Category: Classical
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Philip Wood: Sonnets, Airs and Dances: Songs and Chamber Music
We’ve played this over and over but we can’t, sad to say, find an angle to hang a review on. It’s 24 tracks and Wood has gathered 11 years’ worth of composition; all the pieces were gifts or gestures of goodwill towards people he knows. Maybe that’s the reason it never takes off; all the…
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Sami Junnonen: The Chant Enchanted
We’ve been enjoying this album by flautist Sami Junnonen, though it’s hard to describe. It’s an album of flute music by a Finn (he was born in 1977 in Tampere) but at various places sounds English (Vaughan Williams) and European (Bach/Mozart/chamber music) and at other times exotic — one featured composer is Michio Miyagi, an…
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The Fidelio Trio: Dancing In Daylight
Mention Dublin, dancing and light of some kind and your average music fan is going to think Thin Lizzy and Dancing in the Moonlight. We don’t think the composer of the piece that gives this CD its name was thinking of Phil Lynott and his chocolate stains but the two bits of music contrast well:…
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Cor Cantiamo: Psallite
This is a rather wonderful album and will appeal both to people who like singing and choirs, and those who don’t care much about choirs but like nice music. Clearly, with a stained glass window on the sleeve and a title like Psallite, there’s a religious theme: the sleeve notes say Psallite is an exhortation…
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Galina Grigorjeva: Nature Morte
Even the most average of indie rock bands can litter the internet with glowing reviews and references (usually written by friends and family we guess, and as for all those five-star reviews on Amazon, pfah!) but we always find it surprising that talented people can exist and produce world-class music without causing so much as…
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Kimmo Pohjonen: Sensitive Skin
They’re pleasantly mad in Finland: any country that would enter a hard rock/heavy metal band into the Eurovision Song Contest has got to be eccentric. The fact that Mr Lordi won shows that we find such behaviour endearing. Thus with this, a prog album from an accordionist, featuring the Kronos Quartet and distributed by the…
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Johann Ernst Prinz von Sachsen-Weimar: Violin Concertos
At the first play-through of this collection of lush and charming baroque string concertos, you’re thinking it’s nice but no Premiership as far as composing goes: top of the Championship but not world class. Then you read his biography and learn that Johann Ernst of Saxe-Weimar — born on Christmas Day in 1696 — didn’t…
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Steffen Schleiermacher / Holger Falk: Erik Satie Ultimate Melodies and Songs
Satie is best known for his classic piano piece Gymnopédie No1 (you’ve all heard it) and was endearingly eccentric. He was once so poor he shared a suit with lifelong friend JP Contamine de Latour, meaning they could only go out one at a time, and when he died, his flat — never visited by…
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Burkard Schliessmann: Chronological Chopin
This 3CD box set (Super Audio CD) is self-explanatory by the title, and it seems pointless to type out Schliessmann’s extensive sleeve notes, which range from the technical to the more understandable to laymen such as ourselves (“Chopin was a gifted tunesmith”). Schliessmann writes at length about Chopin’s genius and technical brilliance and while Schliessmann…
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