Clair

With a Ray Davies-like vocal delivery, mountains of songwriting credits, Clair's gritty and provocative tunes are kicked into high gear with the muscular and stirring chops of the mighty Pushbacks. "It takes balls, literally and figuratively, to sing so knowingly about a vasectomy. But in the swaggering, amped-up title track to Love Makes Us Weird, Stephen Clair does just that, turning a four-syllable word into a tight rhyme with the line 'Who are we?'"

Modern audiences sometimes associate musicmaking from the Romantic era with extreme rubato, impetuousness of spirit, and a calculated disregard for the fidelity of the text. Although this certainly existed, these characteristics were by no means universally employed. In fact, many Romantic musicians strove to achieve clarity in their performances. “Toujours clair, I have heard him (Guilmant) exclaim a hundred times…” his student Charles Galloway reported in The Etude magazine in January 1921.

Heitor Villa-Lobos is without a doubt Brazil's most famous composer and one of the great creative personalities of the twentieth century. His oeuvre is gigantic in its dimensions and perhaps can be compared only to that of Darius Milhaud, who, by the way, was a close friend of his. In any case, Villa-Lobos was the first to introduce the music of Latin America to the world's concert halls, and influences from this music do indeed abound in his oeuvre. cpo is now presenting the first complete recording of his colossal symphonic work complex in a boxed set of seven CDs at a special low price! The SWR Radio Symphony Orchestra under the American star conductor Carl St. Clair has taken on this enormous task, and the result can only be described as a bravura achievement. You can look forward to an orchestral tour de force operating on the highest level!