Orchestral & Symphonic

The marches that Elgar wrote, whether for public occasions or as an incidental part of other works, represent only one aspect of his achievement as a composer.1. Coronation March, Op.65 2. Funeral March 3. Pomp and Circumstance March No.1 4. Pomp and...

The magic of the dance in music, with an emphasis on Paris towards the end of the nineteenth century. Orchestral works by Ravel ('La Valse'), Offenbach, Berlioz and others capture the mood of Renoir's beautiful portrait of dancers. Music for dancing and...

The lyrical Second Symphony is haunted by a restless melancholy... yet the result is in no way depressing. Chamber Symphony No.2 is a relatively late work and although it is freely rhapsodic, the mood is more positive and often songful... The nostalgic...

The Lucerne Festival Orchestra brass players perform a broad spectrum of brass music. The ensemble's repertoire includes early polyphonic and Venetian antiphonal masterpieces, Classical and Romantic works, and pieces from the 20th and 21st centuries by...

The loss of one sense, it is said, makes the other keener. What the concert pianist, organist, and composer Josef Labor lost in eyesight when smallpox left him blind at age three, must have been added to his ears. Although roughly a Brahmsian (and a...

The London Philharmonic Orchestra presents this live recording from 2017 of Mahler's Symphony No. 8, conducted by Vladimir Jurowski, with soloists including Sofia Fomina and Matthew Rose, and massed choirs. It's a celebration of the end of Jurowski's...

The London Oratory Schola Cantorum illustrates the Golden Age with this selection of motets from sixteenth-century Spain culminating in Alonso Lobo's great funerary ode for Philip II, Versa est in luctum.1. Francisco Guerrero: Regina Caeli a 8 2...

The London Haydn Quartet perform the String Quartets Op.76, the summit of his quartet-writing, and of the classical string quartet medium itself. The "Emperor", "Fifths" and "Sunrise" may be the best known of the six - as so often with those works by...

The Lobkowicz Trio are Jan Mrcek violin and leader of the Czech Philharmonic, Lukas Klansky piano and Ivan Vokac associate principal cellist of the Czech Philharmonic. Beethoven's Triple Concerto is his take on the old 18th century Sinfonia Concertante...

The little-known Second Chamber Symphony ought to be the most popular of Schoenberg' later masterpieces. Neither "atonal" nor "twelve-tone", it contrasts a lush, melodious, dramatic first movement with a rapid and richly polyphonic second movement.1...

The Linos Piano Trio's In Search of Lost Dances recording centres on the time of greatest change in Ravel's life, juxtaposing his seminal Piano Trio, written weeks before the outbreak of the First World War, with Le Tombeau de Couperin, written between...

The life of the Prague-born composer Hans Winterberg (1901-91) reads like the outline of a detective novel. Having survived internment in the Terez?n (Theresienstadt) ghetto as a Czech Jew, after the War he settled in Munich as a German citizen, and his...