Classical Music Recent Picks
October/November 2009
The title-underlined links will take you directly to our catalogue.
Some featured items are linked via their covers to enable you to read more reviews
1001 classical recordings you must hear before you die, general editor, Matthew Rye.
""1001 Classical Recordings" is a guide concerned with excellence in every field of classical music. The reader becomes familiar with the Gregorian chants of the Medieval age (pre-1400), the madrigals and more secular music of the Renaissance (1400-1600), the intricate ornamentation of the Baroque era (1600-1750), the structured pieces of the Classic period (1750-1820), and the emotionally charged Romantic works (1820-1900), right through to the innovative and sometimes challenging composers of the 20th and 21st centuries. From the great and inspiring masses, choral works, symphonies, concertos, and operas, to the intimacies and subtleties of chamber music and pieces written for small ensembles and soloists, the reader builds up a full understanding of the variety of music in the classical genre, and is guided to the most outstanding recordings of each masterpiece. Each entry is potentially a gateway to exciting new territories of music for the reader to explore." (Amazon)
Peter Sculthorpe : the making of an Australian composer, Graeme Skinner.
"The first biography of Australia's best-known living composer and perhaps the most important composer the country has yet produced, this fascinating story of Peter Sculthorpe's rise to prominence provides an insight into his formative years, his quest for a personal voice, and his arrival through many creative friendships and collaborations at a place in the collective heart of the nation. It is also a social history, charting the rise of modernism in Australian music through the eyes of its key player." (Globalbooksinprint.com)
The original Liverpool Sound : the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic story, Darren Henley.
"The Original Liverpool Sound: The Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Story charts the history of the Phil from its foundation by a group of Liverpool music lovers in 1840 through to the present day, where it remains very much at the heart of Liverpool's cultural life. Written by Darren Henley, Managing Director of Classic FM, and the Phil's former archivist, Vincent McKernan, the book tells the story of the Liverpool Phil and the stories and secrets of the people and events that have been associated with the organisation throughout its illustrious history. Thoroughly researched using the Phil's complete archive, and featuring seldom seen historical illustrations and specially commissioned full colour photographs, The Original Liverpool Sound will be compulsory reading for aficionados of classical music and anyone interested in the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic."
Curious connections: master musicians and the law, by J. B. Thomas.
"In this fascinating study Jim Thomas casts a judicial and musically judicious eye upon the lives and music of over thirty great composers with backgrounds in the law and in the process entertains, educates and gently provokes. (Book jacket)
New CDs:
Bach – Aus der Tieffen, Katharine Fuge (soprano), Carlos Mena (countertenor), Hans Jörg Mammel (tenor) & Stephan MacLeod (bass) Ricercar Consort, Philippe Pierlot (conductor).
"The Ricercar Consort have already been awarded a Radio 3 disc of the Week and a Gramophone Editor's Choice for their Bach recordings for Mirare. Here they present three sacred cantatas, among the earliest written by the young Johann Sebastian in his first posts as Kapellmeister in Mühlausen and Weimar, for Easter. They display the heritage and influence of the old master Buxtehude, but also the force, the modernity, and the genius of the future Kantor." (Prestoclassical.co.uk).
"Pierlot's instrumentalists are pleasingly attuned to each other's declamatory needs, resulting in a well-balanced and lucidly coloured ensemble. He favours the one-voice-to-a-part approach which works well in the generally lighter textures of Bach's earliest cantatas. His four soloists, ever aware of Bach's imaginative work painting, are excellent in their declamatory fervour both in a solo capacity and in ensemble.” (BBC Music Magazine, September 2009)
Symphonic Variations - Bax, Arnold, Ashley Wass (piano)
Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra, James Judd.
