The Black Seeds are a musical group from Wellington, New Zealand. Their music is a fusion of dub, funk, afrobeat and soul. The Black Seeds have two double-platinum selling albums at home, and successful European album releases through the German-based Sonar Kollektiv label…
New Zealand composer Gareth Farr wrote his cello concerto after discovering some family history. His three great uncles left New Zealand to fight in France in World War I. All three were killed within weeks of arrival. Farr’s concerto is instantly accessible and is a dramatic and emotional statement.
Ralph Vaughan Williams (1872-1958) may not have begun the trend toward English pastoral music in the early twentieth century, but he was certainly one of the movement’s leading practitioners. Starting as early as 1900 with his aptly named Bucolic Suite, the man continued to produce charming, serene, idyllic tunes for full orchestra, strings, and chorus right up until the time of his death. In this Naxos collection, English conductor James Judd leads the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra in some of the composer’s most famous short works.
Whether he had to leave Germany because of a fatal duel, whether he had to leave Italy because he married his teacher's daughter, whether he settled in France because he wanted to protect his publishing rights, whether any of the many rumors about Franz Ignaz Beck (1734-1809) are true or false, it is good to have his set of Six Symphonies, Op. 1, available on disc. Composed sometime in the 1750s and published in 1758, Beck's three-movement symphonies are strongly imagined and successfully realized essays in a form that had only just come into musical existence.
The bold opening chords and immediately following crescendo of the D major Symphony, Op.3/2 (from the early 1750s) immediately established its Mannheim credentials, as do the elegantly sophisticated scoring of the Andantino and the effective use of horns in the Minuet and Trio. E flat Symphony, one of the composer’s last, follows a similar pattern, but the three earlier works (from the 1740s), which are actually designated as ‘Mannheim’ Symphonies are altogether simpler, each with only three movements.