The Eighth is often the Mahler symphony that seems to inspire conductors who fall short in the others. That’s a sweeping generalisation, of course, but look no further than a conductor like Solti whose Mahler always struck…

The dedication on this album reads ‘In Memoriam Lars Vogt’ – and that gives it a special resonance. Christian Tetzslaff and his sister Tanja Tetzslaff made music with him together and independently on many occasions and in…

Respighi’s obsession with the ‘Eternal City’ is writ spectacularly large in his three symphonic evocations and maybe in some subliminal way an Italian orchestra like this one can identify better than most with the mythic elements, pictorial…

Like so much of what I’ve heard of Santtu’s work of late this Mahler 2 is decidedly hit and miss – with the emphasis, I regret to say, very much on the latter. It’s strange how the…

It’s strange, but after decades of neglect the music of Florence Price seems uncannily familiar. The soulful themes with their American Deep South tinta, the trumpet-led brass chorales, the jazzy jubas – this is Price’s musical milieu…

With Shostakovich’s word-setting what happens between the words is, more than with any other composer I know (with the exception of Britten to whom the 14th Symphony is dedicated), reflected in what is happening between the notes.…

What a shrewd coupling: seemingly unlikely bedfellows united not just by dint of having both been written in Italy (the Walton, of course, at his retreat in Ischia) but by a certain something in the water…the Mediterranean,…

It is refreshing to encounter a singer – Robyn Allegra Parton – whose gifts of curation are it would seem fully equal to her musicianship. You might argue that the album’s artwork is a sprinkling of gold-leaf…

Vanska’s Mahler 9 arrives in the wake of Rattle’s recent Bayrischen Rundfunk recording – his third of the piece – and perhaps the quality most found wanting by comparison with Rattle is warmth. It’s true that this…

As with the first instalment of Nézet-Séguin’s symphonic Rachmaninov there’s a very real sense here of this music coming home, of a sound, a style, an ethos, in playing it that somehow – subliminally – gets passed…