The Blood of an Englishman

Leopold Anthony Stokowski, one of the true conducting luminaries of the twentieth century, was born in London in 1882. His father was Polish, his mother Irish, but he was raised as an Englishman. His famous, vaguely foreign, accent somehow appeared later in his life.

At the end of the sixties, Barbirolli suffered several short heart episodes which caused him to pass out, but , before his final attack he recovered to have the sufficient time to attend his last public concerts. This great cd is Barbirolli's last recording in life, and, as anyone could expect, this performance is full of stress, blood and strength, acording to a strange approaching to Bruckner's world. In the other hand, Barbirolli went beyond of the typical performance of a Bruckner symphony. I think he has never been so close to Mahler's world performing Bruckner. Maybe he knew that was the last time to leave his own mark...

Great Spans of Muddy Time is the fourth album from Mercury Music Prize nominated artist William Doyle, and the second under his own name (having dropped his earlier East India Youth moniker). Born from accident but driven forward by instinct, the album was built from the remains of a catastrophic hard-drive failure. With his work saved only to cassette tape, Doyle was forced to accept the recordings as they were – a sharp departure from his process on the previous record, 2019’s Your Wilderness Revisited, which he spent four long years honing toward perfection.

Based on Bram Stoker's classic 1897 novel, this film from Francis Ford Coppola and screenwriter James Victor Hart offers a full-blooded portrait of the immortal Transylvanian vampire. The major departure from Stoker is one of motivation as Count Dracula (Gary Oldman) is motivated more by romance than by bloodlust. He punctures the necks as a means of avenging the death of his wife in the 15th century, and when he comes to London, it is specifically to meet heroine Mina Harker (Winona Ryder), the living image of his late wife (Ryder plays a dual role, as do several of her costars). Anthony Hopkins is obsessed vampire hunter Van Helsing, while Keanu Reeves takes on the role of Jonathan Harker, and Tom Waits plays bug-eating Renfield.

A highly erotic, gothic mystery, in the style of Hitchcock's "Vertigo", from Alain Robbe-Grillet, writer of the Oscar-nominated "Last Year At Marienbad" and director of the notorious "Trans-Europ Express". An English historian living in Morocco is searching for some mythical lost paintings. His quest leads him into the ancient Arabic quarter of the city. There he sees a beautiful blonde woman in a white veil. He becomes obsessed with finding her, but discovers that she may already be dead. His Moroccan mistress, Belkis, appears to be encouraging his obsessions, but it soon transpires that she may be trapping him in a dark and dangerous labyrinth of desire, from which death may be the only escape.

The passage of time has perhaps been unkind to the English composer Maurice Greene. By 1730 he was one of the most senior musicians in England: Organist at St Paul's Cathedral, Organist and Composer to the Chapel Royal, and Professor of Music at the University of Cambridge.