A feast of melancholia: three L’Oiseau-Lyre albums of early English chamber music from the dawn of the period-performance era, newly remastered and compiled together for the first time with much material new to CD. With this and several other albums issued in 2019, Eloquence celebrates the art of Thurston Dart, the harpsichordist, conductor and editor […]
Sir Adrian Boult’s first Messiah for Decca, newly remastered and coupled with a rare L’Oiseau-Lyre recording of the Bach Magnificat, new to CD. When this Messiah was released in 1954, critics were quick to recognise it as exemplifying the English oratorio tradition at its finest. Boult used a large chorus – the London Philharmonic Choir, […]
Three L’Oiseau-Lyre albums of chamber music by Couperin, newly remastered and compiled together for the first time, including material new to CD. During the past half-century, Francois Couperin ‘the Great’ has indeed come to be regarded among the great European composers. Where once he was dismissed with faint praise as the confector of trifles to […]
The early recordings of a keyboard lioness, long unavailable and new to CD. Not generally given to extravagant effusions, William Glock (Controller of Radio 3 and the BBC Proms in the 1970s) had no doubt: ‘There is no one who plays the piano better in the world than she does. There is no one with […]
‘The most original and artistically consummate of all my works,’ Hugo Wolf said (with justice) of the Italienisches Liederbuch which he wrote in 1890-1 to the poetry of Paul Heyse. Perhaps no pair of singers on record has interpreted this cycle of 46 songs with such natural accomplishment as Irmgard Seefried and Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau. They […]
Two L’Oiseau-Lyre albums of English brass music from the 17th and 18th centuries – The Royal Brass Music of King James I and English Baroque Trumpet Concertos – newly compiled and remastered and issued on CD for the first time. With this and several other albums issued in 2019, Eloquence celebrates the art of […]
Handel orchestral favourites from the 1950s in a winning combination of old-school polish and unaffected stylistic refinement. With this and several other albums, Eloquence celebrates the art of Thurston Dart, the harpsichordist, conductor and editor who played a leading role in the early-music revival in postwar Britain. After his death in 1971 at the […]
For music-lovers who grew up between the 1950s and the 1970s, Alfred Deller (1912–1979) was the embodiment of the countertenor voice, just as Segovia was the guitar and Casals was the cello. Many who heard his earliest LPs will have applauded the words that Sir Michael Tippett uttered on first hearing Deller live, as early […]
The Vienna Philharmonic’s distinguished Bruckner tradition, documented through a series of superb Decca recordings from the 1960s and 70s on a Limited Edition 9-CD box set, with Original Jackets. Founded in 1842, the Vienna Philharmonic gave a notoriously dusty reception to Bruckner’s Third when they played through it in rehearsal in 1874 and refused […]
A song recital new to CD from a peerless lyric soprano, coupled with classic recordings of Ravel and Verdi. In 1971 Andrew Porter wrote that Margaret Price’s voice was among the things that make one ‘glad to be alive’. In the 1960s she had recorded for a small Welsh label a recital of Welsh, […]
Kurt Masur’s burnished readings of Brahms’s orchestral music with the Gewandhausorchester Leipzig, issued as a Limited Edition box with Original Jackets. Hardly less than with its founder, Felix Mendelssohn, the Leipzig Gewandhaus grew up with Brahms conducting and playing. For a sense of heritage, the orchestra boasts a Brahms tradition second to none. In […]
Alfred Deller’s only complete recording of a Handel opera. First staged at the King’s Theatre in London in February 1732 and revived two years later, Sosarme was not heard again in full (if not entirely complete) until a BBC broadcast in January 1955, conducted by Anthony Lewis. Conductor and performers then made this recording a […]
