Posts tagged as "featured-articles"

Alfredo Campoli – His lasting legacy

September 18, 2024

Campoli’s 78rpm Recordings The first seven CDs of this set contain all the extant studio recordings made by Alfredo Campoli for Decca from his first sessions for the label in 1931 through his last made for release on 78rpm discs in 1949, except for the non-Classical sides he made as leader and soloist with his […]

Josef Krips in concert with the Concertgebouworkest

May 23, 2024

Words by Niek Nelissen (Translation: Margaret Koford) As a recording artist, the Viennese conductor Josef Krips (1902–1974) lived through the most significant technological developments in the music industry. His first recordings were released on 78rpm records, which could only hold about four minutes of music per side. From 1950 onwards music was recorded on tape […]

The Sound of Hollywood – Three Decades Later

December 6, 2023

Reviewing and remembering our recording series for Philips with the Hollywood Bowl Orchestra has been joyous for me. Many thoughts and memories flood my mind and listening to them once again fills me with pride. Pride to have been given the opportunity to create a brand new orchestra; pride to work with a great recording […]

Hans Schmidt-Isserstedt – What The Critics Said

September 27, 2023

“Schmidt-Isserstedt is the man for the job. His reading is strong, spacious and noble, and the symphony emerges at its full tragic stature. The playing and recording are in every way worthy of him.” The Times, August 1953 (Dvořák: Symphony No. 7) “This well-engineered recording deserves repeated hearing.” The Times, March 1959 (Beethoven: Piano Concerto […]

Antal Doráti’s Mercury Recordings – What The Critics Said

June 6, 2023

Antal Doráti – The Mercury Masters – The Mono Recordings “The lively Mendelssohn symphony finds conductor and orchestra in superlative form. Their performance of this difficult work is amply virtuosic, yet very sensitively phrased.” High Fidelity, January 1953 (Mendelssohn: Symphony No. 4) “Refreshingly brisk, straightforward and unmarred by any of the usual sentimentality … The […]

Elly Ameling in her Own Words

March 24, 2023

Elly Ameling in her own words Elly Ameling is a cultivated, gentle lady. Born on 8 February 1933, she was propelled to national stardom after winning the International Vocal Competition’s-Hertogenbosch in 1956. She sang under the young Bernard Haitink in 1958 and that same year won the prestigious Concours de Genève, opening doors to an […]

Christian Ferras

February 24, 2023

The once-mighty Franco-Belgian school of violin playing suffered something of a thin time in the post-war years. In Belgium, Alfred Dubois died in 1949, aged only 50, leaving his pupil Arthur Grumiaux on a lonely eminence. In France, air crashes claimed Ginette Neveu in 1949, aged 30, and Jacques Thibaud in 1953, aged 72. Fine […]

Bach ‘con discrezione’ by Peter Quantrill

November 29, 2022

When Jörg Demus died in April 2019, aged 90, he was remembered by one Austrian obituarist as ‘the ballet-master of ten fingers’. Many pupils from his classes at his own alma mater of the Wiener Akademie paid affectionate tributes to a dry and lively man, equipped with a cynical, quick-witted, typically Viennese turn of mind, […]

CELEBRATING SIR ADRIAN

November 10, 2022

BY ROB COWAN (Re-published with permission from the author HERE) A PERSONAL PRELUDE Among my most valued formative musical experiences from the late 1960s was the year I spent working for what had recently been called the BBC Third Programme but was by then Radio 3. The department I was assigned to, Concerts Management, dealt […]

QUEEN OF THE KEYBOARD

August 11, 2022

Mark Ainley surveys the artistry of Greek pianist Gina Bachauer, to mark the release of her complete Mercury Living Presence recordings. Many pianists are impossible to classify and fit no school. Gina Bachauer was one of these… unlike most modern pianists she was a romantic with a virtuoso approach to the keyboard…. She played in […]

Paul Paray & Mercury Living Presence

July 5, 2022

What The Critics Said VOLUME 1 “Judging from the first releases by him and the newly resuscitated Detroit Symphony Orchestra, [Paray] should soon come into his own. His reading of this much-played symphony is a thrill from start to finish.” High Fidelity, November 1953 (Franck) “Once again, Paray reveals his mastery at interpreting modern French […]

NETHERLANDS WIND ENSEMBLE

May 24, 2022

Peter Quantrill shares his thoughts on this remarkable chamber music group DOWNLOAD FULL BOX SET BOOKLET HERE Nonconformism in the Low Countries has taken many forms. To pass quickly over only its salient manifestations in the history of music, the country already enjoyed a liberal conservative culture when the English composer Peter Philips escaped to […]