Classical Recordings

There is really no need for a long-winded, elaborate review here. Your enjoyment of this disc will depend on your ability to accept these well-known works...

Iva Bittová (b. 1958) is a Czech performer who falls very much between the cracks. She sings and plays the violin, and has developed a performance...

ECM New Series (the classical side of the German otherwise jazz-based label) has released many important recordings over the years, but every so often they come...

Steven Isserlis joined Richard Hickox and the London Symphony Orchestra in 1988 for a very fine and critically well-received recording of Bloch’s Schelomo for Virgin Classics....

Felix Blumenfeld and Georgy Catoire were hardly unknown as composers in their own time. Both were respected pedagogues and moved in exalted musical circles. The disappearance...

Leonid Kogan recorded Brahms’s Violin Concerto three times in the studio: in 1955, in 1959, and in 1967. Henry Roth, in his book on the great...

Andrew Rose is now competing with himself as a transfer engineer. He produced an excellent prior transfer of this performance on Music & Arts—the third on...

In principle, I welcome the novelty and potential insights of period-instrument performances of Brahms. Here, the clarinet, a replica of a “Baermann Ottensteiner” instrument of a...

The chance meetings that occur in the realm of classical music recordings never cease to amaze me. Browsing through the new releases bin on a recent...

Several things about this release annoy me. For starters, if you didn’t know that Paavo Berglund died in January 2012, you’d have to buy this set...

This is not the same Dausgaard Brahms First reviewed by Robert Markow in 36:2. That performance with a different orchestra, the Danish National Symphony, was on...

These are live recordings made at the Royal Festival Hall in the fall of 1952. Even though they are within a year or two of the...

Klaus Tennstedt (1926–1998) is regarded by some as a legendary conductor, but not in the same way as are, say, Toscanini and Furtwängler, or in the...

I’ve reviewed seven or so recordings of Brahms’s piano quartets over the past half-dozen years, but, curiously, this is my first of the trios. The opportunity...

As a rule, I am generally very pleased with the artists and music presented on Atma Classique CDs, yet although the music on this disc is...

The Amsterdam Sinfonietta is a string chamber orchestra which plays these days without a conductor. With the exception of the last, these pieces are all well...

This DVD documents the new TV production of Owen Wingrave produced by Channel 4 in 2001, 30 years after the original version aired on British TV....

This may be Britten’s least-performed opera. Perhaps the wake of Peter Grimes the year before was too strong for it, but his third opera got off...

This pair of CDs contains all the known music Britten wrote for the cello as solo instrument, all of which was made for Mstislav Rostropovich. It...

The one thing that struck me more than anything else as soon as this CD started was the remarkable energy and drive of the choral singing....

Britten’s intense version of Henry James’s dark, indeed disturbing, story has never really been out of the repertory of small opera companies. Scored for six singers...

In the four decades that Daniel Barenboim has been conducting major orchestras, I have yet to hear him do anything that really moved me. I have...

I reviewed the SACD incarnation of this live recording in the March/April 2011 issue, and so I will keep this review short. One of my comments...

Some mistakes turn out to be serendipitous. This is one of them. When I requested this CD for review, I failed to take close note of...

When I got the call to review this disc I pulled a blank with the composer’s name, Joseph Byrd (b. 1937). But then a quick wikigoogle...

Antonio de Cabezón (1510-1566) was the first Spanish composer of international stature, and a member of the extraordinary historical lineage of blind organ virtuosos. Born to...

This is the third and latest in a series of releases of David DeBoor Canfield’s chamber music on Enharmonic, the composer’s own label. The first two...

Back in 34:4 I interviewed David DeBoor Canfield for this magazine (he has since then joined the staff of reviewers) and reviewed his first two CDs...

There can be no doubt that Bellerofonte Castaldi (1580-1649) was one of the most colorful and well-liked figures of his age, even though he is hardly...

Most people will want this CD for the Concert in D, a tremendous work that belongs in the collection of anyone who has any sympathy at...

Ernest Chausson’s life was suddenly and tragically cut short at the age of 44 when he pedaled his bicycle full speed ahead into a brick wall....

Médée (1797) is not only a potent drama (which led Beethoven toward Fidelio ) but contains some of Cherubini’s finest music (try the duet near the...

You can find a biography of Paul Chihara on Wikipedia (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Chihara), where you will learn that he was born in 1938; as a Japanese-American was stuck...

This is a tremendous issue. Andrew Rose of Pristine Classical has managed to smooth out any pitch problems for this 1933/34 set of Préludes . He...

Ian Hobson’s excellent Chopin series continues apace. This is Vol. 10, which bears the title Knights and Demons, and includes the “Funeral March” Sonata, the complete...

I have to admit there are times when my sense of music history’s chronology, like my sense of geography, is more a fancying of what I...

The present issue brings me that much closer to my goal of collecting all ca. 1,000 works to date of the amazingly prolific composer, Carson Cooman,...

Guillaume Costeley (c.1530-1606) is not the most well known of the 16th-century French composers of song. Nothing is known of his life before his arrival in...

Here is an absolutely ravishing disc of music for viola da gamba and harpsichord by arguably one of the two greatest composers of the French Baroque,...

Antoine Dauvergne (1713-1797) achieved his first and greatest success as it were by stealth. In his 1773 memoirs, Jean Monnet, the Opéra-Comique’s former impresario, discussed how...

At first, this release appears of limited interest. Ilja Hurník is what you might call a “local celebrity.” A composer, writer, teacher, and performer, he is...

If this CD and also a recent DVD of the Bulgarian pianist Hristo Kazakov represents something of a career roll-out, I’ll be in the front of...

Danwen Jiang is a Chinese-born violinist who studied in the United States and currently teaches at Arizona State University. Pianist Walter Cosand is professor of music...

Here, almost exactly a year after the release of Volume 1 ( Fanfare 35:5), is Volume 2 of Hyperion’s planned four-disc edition of the complete solo...

Here is another one of Dynamic’s enterprising (read cynical) rehashes of a DVD, put out, without texts, let alone translations, crudely onto CD. As it is...