Endowed with a prodigious and versatile musical talent, the harpsichordist’ George Malcolm, brought a consummate polish to both performance and recording. Despite working at the vanguard of historically informed performance, he did not pursue an aesthetic of zealous purity but concentrated rather on refinement of effect to communicate the spirit of the composition. Happy to […]
In 1936, the English composer and writer, Constant Lambert, described Igor Markevitch as ‘the leading figure of the Franco-Russian school’. As a composer he had been commissioned by Diaghilev and performed by the likes of Alfred Cortot and Roger Désormière but his posthumous reputation largely rests on his prowess as a conductor, a profession he […]
Recorded for the ASV label in 1990, this collection of Ravel’s piano music has never previously been released complete. Now reissued for the first time in more than a decade, this set presents not the kind of coolly objective view of the fastidious composer-craftsman to which modern recordings have made us accustomed but more of […]
Over the course of the 1990s, the Scottish pianist Gordon Fergus-Thompson recorded five albums of Scriabin on the ASV label. Long unavailable, they are compiled and reissued here for the first time complete with original booklet essays by Bryce Morrison. Interviewed in 1995, at roughly the halfway point of the series, Fergus-Thompson remarked that he […]
Stravinsky’s ground-breaking trilogy of Diaghilev-commissions plus a scandalous Bartók ballet, treated to sumptuous late-70s Decca engineering and the Vienna Philharmonic sound. Christoph von Dohnányi has long been considered one of the most versatile conductors of our time, making a name for himself in particular with the works of Romanticism and the Second Viennese School. From […]
A landmark collection of medieval music, available for the first time in many years. The ‘Carmina Burana’ is the most famous of all treasuries of medieval Latin and Middle High German poetry, named after the Bavarian monastery where it was compiled and preserved. It is best known today for Carl Orff’s hour-long selection from its rich […]
Compiled together for the first time, historic recordings of the grand finale to the world’s greatest music festival. In 1969, Philips captured the unique atmosphere of the Last Night of the Proms. Master of ceremonies was Sir Colin Davis who had become chief conductor of the BBC Symphony Orchestra two years earlier. During the 1960s, […]
Three Decca albums of popular Romantic classics, remastered complete for CD and compiled for the first time. Recorded at London’s Kingsway Hall early in 1957 and first released in the US by RCA Victor, ‘Overtures in Spades’ was a collection of operatic openers that enjoyed more popular currency then than they do now: Suppé’s ‘Light […]
A feast of Viennese operetta on two Decca albums, newly remastered and reissued complete. Born in Bratislava – Pressburg, as it was in 1901 – Anton Paulik became a reassuring presence for decades. In the pit at the ‘lighter’ Viennese lyric theatres, he could make the music of the ‘Waltz King’ and his successors sparkle […]
