Funeral Music

This is a sensational, bang up CD. The sound engineering is rich and full, giving you a full injection of glorious string sound. As for the performances, they are some of the best I've ever heard. The Britten is comparable to the composer's own recording, while the Warlock is absolutely the finest I know of. If you are familiar with recordings of these works by William Boughton and the English String Orchestra or by Sir Neville Marriner and the Academy of St. Martin-in-the-Fields, these performances will not seem out of place in their company.

This newly remastered recording presents a varied selection of orchestral works by Benjamin Britten, performed by the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra under Richard Hickox, to mark the great composer’s centenary year. The disc is also a part of The Richard Hickox Legacy, paying tribute to the conductor and leading advocate of twentieth-century British music.

This disc of orchestral works does in many ways display the more than slight tension between Dessau's commitment to social realism and his avant-garde inclinations - a tension between conformity and defiance to the highly politicized art of Eastern Germany (conformity through the choice of themes, defiance in terms of musical voice); "Meer der Stürme", for instance, strongly suggests that Dessau sought an excuse in purported pictorialism for deploying radical compositional techniques…..

G.D @ amazon.com

It has been quite a long time since we had any recorded excerpts from Bax's now legendary score for 'Oliver Twist' let alone a complete score. This issue is doubly welcome for this listener whose home country is immortalized in these fine excerpts from 'Malta GC'!

The fifth volume of our complete recording of Bach’s cantatas completes the series of secular cantatas from the composer’s years in Leipzig. Seven works are involved here, spanning a period from 1725 to 1742, the year of Bach’s final secular cantata, BWV 212. Of Bach’s occasional compositions, some fifty secular pieces have survived, yet these represent no more than a fraction of what must once have existed. Indeed, there is no other group of works by the composer that has suffered such great – and regrettable – losses. In the case of more than half of the works that are known to have existed, only the words, but not the music, survived. Quite how many pieces may have disappeared without leaving any trace whatsoever is impossible to say.

Witold Lutosławski (1913-1994) was the pre-eminent member of a group of Polish composers that came to prominence after the Second World War and whose artistic advancement was given impetus by the death of Stalin in 1953. The works in this set cover four decades of Lutosławski's career and include most of his important orchestral works, starting with the early Symphonic Variations, his first and second symphonies and the Concerto for Orchestra, perhaps his best-known work.