Category: Classical
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Linos Ensemble: Kalkbrenner: Sextet, Septet and Piano Fantasy
This is a charming CD, featuring the word of Friedrich Kalkbrenner (1785-1849). As with many of the CDs we like, his name may not be familiar to most music lovers; in his day he was said to be the foremost pianist in Europe and (according to Wikipedia) became enormously rich because he had a sound […]
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Ruth Wilkinson, Miriam Morris, John O’Donnell: Handel’s Recorder
This album is pretty well what it implies: Handel, played on recorder. It’s noteworthy because it features three of Australia’s leading early-music specialists (it was recorded in collaboration with the Australian Broadcasting Corporation), playing instruments made to as closely resemble the ones of the time as possible, tuned as per in their day. The major […]
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Alexander Kostritsa: Three Generations of Mazurkas
The mazurka sounds like a Greek starter (“I’ll have a mazurka followed by a moussaka please”) but it’s actually a lively Polish folk dance, with the accent on the second or third beat. The Poles say mazurek. This new CD looks at the mazurka as it developed from a dance to full-blown Romantic art-music — […]
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Maya Beiser: Uncovered
Beiser has been called a “cello goddess” “the queen of contemporary cello” (New Yorker and San Francisco Chronicle respectively) but she grew up on a kibbutz listening to rock. She says music is either good or bad and nothing more, so she’s taken her instrument of choice, the cello, to make an album of rock […]
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Goldstone and Clemmow: Rimsky-Korsakov for piano duet
This latest work from the husband and wife team of Anthony Goldstone and Caroline Clemmow lifts what could be pedestrian pieces of work to a higher level. We can imagine that the pieces on this CD —Scheherazade, Antar and Neopolitan Song — could be banged out by a hack player to make inoffensive background music, […]
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