This Nelsons cycle started with a bang – namely the most electrifying recording of the Tenth Symphony we’ve had in almost half a century. The excellence continues. In dramatic contrast to Mikhail Pletnev’s intriguing but decidedly odd…
You would expect Pletnev – a complicated and elusive character at the best of times – to offer a radical re-think of the renegade Fourth Symphony. And he does. Whether it works or not is another matter…
Volume Two of John Wilson’s “celebration” (for that’s what this series surely is) of Richard Rodney Bennett’s manifold gifts as a composer – and once more the choices rejoice in his creative shape shifting. The accomplished jazzer…
Reflecting back over my years in journalism my thoughts turned recently to interviews (that key component of a journalist’s armoury) and the sheer volume of opportunities that had come my way over the years both in print…
After his disappointingly urbane account of the Second Symphony “Resurrection” the twilit, child-like, world of the Fourth would, on paper, seem far better suited to the cultured Royal Concertgebouw sound as favoured and actively encouraged by Daniele…
As this collection and its accompanying notes reminds us, the music came first and the poetry followed for Emily Dickinson. Like all respectable young American women of a certain social standing she studied piano and voice. And…
The opening movement of Elgar’s Second Symphony has brought great diversity of approach over the decades. How to interpret that tempo marking “Allegro vivace e nobilmente”? Exuberance, pace, and nobility. Gardner steers the middle path between expansive…
They say we can’t get enough of our heroes – but I am seriously wondering if at this time next when someone mentions the name Leonard Bernstein my response might be: “Who?” I jest, of course. I…
There wasn’t much that Leonard Bernstein didn’t try his hand at at least once – and wanting, needing, to experience it all applied as surely to the music he wrote as to the music he conducted. “Finding…
It’s fun trawling for online definitions of PERCUSSION. Most are light years behind the curve in evaluating or even just attempting to describe music’s at once most basic and highly sophisticated family of instruments. A phrase like…
