Updates from the world's leading classical music label
Based in the United States, Joan Tower is one of today’s most successful composers. A 2007 Naxos release of her orchestral music (8.559328) won 3 GRAMMY awards. Rick Phillips introduces the latest disc to feature three more of her fascinating and varied compositions for orchestra: Stroke, the Violin Concerto and Chamber Dance. Tower’s flexible style 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 …
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 …
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 …