Francesco Scarlatti (ed. Webber)– Il Daniele nel lago de’ Leoni. Handel – Dicit Dominus, HWV 232. Armonico Consort;, Christopher Monks (conductor). Wigmore Hall, London, 10 January 2025 The rarest of the rare, perhaps, here: an oratorio […]
Are we a land without music? Julian Leeks asks that very question in his new podcast of that name from Sound World. There are, at the time of writing, six episodes covering a wide variety […]
Pierre Boulez – Éclat George Benjamin – Interludes and Aria from ‘Lessons in Love and Violence’ (World Premiere) Brahms – Symphony No. 4 in E minor, Op. 98 Boulez 100, Rattle 70: both nice and […]
I was privileged to hear Fuget rehearse Lully in the Versalles Chapel. It really is a phenomenal experience, and all credit for the label engineers here for capturing the famous acoustic so well for this […]
It is great to see attention falling on Welsh composer Grace Williams (1906-77). She was a pupil of Egon Wellesz and Ralph Vaughan Williams. The ever-enterprising Lyrita label released a fabulous compact disc of […]
This is a tremendous coupling. We have been looking at quite a lot of Respighi of late (orchestral works from Wuppertal; orchestral transcriptions of Bach and Rachmaninnov from Liège; his operas Maria Egiziaca and La […]
In his role as Artist-in-Residence at the Dresdner Philharmonie, I heard Gautier Capuçon in the Kupturpalast in Dresden in September 2023. The orchestra was conducted by Kahchun Wong, the Principal Guest Conductor there and now […]
A real reminder of Massenet’s operatic genius here. This is the story of Salomé, later injected into operatic history books by Richard Strauss, but here set by Jules Massenet in a four-act opera with a […]
It seems amazing to me that I have not yet featured any music by the Finnish composer Kalevi Aho (born 1949). These three quartets date from 1967, 1970 and 1971; Aho’s First Symphony was born […]
Firstly, what a beautiful disc this is, from each and every angle: the performer, one of the most experienced tenors active today, James Gilchist, with a superb pianist, Anna Tilbrook, captured in Chandos’ trademark excellence […]
