Category: Recordings

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.

Latest in the highly acclaimed Hyperion series of Ralph Vaughan Williams symphonies, Symphonies no 3 and 4, with Martyn Brabbins and the BBC Symphony Orchestra, recorded in late 2018 after a series of live performances.

This Accentus release of J.S. Bach’s Christmas Oratorio, recorded live on 15/16th December 2018 at St. Thomas’s Church Leipzig, takes the listener ‘back to Bach’, so to speak.

Writing in April 1923 in The Bookman, of which he was editor, about Ethel Smyth’s The Boatswain’s Mate (1913-14) – the most frequently performed of the composer’s own operas during her lifetime – Rodney Bennett reflected on the principal reasons for the general neglect of Smyth’s music in her native land.