Abandoned Hall

By late 1973, Marc Bolan's star was waning fast. No longer gunning out those effortless classics which established him as the most important figure of the decade so far, he embarked instead on a voyage of musical discovery, which cast him so far adrift from the commercial pop mainstream that when his critics said he'd blown it, he didn't even bother answering them back. Or that's the way it appeared at the time, and today, too, it must be acknowledged that 1974's Zinc Alloy & the Hidden Riders of Tomorrow is not classic Bolan, even if one overlooks the transparency of its title.

'Mendelssohn in Birmingham’ is an exciting new recording project with the CBSO and its Principal Guest Conductor, Edward Gardner. It celebrates Mendelssohn’s special relationship with the city’s Town Hall and will feature the complete symphonies recorded there. It was a venue much loved by Mendelssohn and saw him conduct many of his own works there, including premieres. ‘Mendelssohn in Birmingham’ also encompasses a major concert series at the Town Hall which will run alongside these recordings.

Kiss (often stylized as KISS) are a band who experimented with many styles of Rock music including 1970's Hard Rock and 1980's Hair / Glam Metal (Heavy Metal). Kiss formed in Queens, New York (USA) in 1973…

‘Mendelssohn in Birmingham’ is an exciting new recording project with the CBSO and its Principal Guest Conductor, Edward Gardner. It celebrates Mendelssohn’s special relationship with the city’s Town Hall and will feature the complete symphonies recorded there. It was a venue much loved by Mendelssohn and saw him conduct many of his own works there, including premieres. ‘Mendelssohn in Birmingham’ also encompasses a major concert series at the Town Hall which will run alongside these recordings.

Rod Stewart may have begun his career as a respected singer, yet that critical respect eroded as he got older, as he became more concerned with stardom and adult contemporary songcraft than the rock music that launched him. While he has recorded some terrible albums and he would admit that freely Stewart was once rock & roll's best interpretive singer as well as an accomplished songwriter, creating a raw combination of folk, rock, blues, and country that sounded like no other folk-rock or country-rock material. Instead of finding the folk in rock, he found how folk rocked like hell on its own.

Prince's star faded not long after he won emancipation from Warner Brothers in 1995, as he abandoned the mainstream so he could follow his whims however he liked. Which meant that he effectively started making records for nobody but himself, whether that meant triple-disc collections of new material or an all-instrumental smooth jazz album, and in short order, his fans started dwindling away to nothing but the hardcore, who themselves had their patience tried by such antics as Prince suing his own fanzine in the late '90s. It seemed that he was fated to permanently wander in the wilderness, making music for an ever more selective audience, until he suddenly decided in 2004 that he wanted to be back in the game, returning to the spotlight with acclaimed performances at the Grammys and the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame induction ceremony, announcing an all-hits tour, and releasing Musicology, his first major-label distributed album in five years…

John Cage (1912–92) is regarded as one of the most influential and controversial composers of the 20th century. It is not only his music that this reputation is based on – his ideas were revolutionary, and he cast doubt on the supremacy of European art, and music when it was unchallenged and such views were considered heretic. Cage rejected the status held by harmony, instrumentation, and even the development of music from one point to another. He disconnected harmony from rhythm to liberate western music from its hitherto privileged hierarchies – iconoclastic stuff for 1940s America!