Posts tagged as "benjamin-britten"

A Treasury of English Song

April 19, 2016

These recordings, made over the space of a decade from March 1954 to December 1964, capture Peter Pears in the high summer of his career and at the peak his powers, a period roughly framed by some of the highlights of his partnership with Benjamin Britten: the creation of the character of Peter Quint in […]

Peter Pears – The Decca Premieres

April 19, 2016

On 24 June 1936, Peter Pears joined his BBC Singers colleague, contralto Anne Wood, at Decca’s studio in Upper Thames Street in the City of London to make his very first commercial recording, of Peter Warlock’s setting of the Corpus Christi carol for unaccompanied voices. The year marked a turning-point for Pears: he met Benjamin […]

Jubilee – A Celebration of Royal Music

April 19, 2016

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 […]

Britten Rarities

April 18, 2016

This collection brings together rarities and surprises from the Decca/Argo Britten discography, a collection notable as much for the infrequency with which much of this music is performed as it is for the fact that many of these are world-premiere recordings of Britten’s music. The source material itself is extremely rare and virtually every recording […]

Schumann: Chamber Music

March 22, 2016

Late in the 1840s, Schumann entered a chamber music phase. It was, it is said, motivated partly by financial reasons – creating a body of chamber works that could be played by talented amateurs in their own homes. Many of the works on this disc date from 1849. Significantly, for collectors, one of these – […]

Music of the Monarchs

March 12, 2016

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 […]