Chamber Music & Recitals

When Shostakovich wrote his Piano Quintet in 1940, most of his chamber music had yet to be composed. Combining formal purity and freedom of tone, the quintet was hailed as a masterpiece and has remained his most popular chamber work. In the last years of...

When Rossini drew a line under his own hugely successful operatic career at the age of 37, he spent his final years in Paris where he wrote numerous short piano pieces arranged in 14 volumes, which he jokingly called Peches de vieillesse.1. 1...

When Ravel orchestrated his works, the scoring emerged with total spontaneity, for he had already worked out his orchestral colors with immense care at the piano. His fascination with the Orient, the fantastic, poetic homages, the enthralling world of...

When Pulse Perspective comes to an end, after all the emotion, the rhythm, the musical inspiration, it's improvisations and constructs, the overriding question is: how can a piece of music be as "visual" as this? How can it suggest so many imaginary...

When profiling the Polish composer and violinist Karol Lipinski (1790-1861), the focus is usually placed on his skills as a performer. Apart from having an incredible virtuoso technique, he had fine achievements as a composer. Somewhat forgotten these...

When Prof. Karl Laux, in his day one of the German Democratic Republic's most celebrated musicologists, was working on his book on music in Russia and the Soviet Union, he consigned a dozen or so assorted personalities to near-oblivion on a mere...

When pianist Carsten Dahl went into the studio with his perennial fellow musicians, the bassist Niels Bo Davidsen and the drummer Stefan Pasborg, it was with a special dogma: Not to say a word throughout the recording. The album was created in a...

When one thinks of Schumann, his piano works and Lieder come to mind, as well as the Piano and Cello Concertos and his symphonies. His chamber music has received rather less attention, although he showed himself particularly interested in experimentation...

When one thinks about Beethoven's choral compositions, one might think there is only one: the Ode to Joy from the 9th Symphony. But that is not the case! As the Deutscher Jugendkammerchor has impressively proved with this recording, preoccupying oneself...

When Nigel Kennedy picks up the violin, he combines the music world: first, he thrilled millions of classical music fans from around the world, on the other it is one at least as many Jazz lovers to his admirers. In spring 2010, Nigel Kennedy is a double...

When Nicholas Papador moved to Canada in 2005 he started participating in the Windsor Canadian Music Festival presented annually by the Windsor Symphony Orchestra and University of Windsor. Over the course of several years, and after exposure to a...

When Michael Nyman started reinventing the English baroque back in the 1980s, one critic described the result as "pump- action Purcell". This recording combines these two singular musical styles through the stunning voice of countertenor Iestyn Davies...