PhilomusicaSeveral Eloquence releases have celebrated the pellucid timbre and vivid characterisation of the British soprano’ Jennifer Vyvyan. ‘A treasury to treasure’ was the BBC Music Magazine’s verdict on ‘Songs of England’ (482 5045), a L’Oiseau Lyre recital from 1953. Four years later, she took part in the first complete recording of Purcell’s masque, ‘The Fairy […]
Bach’s music featured early in Ansermet’s career and he conducted the fourth Orchestral Suite in his last concert. Playing Bach in the 1960s was not quite the affair it is today but it would be false to assume that Ansermet’s Bach is the bloated, romanticised affair that was current in the 1960s. While his readings […]
A beautiful collection of Purcell favourites, both from recent times with artists of the calibre of Emma Kirkby and Christopher Hogwood, to such Purcell champions of the mid-20th century as Benjamin Britten, whose rousing arrangement and performance of the ‘Chaconne in G minor’ is here included.
Behind the stuffed shirts and the stiff upper lips of the Victorian era, dwelt some admirable spirits, none perhaps more admirable than Albert, Prince of Saxe, Coburg and Gotha, Prince Consort of Queen Victoria. Among this collection of songs by him are some which could take their place worthily in any recital of Lieder of […]
The potential of music as a means of adding dignity and grandeur to state occasions has surely been lost on a few rulers in history. Portraits of antique kings and queens are more often admired (or the reverse) for their artistic qualities, as opposed to the enhancement in the status of their subjects they were […]
Purcell wrote so much in so many different spheres of musical activity that it is easy to forget that one of his main tasks was to be a royal composer, to provide music for the occasions of State in Westminster Abbey, just as the Gabrielis had done for the Doge at St Mark’s or Lully […]
More than 250 years of music celebrating the reign of the great British monarchs CD 1 – HANDEL: Coronation Anthems Handel’s four uplifting Coronation Anthems, including the epic Zadok the Priest with the Choir of King’s College, Cambridge, and his beautiful Ode for the Birthday of Queen Anne, with its celestial invocation for trumpet and counter-tenor, ‘Eternal […]
