Updates from the world's leading classical music label
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 …
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 …
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 …
This month’s new Naxos High Definition Audio Disc features the recently-restored Cavaillé-Coll organ which is now housed in the Lyon Auditorium. It’s played here by Vincent Warnier in an all-Saint-Saëns programme. Dating back to 1878, this huge instrument was relocated, re-built and then lovingly restored to its original glory in 2013. Saint-Saëns enjoyed a long 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 …
For many people, the week running up to Christmas Day is a frenzy of last-minute shopping, gift wrapping and chestnut peeling, not forgetting rehearsals for Carol Services and Midnight Masses. This week’s blog post, however, skirts the tinsel and mistletoe to look back at some of the more sober events that took place in this Read More …
The music of the Spanish-American composer Leonardo Balada defies categorisation, switching between styles with an easy confidence that continually surprises and delights. Rick Phillips takes us on a tour of this latest Naxos disc of Balada’s music, which visits soldiers and steelworkers alike in their vivid sound worlds. View album details of Leonardo Balada’s Symphony Read More …
Australia’s Great Barrier Reef, one of the planet’s greatest beauties, stretches for some 2,900 kilometres off the Queensland coast and provides the habitat for a cornucopia of corals, fish and sea mammals. Yet we read how swathes are being slowly decimated by climate change and pollution and, in this particular case, what the eye doesn’t Read More …