"Bax completed five works for piano and orchestra, beginning in 1916 with the highly virtuosic Symphonic Variations dedicated to the pianist Harriet Cohen. The work was likened by Rosa Newmarch, who wrote the programme note for the first performance, 'to some great epic poem dealing with the adventures of a hero . . . Passing through a number of different experiences'. The Concertante for Piano (Left Hand) and Orchestra (1949) is on a smaller scale. The romantic slow movement opens with a beautiful and haunting piano tune which gives way to a brooding atmospheric middle section, coloured by typical Baxian orchestral textures, like swirling mists in a nocturnal vision of some Irish coastal vista." (Prestoclassical.co.uk)
"The young pianist Ashley Wass play[s] impeccably – not only stylishly, but also with subtle, expressive shading and lovely liquid tone quality." (The Independent)
"…Bax's monumental Symphonic Variations was written in 1916-18 at the height of his torrid affair with Harriet Cohen… Ashley Wass and James Judd… seem to find an extra degree of rhythmic excitement in the bravura 'Strife' variation, and Wass's playing of the big solo at the start of the finale is eloquent..." (BBC Music Magazine, May 2009)
"A marvellous musical team weaves its magic in this spellbinding repertoire. …Ashley Wass is the most stylish, characterful and charismatic of the three soloists: the way he shapes the spellbinding opening paragraph of the final section ("Triumph", one of Bax's symphonic epilogues in all but name) is sheer magic and betokens a true poet of the keyboard." (Gramophone Magazine, June 2009)
The English Stage Jig, The City Waites, Lucie Skeaping (director)
"An unusual and delightfully bawdy offering from the irrepressible Lucie Skeaping and her collaborators The City Waites.
Today we think of a jig as simply a dance, but in late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century England the word was used to describe a short musical farce featuring songs, dancing and slapstick comedy. By 1590 Jigs were thoroughly established in the London theatres as the standard ending or Afterpiece to more serious theatrical fare; they could be satirical, sentimental, libellous, riotous and often downright obscene, offering a shameless and frequently subversive antidote to the plays which preceded them.." (Prestoclassical.co.uk).
"These performers are well-renowned for championing the popular music of earlier centuries... the singing and instrumental performances are as genially accomplished as ever with The Waites." (BBC Music Magazine, May 2009)
"If one approaches this CD as one would a musical radio play, the listener becomes an active participant, imagining the décor, the costumes and attitudes of the characters, and the frequent bouts of slapstick, of all which are enacted as lustily as one expects. Great music? Hardly. But great performances, without doubt." (Gramophone Magazine, July 2009).
A French Collection Skip Sempé (harpsichord)
"This volume, the third in a series dedicated to French Music, is a selection from the huge roduction of those composers, living in the shadow of Rameau: all great teachers, virtuoso performers and composers. Skip Sempé has taken the most wonderful pieces, re-creating a real concert of Parisian Musique de Salon. Rameau was the model for this generation of harpsichord players, but hearing this disc reminds us that Rameau's contemporaries were also outstanding harpsichordists. The next great flowering of keyboard music in France was to be the music and playing of Chopin, who can rightly be considered the last keyboard composer-performer of the great French salon tradition. Playing on the superb harpsichord by Bruce Kennedy based on 18th century French originals, Skip Sempé is the ideal guide for this voyage into the extraordinary diversity of French harpsichord music from the Age of the Enlightenment." (Prestoclassical.co.uk).
"Skempé's evocation of this sound world is unsurpassed. His inventiveness is immense and vibrant, encompassing extreme tempos, aching lyricism, and delicate hesitations. On this disc his performing genius culminates in the show-stopping Marches des scythes... The intensity of Skemp's delivery leaves this listener breathless. " (BBC Music Magazine, April 2009)
"Skip Sempé presents an eminently stylish recital of what he calls Parisian salon repertoire - single movements composed by some of the best of that large army of French claveciniste-composers of the 18th century...." (Sunday Times, 22nd March 2009)
"French flamboyance and virtuosity on a disc you'll want to hear again and again. This is music that is strongly made, characterful, inventive and gloriously sonorous, especially on the Bruce Kennedy French-style instrument that Sempé touches so expertly here... This is a harpsichord release to treasure and play over and again." (Gramophone Magazine, September 2009).
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