Feature Articles

There were great composers who wrote music for the cello but didn’t play the instrument, and then there were great cellists who wrote music for their...

Michel Brousseau has recorded two masses by Théodore Dubois for Atma, and recently corresponded with Fanfare in a conversation about himself, his work, the recording, and...

Théodore Dubois was an important musical figure in the late 19th and early 20th centuries in France, but has been completely forgotten since his death in...

Théodore Dubois (1837-1924) is a name better known to organists than to musicians in other genres. Yet, as he himself pointed out, he actually wrote far...

Since coming to the University of North Carolina at Greensboro in 1982, conductor John R. Locke has fashioned its wind ensemble into one of the finest...

Harpsichordist, fortepianist, continuo player Christine Schornsheim meets me in her practice room at the Gasteig, one of the last municipal socialist fantasies built in Europe (France...

Pianist Greg McCallum is something of a late bloomer on the American concert stage. It’s a dizzyingly crowded and competitive scene, and paths to recognition are...

David Felder is not, perhaps, an “eclectic” composer, but he is wide ranging and—to quote John Story ( Fanfare 25: 5)—“undoctrinaire.” Given the much-heralded collapse of...

In a better world, Gianluca Luisi would be feted as the natural successor to Maurizio Pollini, but this is a world in which talent doesn’t matter...

Hans von Bülow (1830–94), the great German pianist and conductor who led the premiere of Tristan und Isolde and was one of the first pianists to...

This CD was originally reviewed by Tom Godell in Fanfare 31:3. His dictum was that it was third-rate music in which the piano part was predictable...

Being independently wealthy was perhaps the only way a French composer who lived in Paris in the first half of the 19th century could afford to...

Liszt’s reputation as a composer has always been a controversial and phlegmatic one, veering as he did between what seems to some as cheap, empty paraphrases...

This Italian-flavored collection (Vol. 30 in Naxos’s complete series) gathers up some of Liszt’s more obscure piano works—leavened, oddly, by three chestnuts drawn from the Paganini...

Though Ludwig Thuille (1861–1907) is perhaps best remembered today for his association with Richard Strauss, he was an admirable pianist and composer in his own right....

“I am old-fashioned. I believe that the job of the musician is to move the audience. If you aren’t moved, then I think the artist hasn’t...

I had not heard of Jennifer Hoult before this recording, though this vanity production bodes well for her future. She has assembled a program of no...

I did not request this CD for review but, after the artist read my review of her CD Golden Quadrilateral, she sent it to me. I...

Chinese pianist Dizhou Zhao enters a crowded field by daring to record the Chopin etudes early on in his career (the disc is reviewed below). I...

Here’s a disc on a Russian label of a Chinese pianist playing the etudes of Poland’s most famous composer. If that isn’t international enough, Dizhou Zhao,...

Dizhou Zhao is a lovely pianist. His story is one of great natural talent skillfully nurtured and developed. The New England Conservatory had the foresight to...

After a combined 30 years at one of New York’s premier classical studios, Richard Price and Wayne Hileman formed Candlewood Digital, a company now entering its...

Carolyn Stuart and Svetozar Ivanov’s recital of music by Nikolai Roslavets, a Russian composer who’d been branded, punished, exiled, and forgotten by the Soviet government, gives...

Nikolai Roslavets (1881–1944) had the supreme misfortune, like so many others, to live during the nightmares of the Soviet system. His music is oddly schizophrenic stylistically....

The prospect of learning anything new about Beethoven always intrigues me, and so it did with a new disc that arrived in the mail for review....

It might seem improbable that a recording of Beethoven piano trios could have the adjective “new” applied to each of the included works, but this is...

I had the opportunity to speak with Julian Wachner, the first installment of whose complete choral music has just been released by Naxos in its “American...

If variety is the spice of life, percussionist Bob McCormick’s certainly hasn’t been bland. He’s played everything: popular, jazz, classical, both light and serious. He served...

Before I get started, I have a few complaints about program notes to get off my chest. The following are generalizations (but particularly pertinent to this...

The pianist Andrea Bacchetti (not his rugby-playing namesake) met Luciano Berio when he was around 11 and worked, studied, and played music with him until Berio,...

I enjoyed Andrea Bacchetti’s previous Bach release (see my review in Fanfare 33:3) and the same strengths are in evidence here: a sensitivity to dynamics (without...

Andrea Bacchetti’s written introduction spells out his close association with the composer of these pieces. There is much to admire here, certainly, but Bacchetti does not...

There is a revealing comment in Andrea Bacchetti’s memoir of Luciano Berio, included in this CD’s booklet, where the then-teenaged pianist—he met and began an informal...

Thanks to the wonderful benevolence of public education, the mainstream media, and corporations that have shoved musical culture back up the social ladder to the realm...

As regular readers know, I’m not a big fan of the hardcore in modern music. But not wanting to hold the execution before the trial, I...

This CD from 2005 captures two obviously congenial musical colleagues from the University of Baton Rouge, Louisiana, in mostly 20th-century repertoire for viola and cello. The...

Oddly enough, back in Fanfare 29:2, and as recently as 33:5, I reviewed two albums containing material duplicated on the current Centaur CD. The first, titled...

Here we have two very serious and heavy cello sonatas, written approximately 12 years apart, and oddly the younger man’s composition (Jongen) preceded the older. The...

This is not a particularly new recording, having been taped in December 2001, in the LSU Recital Hall at Louisiana State University. It is, however, a...

The piano artistry of Lilia Boyadjieva was first brought to my attention back in 1997 by a Greek friend, who urged me to hear a newly...

This is the third CD by the Bulgarian-born, Moscow-trained pianist Lilia Boyadjieva. Her previous two discs—the first of music by Samuel Barber, the second an exploration...

The Bulgarian-born pianist Lilia Boyadjieva has been praised in these pages by Walter Simmons and Peter Burwasser for her “power and delicacy” performing the music of...

Last May I had the chance to chat with Carlo Grante by telephone apropos his series of the complete sonatas of Scarlatti. My review of Volume...

Q: Thanks very much for this opportunity to chat, Scott. I’ve seen your name in the roster of various early-music groups over the years, but always...

The five pieces on this program are all taken from the Peterhouse Partbooks, a large collection of music (72 works) from late in the reign of...

A graduate of Lafayette College with an M.B.A. from Columbia, John Berky is 63 and has been married to wife Marjory for 39 years. Following 18...

Fans of the rock group Deep Purple have been following the creative evolution of its former keyboard player, Jon Lord, for some three decades now: His...