Composing piano etudes brought out the best in Scriabin, as it did with Liszt, Debussy, Rachmaninoff, Ligeti, and George Perle, perhaps because the idea of an...

While in no way an indispensible recording of Il pirata or even an important one, this is nonetheless both a satisfying performance and an interesting look...

Classical violinists abandoning the role of composer (Corelli, Vivaldi, Geminiani, Spohr, Viotti, and so on, not to mention Paganini, rolled their own) have left Mark O’Connor...

Most Fanfare readers are no doubt aware by now of the large, and growing, number of out-of-print CDs being reissued by the Web retailer arkivmusic.com. My...

One may be forgiven, I hope, feeling a twinge of pity for listeners who’ve never discovered Peter Dawson. Risking the accusation of exaggerating, I will venture...

One of the criteria for a Hall of Fame entry is availability, so this vast 16-CD set may not apply for long. It is unlikely to...

Composing piano etudes brought out the best in Scriabin, as it did with Liszt, Debussy, Rachmaninoff, Ligeti, and George Perle, perhaps because the idea of an...

While in no way an indispensible recording of Il pirata or even an important one, this is nonetheless both a satisfying performance and an interesting look...

First we had Peter and the Wolf , a cautionary tale. Then we got The Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra , a set of pedagogical...

Who, or better, what was Thomas Beecham (1879–1961)? Depending upon whom one talks to, for those of a certain age he was a brilliant trainer of...

In the early 1960s, when I was a novice listener, my friends and I called him Freddie Hubbub. His friends nicknamed him Hubcap. Freddie Hubbard, who...

Ben Jacks, principal horn with the Sydney Symphony Orchestra, seems poised to become the next big thing in the horn world. Or so this new disc...

For the last issue I had the pleasant task of auditioning a disc entitled “Oboe Divas” that featured Elaine Douvas, principal oboist at New York’s Metropolitan...

The 2007 Kannada film Preethi Yaake Boomimelide (“Why on Earth Is There Love?”) has been rather controversial, to the extent that there were “violent protests” against...

We have here two classics from the Golden Age of Bollywood. The 1958 black and white Hindi comedy Chalti ka nam gaadi (literally, “The one that...

This is a tremendously enjoyable production of an opera that can be difficult to bring off. La forza del destino is so epic that it runs...

Karl Böhm—unsmiling, severe, businesslike, and media-shy—was, paradoxically, one of the greatest conductors of the 20th century. In many ways he was like tenor Jon Vickers, a...

In future histories of music from the second half of the 20th century, Chou Wen-Chung (b. 1923) will have an important place as a “bridge” between...

Contemporary Chinese pieces alternate with works by young Danes on this recording that teams the European recorder family with its Chinese analogs, the xiao and dizi....

Over the last quarter-century or so, Stephen Hough has developed from an impressive contest winner into one of the three or four most arresting pianists around....

Although Herwig Zack explains in his notes that the title “Essentials” bears several connotations, it’s clear that while these pieces may have posed musical challenges throughout...

Deborah Riedel and Richard Bonynge issued a disc in 2001 of arias from British operas by Balfe, Sullivan, and Wallace. (That disc, entitled “The Power of...

This is a welcome addition to a rarefied repertoire, though it makes such a good argument for the medium of voice and flute, that one wonders...

There is a large choral repertoire available in Scandinavia, largely beginning in the 19th century to meet the needs of the rapidly expanding choral singing movement...

The Tudor Choir is a Seattle-based chamber chorus of 12 voices, whose recording on Loft of Shaker music, in arrangements by Kevin Siegfried, Craig Zeichner “implored”...

This music of the Portuguese late Renaissance is all recorded here for the first time. Some composers, such as Duarto Lôbo, are familiar, while Manuel Leitão...

Three of the composers included in this anthology—Avraham Cáceres (fl. first half of the 17th century), Cristiano Giuseppe Lidarti (1730–1793), and Carlo Grossi (1634–1688)—are assumed to...

People come to classical music through different means, but most fans nowadays probably have been exposed to it through family and friends who enjoy recordings rather...

This is, obviously, a big chunk of music from a big bunch of composers. This review is an attempt to give a sense for the comprehensive...