Movie music aficionados are a very particular breed – serious, knowledgeable, fanatical. Even the soft-core variety – as I once was – are fiercely defensive of their favourite practitioners. The music and the indelible images they amplify…
School of Barbirolli. That was my first thought as the faltering pulse of the opening bars ushered in the warm and consoling first theme, first heard, of course, in the second not first violins. No hint so…
A Mahler 4 as insightful and as individual as we have come to expect from this source. How rarely we hear the opening bars of the symphony delivered precisely as Mahler instructs: Bedächtig. Nicht eilen (Deliberate. Don’t…
Since it was unveiled at last year’s Glyndebourne Festival Keith Warner’s handsome and insightful staging of Barber’s Vanessa has probably done more to silence the work’s naysayers than any in recent memory. It’s a piece that has…
Melody Moore’s ‘An American Song Album’ feels personal and custom-made for her ample lyrico spinto instrument. And that’s always a good place to start. She can thunder darkly, she can float, she can spin – she has…
Just Sibelius’ First Symphony? That is exceptionally short measure for a CD. The ratio of quality over quantity needed to be especially dramatic – not least because barely a couple of months back Santtu-Matias Rouvali and the…
Enter the extraordinary world of Federico Fellini – a world where childhood dreams strive to lose touch with reality, where playboys and clowns rub shoulders and pretty much all life is a three-ring circus. In Fellini’s Italy…
A number of things become clearer as Wynton Marsalis’ Violin Concerto unfolds: first, that there’s a story to be told, an American story; second, that Charles Ives – musical America’s greatest pioneer – has not passed Marsalis…
This month’s cover feature has prompted some age old cravings in me. I have travelled far and wide in the United States, I have repeatedly given my regards to Broadway, the American Songbook is as much a…
So it’s vacation time for the Latvian mezzo. Sun, sea, and seduction. True love may never run smooth but it always sounds better in Spanish or Italian. Garanca’s selection of flamboyant Mediterranean and Latin American songs is…
