Pierre Monteux is the ideal interpreter of Ravel that great teaser and lover of mystification. Born less than a month apart in 1875, the two men were bound to come together in pre-war Paris which was such fertile ground for artistic novelty. The 1914-18 war scattered the main actors of Parisian musical life. Like Ravel, […]
The name of Pierre Monteux inevitably brings Stravinsky’s ‘Le sacre du printemps’ to mind; he conducted the notorious first performance in Paris in 1913 which degenerated into a brawl broken up by the police. This historic event has slightly overshadowed other Ballets Russes commissions, such as Ravel’s ‘Daphnis et Chloé’ and Debussy’s ‘Jeux’ which were first […]
In the year 2015 we should have been celebrating the seventieth birthdays of two uniquely talented women cellists who were both born in 1945 but instead we have been remembering a more tragic coincidence: in 1973, multiple sclerosis forced the English virtuoso, Jacqueline du Pré, to retire and her German colleague, Anja Thauer, committed suicide. […]
The early years of Henry VIII’s reign were a time of ostentatious pageantry, ceremonial and courtly entertainments of all kinds. Royal entries, tournaments, funerals, executions, banquets, coronations, christenings were all ceremonial occasions in which music had a function. Very little actual ceremonial music has survived; most of it was probably never written down. But many […]
A collection of songs and dances by Dowland, East and Holborne performed by two of the most eminent of British early-music groups in the late-1960s: Musica Reservata and the Purcell Consort of Voices. The performance of contrapuntal vocal music with viols doubling the voices, stems from a long European tradition and in several of the […]
Most parents will assert that siblings do not always play well together but classical music gives many examples to the contrary. Although violinist, Yehudi Menuhin, was the most famous member of his family, he performed and made several recordings with his sisters, Hephzibah and Yaltah both pianists. (Pianist Marcel Ciampi who taught both sisters, remarked […]
While Dohnányi’s musical language was firmly rooted in the nineteenth century, the two chamber works on this reissue – championed by András Schiff and the Takács Quartet, no less – deserve much greater attention than they get. Dohnányi’s Piano Quintet was written when he was seventeen and bears the strong imprint of Brahms, courtesy of […]
These recordings of the voices of Inge Borkh and Ljuba Welitsch are very fine examples of the art of the dramatic soprano from the 1950s and early 1960s. Borkh acquired a considerable reputation as Aida, Tosca, Turandot, and Medea in Cherubini’s opera of the same name, as well as Leonora in Fidelio. On this anthology, […]
To mark the 150th anniversary of the birth of Sibelius, Decca Eloquence collects together the four LPs of the composer’s music that Horst Stein recorded for Decca between 1971 and 1981. They include all the important tone poems, the Second Symphony (receiving its first international release on CD) and music for the theatre. All were critically […]
On this reissue, Tchaikovsky’s ever-popular Piano Concerto No. 1 is coupled with a relative rarity – the Concert Fantasy. Peter Katin was not the first pianist to make a studio recording of Tchaikovksy’s Concert Fantasy – that honour went to Tatiana Nikolayeva in 1950 – but his 1958 recording with Sir Adrian Boult was the […]
The D’Oyly Carte Company began its association with Decca after World War II, embarking on a series of recordings in the late 1940s and early 50s of the major Savoy Operas. A subsequent stereo-era cycle, begun in 1957, was followed in turn by a new series of which the present 1974 recording of ‘Iolanthe’ is […]
Time to pass in court circles there certainly was – and money to spend in the passing of it too! Lavish entertainments, revelry and dancing, pageants, music and the ritual of the hunt were known to Henry’s queen, Katharine; and all these culminated in the superlative splendours of the Field of Cloth of Gold in […]
