The Piano Quartets are like heavenly twins, alike on the outside but very different in tone. The G minor, like all Mozart’s works in that key, is intense, introspective and even tragic in places. The E flat is extrovert, bracing, brilliant and straightforwardly pleasurable. The present performances feature what, at first glance, is a strange […]
‘If I were condemned to hear only one voice for the remainder of my life I think it might well be hers. If I wanted to be charmed, to laugh or cry I would find her the perfect companion. In her singing … we hear someone whose every utterance bespeaks natural sincerity and truthful feeling’ […]
Driven almost to distraction by debts, illness in the family – his baby daughter Theresia died on 29 July – and the indifference of a fickle public, Mozart often turned for financial succour to a fellow Freemason, Johann Michael Puchberg. This gentleman, whose name has come down through history solely because of his assistance to […]
The first of Josef Suk’s two mature quartets, in B flat major, Op. 11, was partly written in Helsinki and Vienna hotels early in 1896, the last two movements being composed at home in Prague. The work which positively breathes romanticism, inevitably shows the influence of his beloved teacher and future father-in-law, Antonín Dvořák. By […]
Begun in October 1876, Smetana’s E minor Quartet, ‘From My Life’, was completed by the end of the year; its first reception was lukewarm, being considered too advanced, musically and technically and too ‘orchestral’. It certainly presented the viola in a fresh light: never had this instrument been elevated to such eminence in a piece […]
In the vast vacuum left by Arturo Toscanini’s retirement and death, French conductors were prominent among those who dominated the orchestral scene, especially in America. One of the most gifted was Jean Francisque-Étienne Martinon (1910–1976). His complete recordings for Deutsche Grammophon (as both conductor and composer) are here collected for the first time. Conscripted into […]
‘If I were condemned to hear only one voice for the remainder of my life I think it might well be hers. If I wanted to be charmed, to laugh or cry I would find her the perfect companion. In her singing … we hear someone whose every utterance bespeaks natural sincerity and truthful feeling’ […]
‘If I were condemned to hear only one voice for the remainder of my life I think it might well be hers. If I wanted to be charmed, to laugh or cry I would find her the perfect companion. In her singing … we hear someone whose every utterance bespeaks natural sincerity and truthful feeling’ […]
Jean Martinon’s career in the recording studio got under way after World War II when, in 1947–48, he and the London Philharmonic Orchestra recorded music by Mozart, Ravel, Tchaikovsky and Chabrier. Between then and April 1960 he recorded extensively for Decca. Brilliant as many of these recordings are, they have completely overshadowed the parallel legacy […]
‘If I were condemned to hear only one voice for the remainder of my life I think it might well be hers. If I wanted to be charmed, to laugh or cry I would find her the perfect companion. In her singing … we hear someone whose every utterance bespeaks natural sincerity and truthful feeling’ […]
‘If I were condemned to hear only one voice for the remainder of my life I think it might well be hers. If I wanted to be charmed, to laugh or cry I would find her the perfect companion. In her singing … we hear someone whose every utterance bespeaks natural sincerity and truthful feeling’ […]
Like so many artists from north of the Alps, Wolf was lured by the Mediterranean south, an intoxicating world of light, sensual grace and intense, often violent emotions. His ‘Spanisches Liederbuch’ of 1889–90, 34 settings of Iberian folk poems translated by Emanuel Geibel and Paul Heyse, is the finest fruit of a long-lasting fascination with […]
