Orchestral & Symphonic

When Toscanini encouraged Nino Rota to study at the Curtis Institute, where instructions by Fritz Reiner and a friendship with Aaron Copland awaited the precocious composer, it was already clear he would have a massive career. Only the direction wasn't...

When this 1956 recording of Rigoletto was first released in Britain, the Gramophone reviewer commented: "under Perlea, the orchestral playing is firm and dramatic, well balanced with the voice. The music is well paced.1. Rigoletto

When theßAmerican violinist Aaron Rosand, who died aged 92 in 2019, had performedßBruch's Scottish Fantasy with the Greenwich Symphony Orchestra in 2009, he rounded off a 77-year playing career which - he was proud to note - shattered Nathan Milstein's...

When the world stoops around us, when the structures of a civilization are shattered, it is a good thing to revert to what in history does not stoop but, on the contrary, summons up courage, gathers the parted ones, makes peace without hurting. Thus...

When the symphonic poem The Raven after Edgar Allan Poe celebrated it's premiere in London in March, 1900, the critics showered hymns of praise on his work so rich in unique orchestral colors and on it's young composer Josef Holbrooke. It brought him his...

When the subject turns to oboists, his name is now de rigeur: Albrecht Mayer. His playing has both listeners and critics raving, with expressions like "divine spark" or the "miraculous oboe" that the German player has elevated to become an "instrument of...

When the red light in Studio 2 at the famous Abbey Road Studios came on at the start of the recording sessions for Leonard Elschenbroich and Alexei Grynyuk's latest ONYX recording, the control room had a very different atmosphere. The recording was made...

When the music of Nikolai Kapustin was discovered by a wider audience in the West, it was positively shocking: Who was this Soviet (!) composer, whose music sounded more like an Oscar Peterson improvisation than anything else - but who wrote detailed...

When Slagwerk Den Haag (The Hague Percussion) asked Anthony Fiumara to put together a concert program for Glass's 80th birthday in 2017, he was inspired by the rhythmic patterns, the long lines and the modality in Philip Glass's early music. He arranged...

When Round Midnight was published, Thelonius Monk was an outsider due to the extravagant harmony and the complexity of his music; he cultivated this image. With this elaborate polyphony, Monk ingeniously managed to translate the Romantic 'midnight piece'...

When rehearsals of Arnold Schoenberg's piano works for published by WERGO CD Herbert Henck met again in the name of the Austrian composer Josef Matthias Hauer. Hauer had developed it's own twelve-tone technique before Schoenberg and ended in later years...

When Pablo Casals rediscovered the cello suites of Bach at the beginning of the 20th century, the novel thing about it was that he played them "senza basso", i.e. without piano accompaniment. In a time of music-historical over-maturity and...