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Welcome to Fanfare, the Magazine for Serious Record Collectors. If you are not yet a Fanfare subscriber, you may browse a generous sampling of recently published articles on this site. New articles are added daily. Subscribers may view the complete contents of these issues in the Archive. |
| Most Popular Music Reviews |
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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...
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 Musical purists, before you move on, consider how the times have changed. Decades ago we felt we had to hold arrangements like these in contempt, appalled...
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 In my opinion, nemo is a blob of a piece of music. There are no hard attacks, no percussion, just a mass of sound that ebbs...
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 Linda di Chamounix is a blend of the old and the new, modern in its musical structure, old fashioned in its plot and its style of...
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 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...
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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...
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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...
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 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...
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 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...
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 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...
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 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...
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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...
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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...
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 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...
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 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...
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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...
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 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...
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 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...
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 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...
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 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...
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 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....
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 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....
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 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...
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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...
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 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...
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 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...
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 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”...
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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...
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 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...
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 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...
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 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...
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