Bringing together Eduard van Beinum’s complete Elgar recordings for Decca, this important historic reissue presents multi-faceted sides of the composer: his sense of national pride in Cockaigne, his fondness of childhood memories in The Wand of Youth, and his profundity in the little Elegy and his masterpiece, the Cello Concerto. The Wand of Youth actually originated […]

Two beloved Romantic orchestral works in stellar performances, return to the catalogue in beautiful transfers. Pierre Monteux (1875-1964), often bemoaned the fact that he was associated with the French and Russian repertoires to the exclusion of music from outside of those traditions. He could hardly help it; after all, it was Monteux who conducted the […]

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 […]

During the 1960s, Louis Halsey, together with the Elizabethan Singers and The Louis Halsey Singers, made a number of recordings of British choral music for Decca. Three LPs devoted to the music of Parry, Elgar, Stanford and Delius and of folk song settings by a range of British composers, are here collected on this 2CD […]

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 […]

Perhaps one of the grandest and most emotional of all the recordings of Elgar’s ‘Enigma Variations’ ever made, Norman Del Mar and the Royal Philharmonic recorded it in January 1975 in the superb acoustic of the Guildford Cathedral. The Pomp and Circumstance Marches have a real swagger too. Anthony Burton provides the insightful notes.

The violinist who straddled the divide between the old ways and the new, was the Viennese virtuoso, Wolfgang Eduard Schneiderhan. He was born on 28th May 1915 and beginning violin lessons at five, he polished his technique under Sevcík and Winkler. From the 1950s onward, Schneiderhan displayed all the qualities normally associated with German musicians. […]