Classical Reviews/Composers & Works

18 interviews, and over 500 reviews of classical CDs, SACDs, DVDs, and Blu-rays in this 624-page issue!

Latest Music Reviews

I’ve been critical of a variety of operatic films that succumb to Television Syndrome. That’s the belief you can’t count on a TV audience wanting to...

The Blair Wind Quintet is a faculty ensemble of the Blair School of Music of Vanderbilt University. Though a woodwind player myself, I am not familiar...


Recent Music Reviews

Way back in Fanfare 24:2 I reviewed Steve Mackey’s opera Ravenshead and concluded that while it had a number of compelling elements, it didn’t ultimately satisfy,...

What a risk-taking, creatively fertile theater the Opéra de la Monnaie is. Although much remembered for Antonio Pappano’s reign (during which Britten operas were introduced to...

I must say that this particular recording is a hard one to review. As stated on the front of the case, it is “en souvenir de...

Numerous paradoxes of the acoustical world inhabit the sounds of string playing, I am reminded here. A solo instrument might reveal itself as warm and beautiful...


More Music Reviews

By the look of things, Oehms Classics has a pair of Rings in progress simultaneously. In Fanfare 34:6, I covered a Das Rheingold from Frankfurt led...

I suppose I’m not giving away any secrets to note just how much fanciers of 19th-century piano concertos that lie outside the Grand Masterworks of Forever...

The music of Kara Karayev (1918–82) is not well represented in the current catalog. As favored students of Shostakovich go, his fall since the demise of...

Even geniuses can be wrong. Goethe says that nightingales fly away, but spring lures them back. They have learned nothing new, he says, but sing the...

This is being written a day after the passing of Montserrat Figueras at the age of 69 after a year’s illness. Her legacy of more than...

Having given us some fascinating examples of re-imaginings of the Baroque composer’s works through the lenses of such formidable Romantic composers and arrangers as Busoni, Reger,...