John Hirst

After The War was initiated by Dr Brendan Nelson, Director of the Australian War Memorial, and recorded at Rancom St Studios in Sydney with Garth Porter (Producer). This album commemorates and honours the men and women who are serving, and have served our country; and coincides with the 100 year anniversary of the signing of the Armistice on 11th November 1918, the end of The Great War. The album spans from Gallipoli and Passchendaele, to the sinking of HMAS Canberra in 1942 in the waters off Savo Island, to the Battle of Long Tan in a rubber plantation in Vietnam, and the blurred and dusty battle lines of Afghanistan. The songs have been brought to life by the contributions of talented and generous artists who have all donated their royalties to veteran services under the direction of the Australian War Memorial.

There’s not much cruelty, corruption or ruthlessness in Arleen Auger’s exquisitely sung portrayal of the manipulative Poppea, but this hardly detracts from her otherwise radiantly expressive performance. This welcome reissue is not just exhilaratingly played by the City of London Baroque Sinfonia with a spareness and verve that keeps the drama taut, but impressively cast. James Bowman is an elegantly spurned Ottone; Gregory Reinhart a noble Seneca; and the wonderful Della Jones a spirited, quite convincingly masculine Nero. The only snag is Linda Hirst’s unlovely, rather hectoring Ottavia; it doesn’t do, somehow, to sympathise with Nero’s decision to dump her.

It's a tall order to compile the best classical music of the twentieth century, but EMI has selected its top 100 classics for this six-disc set, and it's difficult to argue with most of the choices. Without taking sides in the great ideological debates of the modern era – traditionalist vs. avant-garde, tonal vs. atonal, styles vs. schools, and so on – the label has picked the composers whose reputations seem most secure at the turn of the twenty-first century and has chosen representative excerpts of their music. Certainly, the titans of modernism are here, such as Igor Stravinsky, Arnold Schoenberg, Béla Bartók, Dmitry Shostakovich, Sergey Prokofiev, Claude Debussy, and Benjamin Britten, to name just a few masters, but they don't cast such a large shadow that they eclipse either their more backward-looking predecessors or their more experimental successors.