Raindrops The Exquisite Music of Chopin

For the 200th anniversary of Clara Schumann’s birth, Isata Kanneh-Mason takes us on a journey through the composer’s extraordinary life with her stunning debut album on Decca Classics. Isata will be joining forces with an all-female line-up to champion the significance of women musicians throughout the years, and their influence on the classical musical canon. The recording features Clara Schumann’s Piano Concerto in A minor, written at the age of fourteen, performed by the composer at Leipzig Gewandhaus two years later under the baton of Felix Mendelssohn.

Lutenist, singer and composer Henry VIII and his first wife, Catherine of Aragon, presided for a short while over one of the most cultivated European courts. Sirinu, with imaginative deployment of instrumental colour, performs the songs, consort music and arrangements attributed to Henry Tudor, including the well-known ‘Pastyme with good companye’. A fascinating disc.

The much beloved and acclaimed composer David Maslanka (1943-2017) featured the saxophone in many of his compositions, including concertos, solo, and chamber works. Nicholas May has chosen two for his debut recording – the Sonata for Alto Saxophone (1989) and Piano and Tone Studies (2009). Maslanka's music requires not only tremendous technique but also a performer who is master of sound and color. The saxophone is an instrument of tremendous beauty and flexibility and Maslanka's works require a saxophonist capable of broad swaths of color, rich depths of contrast, and generous apportionment of the musical canvas. Nicholas May is such a saxophonist and this recording defines the works. May has been a finalist in numerous state, national, and international competitions. He received degrees from the University of Kansas and the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. He is now on the faculty at Mid Plains Community College and a member of the Heartland Duo and the Sanders-May Duo. His collaborator, pianist Ellen Sommer is on the faculty at the University of Kansas School of Music.

This CD contains selected themes from five of Chaplins brilliant films. The Kid (1921), The Gold Rush (1925), The Circus (1928), City Lights (1931) and Modern Times (1936). If you love the music from these films then you will love this album. Carl Davis has been very sensitive when rerecording the original scores. The music sounds amazing and he has remained true to Chaplins own styles and tempo's. The thing that will strike you more than anything is how amazing these scores really are in Stereo! They really do sound very good indeed. It also fully demonstrates just how good a composer Chaplin really was, and his talent for marrying music to film. As music it is beautiful from the harshness of "Gold Rush" to the haunting "Modern Times" and not forgetting the swinging "City Lights". Magical stuff! 5 out of 5, 10 out of 10 etc… But if you are planning on listening to this 80 minute album from beginning to end, you'd better make sure you have some Chaplin films close to hand because you WILL want to watch them all again. Nostalgia at its very best.

Chandos has been offering some interesting scores in the Movies series, but this differs in their having had to combine two composers on one CD since neither one scored enough films to have an album entirely to himself. Lambert and Berners were close friends, and William Walton was part of their circle as well. All three of them tried to separate their music from the strictly English style and to be more cosmopolitan. Lambert even called music of the English pastoral tradition "cow pat." The first of Lambert's scores was for a documentary about the Merchant Navy - which, being made in 1940, had a scene of a ship being torpedoed. Lambert was considered something of a Russian specialist in music and got the job for the Russian drama on Anna Karenina, released in 1948.

First and foremost, Domenico Scarlatti is regarded as the greatest composer of binary harpsichord sonatas of all time, and that is as it should be: he wrote more than 600 of them and many are constantly recorded and played. However, early in his Italian career, Scarlatti developed a proven track record as a composer of sacred music, some of it under the watchful eye of his father, Alessandro Scarlatti, believed by many at the time as the top composer of the age. The fact most readily observed in regard to Domenico's sacred music is that his Stabat mater, composed in 1717 or 1718, was the work within that genre replaced in Rome by Giovanni Pergolesi's Stabat mater around 1735. The Scarlatti work was conceived in a different style to different strictures; while it has become the most recorded of Scarlatti's sacred works, it definitely suffers when paired with the Pergolesi owing to its immediacy and familiarity. On Coro's Iste Confessor, the Sixteen led by Harry Christophers widely opt for Scarlatti's own, other sacred music as filler to the "Stabat mater with results fairer to the composer and quite favorable to listeners.

Composer Michael G. Cunningham introduces the beauty of sacred choral compositions with the unique energy of the live recording. “Ecumenical” is defined as the promotion of unity among different Christian churches across the world, and ECUMENICAL SPIRIT celebrates the unifying powers of music as it transcends the borders of all differences.

It has been quite a long time since we had any recorded excerpts from Bax's now legendary score for 'Oliver Twist' let alone a complete score. This issue is doubly welcome for this listener whose home country is immortalized in these fine excerpts from 'Malta GC'!