Could my sound system have been malfunctioning soley through my audition of Borodin’s Second String Quartet (the one with the Nocturne) as performed by a subset...

You owe it to yourself to hear the Auryn Quartet perform the late Beethoven quartets. True, the group’s approach is not to every taste. The disc...

It all started in a Chinese restaurant in Soho—the one in London, not New York. I was having lunch with Aleš Březina, director of the Bohuslav...

Some assignments that come from the Fanfare editorial office have the ring of routine about them; after all, nor every label looking for attention from the...

Since its first review ( Fanfare 29:4), this recording has remained a touchstone of chant singing, even though the monks who were once at the center...

There are a few recordings that almost all serious collectors, listeners, and critics would probably agree belong in a “classical hall of fame,” and this is...

Could my sound system have been malfunctioning soley through my audition of Borodin’s Second String Quartet (the one with the Nocturne) as performed by a subset...

You owe it to yourself to hear the Auryn Quartet perform the late Beethoven quartets. True, the group’s approach is not to every taste. The disc...

All of us under the new editorial policies at Fanfare were asked to read and absorb this book, but since I was chosen to review it...

This hefty volume, the latest in a continuing series, gathers up shortened CD and DVD reviews of the “best” recordings from Gramophone , bolstered with some...

The blues evolved from African-American gospel music, field songs, chants, and hollers. This music was often sung in mixed or minor keys, sometimes modal, which led...

At least since the 1938 publication of Dorothy Baker’s novel Young Man with a Horn , which was based on the short, miserable life of Bix...

This enterprising collection (the clunky title sums it up pretty well) couples one very famous recording with three pieces of real esoterica. The recordings all date...

Titled New Horizons 2 , this disc is the second in a series presenting contemporary scores live from the Concertgebouw on the orchestra’s house label. It...

Writing in 29:4 about the Hagen’s fine CD accounts of Beethoven Quartets Nos. 12 and 15, I noted two salient features of its approach: a sonority...

In earlier works, such as his Ghost Opera (1994) for string quartet and pipa, Water Passion after St. Matthew (2000), and the Concerto for Cello, Video,...

The first duo in Alexander Hülshoff and Friedemann Eichhorn’s collection of fantasies written in collaboration by Adrien François Servais and violinists Joseph Ghys, Hubert Léonard, and...

Samuel Barber’s Toccata Festiva for organ and orchestra presents the best of him. It is variously brilliantly virtuosic and deeply meditative, and speaks—more to the point,...

Jessica Mathaes, the youngest concertmaster ever appointed to the Austin Symphony, and a graduate of the very fine music school at Rice University, has created a...

Sooner or later every violinist is urgently summoned to see the Stradivari someone just found in grandma’s attic. You feel so hurtful pointing out that while...

The bold title, covering a picture of German soprano Simone Kermes lying on a white sheet surrounded by her flaming red hair, and the back cover...

This disc is interesting, and valuable, on many levels. It offers strong, distinctive singing and conducting, an unusually imaginative intelligence applied to the programming, extremely natural...

The K&K Philharmonic—the ampersand apparently part of its official spelling—was put together in 2002 by autodidact conductor Matthias Georg Kendlinger. It’s a smallish ensemble with the...

This extremely strange but fascinating disc combines works by two prominent members of the modern German school, one member of Les Six, and that lone wolf...

This set of two discs is a wonderful compendium to hear, for it is not normal for listeners to have the advantage of a selection of...

Here is a delightful collection of mostly French vocal and instrumental music from the second half of the 16th century, a bloody, turbulent period in French...

Nowhere on the box of this DVD are the dates of these performances given; this only appears, in small print, at the top of page 7...

The title of this release, Lord Ronan’s Return , refers to Linn Barnes’s and Allison Hampton’s dog of the same name. As the notes to this...