Category: Recordings

In 1770, during an extended tour of France and Italy to observe the ‘present state of music’ in those two countries, the English historian, critic and composer Charles Burney spent a month in Naples – a city which he noted (in The Present State of Music in France and Italy (1771)) ‘has so long been regarded as the centre of harmony, and the fountain from whence genius, taste, and learning, have ?owed to every other part of Europe.’

At last, Herbert Howells’s Missa Sabrinensis (1954) with David Hill conducting the Bach Choir, with whom David Willcocks performed the piece at the Royal Festival Hall in 1982. Willcocks commissioned this Mass for the Three Choirs Festival in Worcester in 1954, when Howells himself conducted the premiere.

The life of Alessandro Stradella was characterised by turbulence, adventure and amorous escapades worthy of an opera libretto. Indeed, at least seven composers have turned episodes from the 17th-century Italian composer’s colourful life into operatic form, the best known being Flotow whose three-act comic opera based on the Lothario’s misadventures was first staged in Hamburg in 1844.

In 1877, Ethel Smyth, aged just nineteen, travelled to Leipzig to begin her studies at the German town’s Music Conservatory, having finally worn down the resistance of her father, General J.H. Smyth.

This new recording of excerpts from Wagner’s Der Ring des Niebelungen is quite exceptional – and very unusual for this kind of disc. The words might be missing, but the fact they are proves to have rather the opposite effect. It is one of the most operatic of orchestral Wagner discs I have come across.

Simon Rattle has never particularly struck me as a complex conductor. He is not, for example, like Furtw‰ngler, Maderna, Boulez or Sinopoli – all of whom brought a breadth of learning and a knowledge of composition to bear on what they conducted.

AntonÌn Dvo?·k Requiem op.89 (1890) with Jakub Hr?öa conducting the Prague Philharmonic Orchestra. The Requiem was one of the last concerts Ji?Ì B?lohl·vek conducted before his death and he had been planning to record it as part of his outstanding series for Decca.

Mirga Graûinyt?-Tyla conducts the music of Raminta äerkönyt? with the Kremerata Baltica, in this new release from Deutsche Grammophon.

“How weary we are of wandering/Is this perhaps death?” These closing words of ‘Im Abendrot’, the last of Richard Strauss’s Vier letzte Lieder, and the composer’s own valedictory work, now seem unusually poignant since they stand as an epitaph to Mariss Jansons’s final Strauss recording.