Joseph Alexander

The 37 songs in this recital, written by 27 composers – male, female, English, French, Swiss, German, Romantic, modern and contemporary – bear witness to the richness of Shakespeare’s works to which this recital is dedicated.

This CD presents a complete recital given by the master violinist Joseph Szigeti in the Hancock Auditorium at the University of Southern California on 13 January 1957. This concert originally formed the last of a series of three concerts featuring works by 20th-century composers entitled ‘Eleven Masterpieces of the Twentieth Century’, which Szigeti performed at numerous college campuses throughout the United States in the late 1950s. He described this three-part series was ‘an incentive to break with the “one-programme-each-season” type of concertizing that the organized audience movement demands.’

Renowned performers Iestyn Davies and Joseph Middleton perform Schubert’s tragic song-cycle Die schöne Müllerin (The Beautiful Maid of the Mill).

Joseph Moog, after recording both Brahms piano concertos for Onyx Classics, turns his attention to one of the most demanding and forbidding of piano concertos. Max Reger's concerto dates from 1910. This rugged giant of a concerto displays all Reger's formidable skill at using large orchestral forces with great clarity, making the piano part of the orchestral fabric. The concerto has much music that is both brilliant and poetic as well as passages of great turmoil. The album includes the 6 Intermezzi, which display a different facet of this complex composer. These are delightful pieces, tender, romantic with much poetry.

Paganini’s Caprices have exerted a mesmeric attraction for composers since their publication in 1820 (they were composed between 1802 – 1817). Liszt, Chopin, Berlioz, Rachmaninov to name a few. Schumann’s two sets of Etudes were the result of hearing Paganini play in Frankfurt in April 1830. These early compositions are comparatively rare in performance – they were composed at the same time as the Abegg Variations Op.1, Papillons Op.2, Davidsbündlertänze Op.6, the Toccata Op.7 and the famous Carnaval Op.9. From these early works to his last days in the asylum at Endenich where he composed a piano accompaniment to the 24th Caprice, Paganini was still working his magic on Schumann.

Andrew Nethsingha and The Choir of St John’s, Cambridge present a tribute album to two former directors, Christopher Robinson and David Hill, who celebrate their 85th and 65th birthdays respectively.