‘From Melba to Sutherland: Australian Singers on Record’ is the first-ever comprehensive survey of the recordings of Australia’s greatest singers – in a unique, new, 4CD set from Decca, complete with biographies of each of the 80 artists, rare photographs, all contained within a 68-page booklet. Why has there been such an extraordinary procession of […]
Salvatore Accardo, born in Turin in 1941, brings an Italianate warmth and intensity to the music he plays – not just to fellow countrymen such as Vivaldi, Tartini and Paganini but also to Austrian and German composers. By the age of thirteen, he had performed Paganini’s Caprices in recital and he was an international competition […]
Aromatherapy, the quiet moments of classical music. And the seventh volume is a collection of music inspired by the countryside. This album takes a tour of many and varied landscapes beginning with the English countryside as seen through the eyes of Vaughan Williams, coupled with the Vienna Woods, in Johann Strauss II’s popular waltz, France’s […]
In 1979, the much-loved British cellist Jacqueline du Pre, then beset with multiple sclerosis (she was diagnosed in 1973), stepped into the recording studio to make what was to be her last recording – not as cellist but as an engaging narrator in ‘Peter and the Wolf’. Her husband, Daniel Barenboim, conducted a spacious and […]
A superb collection of four complete Britten orchestral masterpieces in performances that have been lauded over and over again. The ‘Simple Symphony’ is engagingly done, the virtuosity in the ‘Frank Bridge Variations’, not to mention state-of-the-art sound engineering, has never been exceeded and the two Van Beinum recordings have a wonderful nobility to them.
Three delightfully breezy concertos by Vivaldi are the centrepiece of this collection which begins with the familiar A major concerto of Giulani and ends with the beguiling 17-minute sonata by Paganini.
This is one of the most successful and stylish of Don Giovanni recordings. Having sung Donna Anna in her early (Giulini) recording, Sutherland here is, if anything, even more spine-tingling in this role. Bonynge and the English Chamber Orchestra, together with the Ambrosian Singers, really deliver the goods and the rest of the stellar cast […]
These delightful Cantatas have very familiar tunes that Handel was later to reuse in other works, so many of them are instantly recognisable. They also elicit some of the most visceral singing imaginable from Helen Watts.
Aromatherapy, the quiet moments of classical music. And the seventh volume, Reflections in the Water, is the ultimate tranquility! Water is a force of nature that inspired composers to some of their most languid compositions, from the Baroque (Handel’s Water Music written for a royal party held on a barge) to Impressionistic (the aqueous ripples and shimmer […]
This happy assembly of pianists and conductors share the honours for these three Mozart concertos, making a welcome return to the Decca catalogue.
Some of Handel’s most magnificent and regal choral writing is collected on this CD. The most popular work on it, by far, is the Coronation Anthem ‘Zadok the Priest’. Both the Coronation Anthems and the ‘Ode for the Birthday of Queen Anne’ were written for monarchs and the opening of the ‘Ode’ with its trumpet […]
Janet Baker started her singing studies with Helen Isepp in 1953. She won second prize in the Kathleen Ferrier awards only three years later making her debut in the same year. She quickly established herself as a regular of the Glyndebourne Festival and a member of Benjamin Britten’s English Opera Group also making her mark […]
