Category: Classical
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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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York Bowen: String Quartets
Bowen is another British composer who’s been lost to present music fans. Like Arnold Cooke from last week, this was originally released by the British Music Society and is now out on Naxos. Bowen (1884-1961) was active before WWI and seems to have disappeared without trace afterwards, which is a shame. This album from…
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Eric Craven : Piano Sonatas 7+8+9
We’ve not heard of Craven, but apparently he was a teacher who taught music and mathematics in secondary schools in Manchester. He has composed music since his teens, but rarely performed or published until recently. Encouraged by Mary Dullea and Divine Art/Metier Records, the first album of his music SET for piano, performed by Dullea,…
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Michael Finnissy: Mississipi Hornpipes
If the title suggests to you some folkie American Appalachian adaptations, you’re going to be sorely disappointed. Finnissy — Prof Finnissy to give him his proper title — is professor of composition at the University of Southampton. We found this quote attributed to him: “If it’s a commercial success you have in your sights, lay…
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Arnold Cooke: Three String Sonatas
This appears to be a CD that was originally released (in 2009) by the British Music Society, formed in 1979 by a group of amateur and professional music lovers to promote British music in the face of indifference. Cooke was a good one to support: despite having a prolific working life over nearly a century,…
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Moscow Chamber Orchestra / Rudolf Barshai : Baroque Music volume one
The most surprising thing about this CD is the fact that its recordings are 50 years old, as they sound so fresh and new. Barshai won numerous Soviet and international competitions and was the founding violist of the Borodin Quartet in 1945. In 1955, he founded the Moscow Chamber Orchestra, which he led and…
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Lei Liang: Bamboo Lights
We like a bit of avant-garde in the Review Corner, and this garde is as avant as they come. This is a “portrait CD” of Liang’s work, which we are going to crudely summarise thus: imagine an upmarket kung fu movie with pretensions of art, and a scene where the protagonists walk through a bamboo…
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