Strange Strings

Frederick Septimus Kelly was one of Australia's great cultural losses of World War One: a composer the equal of Vaughan Williams, who survived Gallipoli but was cut down in the final days of the Battle of the Somme. His music – crafted entirely in his head, and only committed to paper once perfected – displays touching lyricism and profound invention. Even during the war, he never stopped writing music: on troop ships during long ocean crossings, in training camps, in the trenches of Gallipoli, in a military hospital recovering from war wounds, in a bombed-out cellar barely 300 metres from enemy lines in France. This album presents his complete catalogue of orchestral works, many recorded here for the first time.

A new T. Rex box set called simply 1972 brings together studio recordings, broadcasts and performances by Marc Bolan and T. Rex and is available to pre-order in 6LP coloured vinyl and 5CD editions, with limited quantities being available with a print of The Slider SIGNED by producer Tony Visconti.

A new T. Rex box set called simply 1972 brings together studio recordings, broadcasts and performances by Marc Bolan and T. Rex and is available to pre-order in 6LP coloured vinyl and 5CD editions, with limited quantities being available with a print of The Slider SIGNED by producer Tony Visconti.

A master of the kora (21-string West African harp), Toumani Diabaté has brought the traditional music of his native Mali to the attention of an international audience with a series of well-received solo albums and some unlikely, but acclaimed, collaborations. Although he came from a family of musicians, Diabaté (born August 10, 1965) taught himself to play the kora at an early age, as his father, who also played the instrument, was often away touring. He developed a style of playing that, while being strongly rooted in the Malian tradition, is also open to a wide range of other influences, such as jazz and flamenco. He has subsequently sought out other musicians from around the world who are willing to experiment with him, even performing a concert in Amsterdam with a classical harpist.

This whopping 40-disc set, which sells for very little, contains familiar performances of the major works, and most of them are quite good. Symphonies Nos. 1-7 feature Kosler and the Slovak Philharmonic–not a first-class orchestra, but a fine conductor who gets the ensemble to play idiomatically and well. The Eighth is Menuhin's (not bad), the Ninth Paavo Järvi's (quite good). The concertos come from Vox and feature Firkusny (piano), Nelsova (cello), and Ricci (violin).

Bernard Stevens's Dance Suite, Opus 28, was written in 1957 and first performed in a radio broadcast in 1961 by the BBC Northern Orchestra under George Hurst. Any listener expecting a relaxed sequence of light music will soon be rudely disabused. In choosing his title Stevens may well have been thinking of the Dance Suite of Béla Bartók, like his own, a challenging and substantial work founded on a complex sublimation of national dance-rhythms. The four movements of Stevens's suite create the impression of something more like a concise and vigorous 'dance symphony'; and like ……