What a lovely disc!Deeply felt and warmly expressive, superbly played and lucidly recorded, the disc of the chamber music of Herbert Howells (1892-1983) is a model of what a contemporary recording should be. First and most importantly, the music is wonderful and nearly unknown. While his sacred music has some currency among church choirs and there ...
The restriction of this disc to the viola music of fairly obscure British-American composer Rebecca Clarke may seem to come from the realm of arcana, but in fact, Clarke seems to have had a predilection for the viola. The 10 works recorded here represent about one-eighth of her total output, and the disc can serve as an introduction to a ...
This solid reissue, one of many that Naxos has salvaged from Collins Classics, presents three of Benjamin Britten's orchestral song cycles: the well-known Serenade for Tenor, Horn and Strings, the Nocturne, and the dramatic cantata Phaedra, composed in 1975, not long before the composer's death. All three are conducted by the veteran Steuart ...
Gerald Finzi, and important and prolific English composer in the first half of the twentieth century, had a life unduly filled with loss. Although he only lived 55 years, he survived through the death of many family members and close friends. By 1951 -- five years before his own death -- he was diagnosed with a form of leukemia and knew that it ...
The Gould Piano Trio, along with clarinetist Robert Plane, performs Messiaen's greatest chamber composition along with two attractive smaller pieces. Their reading of Quatuor pour la fin du Temps is notable for the musicians' sense of balance, bringing some lines to the foreground and keeping others in the shadows. Maintaining that sense of ...
Charles Stanford's First Symphony may not break any new ground -- don't expect the English equivalent of Brahms much less Mahler -- but the composer was not only young but English and thus with few native models to draw on. Far more important than originality, this First shows Stanford to be a remarkably self-assured composer confidently filling ...
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