Contemplations Glassberg Erato

Caterpillars in the field and garden

Jeffrey Glassberg's acclaimed Butterflies through Binoculars guides have revolutionized the way we view butterflies. Now there's a field guide in the same practical format, and with the same emphasis on conservation, to identify caterpillars.

Terpsicore (HWV)(8b) is a prologue in the form of an opéra-ballet by George Frideric Handel. Handel composed it in 1734 for a revision of his opera Il pastor fido which had first been presented in 1712. The revision of Il pastor fido with Terpsicore as the prologue was first performed on 9 November 1734 at Covent Garden theatre in London, opening Handel's first season in that newly built theatre. Terpsicore mixes dance along with solo and choral singing and was patterned after models in French operas, a particular source being Les festes grecques et romaines by Louis Fuzelier and Colin de Blamont, first presented in Paris in 1723. The work featured the celebrated French dancer Marie Sallé as well as stars of Handel's Italian operas and was a success with audiences of the day.

Violinist Fenella Humphreys brings you a new album with Rubicon Classics after her 2023 BBC Magazine Premiere Award-winning album ‘Caprices’. Fenella brings a unique programme called ‘Prism’, which focuses on unaccompanied violin works. These consist of new works written by young British composers such as Michael Small, Bethan Morgan-Williams and Cheryl Frances-Hoad to more iconic contemporary works by British and American compoosers such as Caroline Shaw, Jessie Montgomery, George Walker and the wonderful Sir Peter Maxwell Davies!

When the very young Marie-Claire Alain recorded for Erato for the second time, in late winter of 1955, she did not necessarily suspect that she was participating in a long discographic odyssey. The organist would become one of the emblematic personalities of the Erato catalogue, working with the French firm up until the early 1990s. On 27 February 1955, in the church of Sainte-Clotilde in Paris’s 7th arrondissement, she began a series of recordings devoted to French composers of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. She initiallly elaborated a brief programme of famous toccatas: Gigout, Widor and Boëllmann. Brisk tempos, nimble articulations, a wide variety of colours: Marie-Claire Alain charmed with her vivacious spirit – the famous piece by Widor (finale of the Fifth Symphony) is of noteworthy elegance. These youthful accounts already reveal all of Marie-Claire Alain’s affinities with this repertoire with which she has not always been associated and of which, in truth, she promotes a fleet, airy, supple vision. However, it was a few weeks later, around 13 March 1955, that Erato offered the young French organist, fully concentrated at the time on Buxtehude’s music, her greatest joy: she could defend ‘in studio’ the works of her elder brother, Jehan Alain. It is a veritable godsend to rediscover these youthful documents, keen and always pertinent, by Marie-Claire Alain, recorded in the church of Saint-Merri a little more than a year after her very first recording for Erato devoted to J. S. Bach.