Composer-pianist Nikolai Medtner (1880-1951) has sometimes been labelled, like his compatriot and friend Sergei Rachmaninov, as being ‘born too late’. The late-Romantic idiom in which they both wrote, well into…
Category: Recordings
The English Tenor: a debut disc from Scott Robert Shaw
The English Tenor might seem a rather odd title for a disc which is sung by a tenor who was born in Australia, trained at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music…
New College: Commissions & Premieres
A disc of commissions and premieres may seem a bold decision for a record company wishing to maximise on sales potential. But this is the choir of New College, Oxford,…
Maltworms and Milkmaids: a new recording of Warlock’s orchestral music and songs
During his tragically short life, Peter Warlock – the pen name used by Philip Heseltine (1894-1930) – composed around 119 solo songs, 23 choral works (some unaccompanied and others with…
Joel Frederiksen and Ensemble Phoenix Munich offer the lyric mastery of Walther von der Vogelweide
In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, the aesthetic and songs of courtly love travelled to Germany from Provence and northern France. Minnesinger, like their Romance counterparts, composed both the texts…
Anime Immortali: Franco Fagioli offers a portrait of Mozart and the castrato voice
Mozart probably isn’t the first composer whom one thinks of in association with eighteenth-century castrati. But, for over two decades – from Mitridate, re di Ponto K87/74a, written for the…
Uplifting performances of Orchestral Anthems from Merton College, Oxford
Christmas, Easter and specific feast days or celebrations provide opportunities for cathedrals and large parish churches with the necessary resources to perform liturgical works with orchestral accompaniment. All the music…
Kenneth Leighton: Every Living Creature – a revelatory and truly rewarding disc by Londinium
At the opening of Kenneth Leighton’s Symphony No.3 ‘Laudes musicae’ (1984), the tenor soloist sings the composer’s own hymn of praise: “O yes, I must sing! And so must you…
The choral music of Ivo Antognini is superbly sung by the Choir of Trinity College, Cambridge
On this disc of a cappella choral music by the Swiss-born Ivo Antognini (born 1962), issued earlier this year by Hyperion, the Choir of Trinity College, Cambridge yet again demonstrate…
Martinů’s The Greek Passion (1954-57): as relevant as ever
In 1954-57 Bohuslav Martinů composed The Greek Passion, an opera about Greek refugees seeking a bit of land in a nearby (likewise Greek) village where they might work and live,…