Poland through to his last works for the instrument composed in Moscow. En route, Tashkent, Shostakovich and the Head of the post-Stalin KGB all play a part in the fascinating story of Read More …
In this week’s podcast, Raymond Bisha introduces a disc of Spanish guitar music that goes to the heart of that nation’s musical culture, presenting four works by the prolific Madrid-born composer Federico Moreno Torroba. This new release is the first of two volumes devoted to the composer’s complete works for guitar and orchestra. It features performances Read More …