Updates from the world's leading classical music label
It will soon be the season of Christmas carol services, managed somehow or other this year by technical wizardry in defiance of Covid-19. It set me thinking not only about the traditional carols I grew up with, but also the plentiful variety of alternative music that has been written over the centuries to mark the 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, released in April 2015. View album details Catalogue Read More …
Six centuries. Ten composers. One text. This week’s blog is a journey that savours the flavours of settings of Gloria in excelsis Deo (Glory to God in the highest), the opening text of the Gloria section of music that has been written for use during the celebration of the Mass in churches down the ages. Read More …
I started musing on the date of the posting of this blog, 8 November, as its initial focus. But I soon found myself sidetracked by some interesting snippets that popped up en route. At least I ended up gathering some hopefully attractive music samples for you in my wake. If you’re ready to go walkabout Read More …
Mozart is reckoned to have posited that silence, paradoxically, is the most powerful element in music. And I once read that, while there’s one particular zone of your brain that is stimulated when an object starts to produce a sound, it’s a different part that reacts when a clock, for example, ceases its tick-tock and Read More …
Well, I think I might be if I knew that the three obelisks generally referred to as Cleopatra’s Needles, sited in London, Paris and New York, had nothing to do with me, perhaps the most famous queen of all time. Constructed a thousand years before Cleopatra’s lifetime, they at least stand as a popular memento Read More …
Icelandic composer Jón Leifs (1899–1968) made a big noise, literally, at one of this year’s BBC Promenade Concerts. How so? With a rare performance of his Organ Concerto Op. 7. Completed in 1930 after a 13-year gestation, the work was premièred in Germany in 1941 by the Berlin Philharmonic with Leifs himself as the soloist. 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 …