Feature Articles

My first experience with the playing of Milica Jelača Jovanović was her marvelous CD for MSR Classics, Bright Moods, which I reviewed in Fanfare 36:4. I...

Colin Clarke was enthusiastic about this collection when he reviewed it in Fanfare 36:2, and for good reason. Or, more accurately, for two good reasons.

Michael Antonello is a fascinating character. He is not only a fine violinist but also a monumentally successful insurance salesman as well as an art connoisseur...

Most violinists we hear on recordings nowadays begin their careers either as prodigies or as pretty young faces on album covers. So, what happens to the...

Violinist Michael Antonello, who has seemed for the last several years intent on recording the lion’s share of the standard repertoire for solo violin, for violin...

As some Fanfare readers will know, I run the label Toccata Classics, which specializes in unfamiliar repertoire. One of my house-rules is not to record music...

The music of Alkan always brings delights. His whole output could be likened to a multifaceted jewel. Classical gestures, baroque purity and romantic excess are all...

Has it really only been since about 1962 that we’ve heard of Alkan? And, when we did first hear of (and hear) his music, that we...

It is typical that when Alkan seems most conventional—adding five collections of Chants, that is, genre pieces, to the spate of drawing room fare inaugurated by...

I’ve reviewed Stephanie McCallum’s fine recording of Beethoven Bagatelles elsewhere in these pages. Impressive though she frequently is, I am less consistently enamored of her Schumann....

Let me immediately explain that the last six works on this disc are taken from Beethoven’s Kuliak Sketchbook, and several are listed as edited by Peter...

From the standard repertoire to its (not-quite-so-anymore) outer fringes: Meet Stephanie McCallum. Like a true musician she is interested in just about everything that her instrument...

Although I very much enjoyed speaking with pianist Vassily Primakov in preparation for his first feature appearance in this magazine ( Fanfare 32: 6), at the...

Vassily Primakov is one of the most appealing younger pianists before the public today. He possesses plenty of technique, although that seems to be ubiquitous among...

Vassily Primakov and I have had our ups and downs, but this meeting strikes a positive note. First off, there is method to this program, which...

Do you prefer your Chopin streamlined? Sharp in profile? Fervently heroic? Do you believe that pianists should be as neutral as possible, keeping their temperaments in...

On his website, pianist Vassily Primakov discusses in poignant language his “ongoing search/struggle/affair” with Chopin’s music, noting that the album for consideration here “is not an...

Evan Richards is the secretary to the Madison Savoyards’ Board of Directors, and is also on the boards of the Association of Wisconsin Symphony Orchestra and...

First, let’s discuss what this DVD is, and what it is not. It’s not a professionally produced recording of a professional production of Gilbert and Sullivan’s...

Very often technology takes center stage in DVD productions, bedazzling us with special effects while the music and drama pass by half noticed. It is refreshing...

“I think it will be a great success, for it is exquisitely funny, and the music is strikingly tuneful and catching.” So wrote Sullivan in a...

It’s hard to believe that Augustin Dumay, born in 1949, has become an elder statesman. Studying at the Paris Conservatory, he graduated with a first prize,...

This is not Augustin Dumay’s first album for Onyx, but it does appear to be his first recording of the Strauss Sonata. Dumay previously recorded the...

Violinist Augustin Dumay and pianist Louis Lortie present a program anchored by the violin sonatas of Richard Strauss and César Franck and enhanced by some arrangements...

Richard Strauss composed his Violin Sonata in E♭ in 1887 and 1888 while courting soprano Pauline de Ahna who would later become his wife. Pianist Louis...

I wonder at times whether the fact that classical music is increasingly lacking in popularity, particularly among young people, does not stem in part from the...

Pianist Findlay Cockrell was a well-loved professor at the University of the State of New York in Albany for 40 years. Having recently retired, he now...

While pursuing her dual career as principal cellist of the Greensboro Symphony Orchestra and as a professor at the University of Wyoming, Beth Vanderborgh has had...

August Nölck (1862-1928) was born in the far northern German city of Lübeck and studied in Hamburg. He was an excellent cellist and he became a...

A few issues back ( Fanfare 36:2), reviewing a disc of piano music by Karl Weigl, Radu Lelutiu distinguished between “neglected composers” and “neglected neglected” composers....

“group of twenty-seven” (“g27” for short) sounds like science fiction, or perhaps a political consortium within the People’s Republic of China. It is neither of these,...

There are two different, and opposing, ways of performing French chansons. The first, which is really the traditional manner that existed until the middle of the...

After hearing Paul Stewart’s discs of Medtner (reviewed below), I was alerted to a musician of the highest intellect. I also heard Naxos discs of Medtner...

Nikolai Medtner (1880–1951) is not a composer with whose music I’m overly familiar, but what I have heard of it, I’ve found much to my liking....

The music of Nikolai Medtner (1880-1951) is complex and highly accomplished but conservative in style by comparison with that of his more adventurous contemporaries. He was,...