‘In every way the most transcendentally gifted young piano student I have heard in the last 25 years’ was Percy Grainger’s pronouncement of the young Eileen Joyce (1908–1991) when he first heard her play in 1926. From the goldfields in Western Australia whose capital city is the most remote in the world, Joyce defied incongruous and […]

The Weber Clarinet Quintet is well known and it’s good to welcome back this recording to the catalogue, notable especially for the wonderful clarinet playing of Gervase de Peyer. But the real finds on this recording are the superb Septet and Quintet of Hummel. The Piano Concertos of Hummel are now becoming a little more […]

These peerless recordings of Oboe Concertos are despatched with beautiful clarity by Ernest Rombout both playing the oboe and directing the Concertgebouw Chamber Orchestra.

As a companion to the 2CD set of ‘Paris’ Symphonies, this CD presents the rest of Ansermet’s Haydn recordings – two symphonies (recorded in 1965), the Trumpet Concerto (dating from 1957) and as a pendant, the Hummel Trumpet Concerto (recorded in 1968). The readings are certainly on a larger scale than that which we expect […]

In 1819, the Viennese publisher Anton Diabelli asked ‘the most excellent composers and virtuosi of Vienna and the Austrian Empire’, to write a variation on a waltz theme he had composed. Beethoven was also asked and although he at first refused, he did finally deliver a cycle of 33 variations as his own contribution to […]