Richard Portter

Sir Cliff Richard OBE (born Harry Rodger Webb; 14 October 1940) is a British singer and actor.

Cliff is the 1959 debut album of British singer Cliff Richard and his band the Drifters (later known as the Shadows). The recording is the first white professionally recorded live rock and roll album.

Cliff Richard In the years after Elvis Presley but before the Beatles, Cliff Richard was the biggest thing in British rock & roll – and in the years after the Beatles, he was never far from the top of the U.K. charts. Arriving in 1958, just a couple of years after skiffle swept Britain, Richard was the first English singer to approximate the hip-shaking rebellion of American rock & roll with his 1958 debut single "Move It." A smash hit right out of the gate, "Move It" kicked off an astonishing five decades' worth of hits (as of 2014, his last time in the U.K. Top Ten was in 2008, when "Thank You for a Lifetime" went to number three).

Wenn es einen Komponisten gibt, der die Sopranistin Diana Damrau schon sehr lange begleitet, dann ist es Richard Strauss. In Interviews wird die Künstlerin nie müde, von seinen Vokalwerken zu schwärmen, die sie schon ganz zu Anfang ihrer Karriere für sich entdeckte und deren geradezu magische Verbindung zwischen Musik, Stimme und Sprache für sie immer wieder eine besondere Erfahrung ist. Nach einer Reihe von Produktionen des italienischen Belcanto oder der französischen Grand Opéra wendet sie sich nun dem Strauss’schen Liederkosmos zu – neben einer Auswahl des Klavierliedschaffens zusammen mit dem renommierten Pianisten Helmut Deutsch stehen natürlich die Vier letzten Lieder auf dem Programm. Die Aufnahmen hierzu entstanden in Zusammenarbeit mit dem Symphonieorchester des Bayerischen Rundfunks unter Mariss Jansons und gehören zu den letzten musikalischen Zeugnissen, die der erst kürzlich verstorbene Stardirigent – der noch im Oktober einen OPUS Klassik für sein Lebenswerk entgegennahm – hinterlässt.

“For me, Strauss is one of the greatest composers,” Diana Damrau has said. “The way he handles the soprano voice is a joy. And to be able to sing his music with my voice feels like coming home.” The centrepiece of this album of Strauss songs is the sublime Vier letzte Lieder, in which Damrau – born and trained in Bavaria – joins forces with the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra and its long-standing Chief Conductor Mariss Jansons, in what was to become his final recording. Her partner in a tempting and diverse selection of songs with piano is Helmut Deutsch. “Not only is Strauss’s music gorgeous,” says Damrau, “there’s the way he combines words and notes – and the psychology.”

Charles Richard-Hamelin continues his exploration of Frédéric Chopin’s oeuvre with this recording of the Preludes, op. 28, and the "Andante spianato et Grande polonaise brillante, op. 22".

In the years after Elvis Presley but before the Beatles, Cliff Richard was the biggest thing in British rock & roll – and in the years after the Beatles, he was never far from the top of the U.K. charts. Arriving in 1958, just a couple of years after skiffle swept Britain, Richard was the first English singer to approximate the hip-shaking rebellion of American rock & roll with his 1958 debut single "Move It." A smash hit right out of the gate, "Move It" kicked off an astonishing five decades' worth of hits (as of 2014, his last time in the U.K. Top 10 was in 2008, when "Thank You for a Lifetime" went to number three). The earliest recordings, most made with his backing band the Shadows, were his hardest-rocking and undoubtedly his most influential, making an impression on nearly the entire first generation of British rock & rollers. Like Presley, who was certainly Richard's key influence, Cliff's popularity wound up pushing him ever so gradually to the status of an all-around entertainer. He moved into movies quickly – the first came just a year after "Move It" – and the Shadows tamed their rockabilly, but the real shift into the mainstream came after the Beatles opened the flood gates for homegrown British rock & roll, banishing Richard to the status of an older generation. Cliff continued to have hits in the '60s, even after he and the Shadows disbanded in 1968, but he split his time between pop and Christian music; in the early '70s, he focused on hosting a variety show on the BBC. Toward the end of the '70s, he made a big pop comeback with 1976's "Devil Woman," which became his first Top 10 hit in the U.S., and over the next five years, he racked up several intercontinental soft rock hits, including 1979's "We Don't Talk Anymore," 1980's "Dreamin'," and the Olivia Newton-John duet "Suddenly," taken from the 1980 soundtrack to Xanadu.