Berlin 36

The Lemmy Kilmister/Phil Campbell/Mikkey Dee Motörhead line-up spent decades cracking sound barriers, bending ears and decimating lawns worldwide, consistently delivering the Motörgospel to hundreds of thousands of fans. Louder Than Noise… Live in Berlin is a thunderous performance from the band’s 2012 Kings of The Road tour, spanning fifteen classics across all four decades. This line-up was Motörhead’s longest serving by a considerable distance, and throughout Louder Than Noise… Live in Berlin their powerful synergy boots its way through the speakers with the raucous charm and dirty, dangerous, sweaty gusto that was the Kilmister/Campbell/Dee trademark. From the unapologetically furious ‘I Know How to Die’ to a deliciously rare and raucous ‘Over the Top’, Louder Than Noise… Live in Berlin is all about the thick, raw and liberating power of Motörhead live. Further highlights include a favorably feral ‘Rock It’, a rudely raunchy ‘You Better Run’ and a classic one-two haymaker of ‘Ace of Spades’ and ‘Overkill’. Whether a collector completist or newbie to Motörhead’s music, Louder Than Noise… Live in Berlin is a welcome reminder of what real rock ‘n’ roll is truly about.

Johann Sebastian Bach and the Akademie für Alte Musik Berlin go back a long way together! This recording, made with the welcome participation of Isabelle Faust and Antoine Tamestit, follows the complete violin concertos (2019), which left a lasting impression. Returning regularly to the inexhaustible source of the Brandenburgs ever since a memorable first recording in the late 1990s, the Berlin musicians have achieved a sovereign mastery of what is not a single work, but six, which, under their fingers, are successive episodes of a piece of musical theatre in love with dance, transparent sound and freedom. An exhilarating experience!

Verdi was on a war footing with the Catholic Church from a very early age. It is true that he was brought up to believe in God, as was usual in Italy at that time, and it is no less true that his first music teacher, Ferdinando Provesi, was the organist at the Church of San Bartolomeo in Busseto, but when the then sixteen-year-old composer applied for the post of church musician in the town in 1829, his application was rejected – not because his musical abilities were in any way deficient but because he was regarded as a protégé of Antonio Barezzi, a local businessman with a reputation for his anti-clerical views. He fared little better when he submitted his first sacred works – a Laudate pueri, a Qui tollis and two settings of the Tantum ergo – in the early 1830s, when the Church authorities complained that the music sounded “theatrical, lascivious, bellicose and indecorous” . In short, it was hardly calculated to foster a sense of piety and devotion.

The church cantata very quickly came to occupy a privileged place in Bach’s output, but it was in his Leipzig period that he explored new stylistic possibilities for the genre in several cycles. The third of these, mostly scored for relatively small forces, features in these Dialogkantaten three fine examples of the ‘madrigalian’ type: in their arias, recitatives and chorales, the composer deploys a poetry that does not exclude audacity and an eloquence worthy of opera.