Robert Long

The CD “Clap your hands and stamp your feet” is released in 2001 and gives a very nice overview of all the songs that Bonnie St. Claire and Unit Gloria have recorded together.
Songs of Bonnie St. Claire are added to this CD. She recorded them before the co-operation with Unit Gloria, namely “Catch Me Driver”, “I Won't Stand Between Them”, “Let Me Come Back Home Mama”, “Mañana, Mañana”, “Marly purt drive”.

These 14 tracks, cut in 1996 when Lockwood was 81 years old, are among the most accessible music that he has ever laid down. Had this record – with its mix of spare, raw solos and duets juxtaposed with full band pieces that thunder quietly or roar loud and clear – come out in the late '60s, it might have been as big and important a record as anything cut by Muddy Waters (maybe more, since Waters didn't get to make albums as strong and straightforward as this until the 1970s)……

Under the heading of "old business," someone a while back asked for opinion on the B Minor Mass of Robert Shaw. It is a performance I like a lot. Actually I prefer HIP treatment for Bach, but I think that Shaw goes a long way to give a dynamic life to this music. He has fine singers…..One of my favorites in the mass is the "Laudamus te" and you will go a long way to hear it sung any better than Delores Ziegler sings it….and the opening long phrase in one breath…..in a tempo more relaxed than one hears in other readings. Julianne Banse (Rilling) can also do it in one breath, but at a faster tempo. Veronica Gens (Herreweghe) can make you think that she does it in one breath, but she doesn't quite. She is very clever in this.

Toshio Hosokawa is a Japanese composer born in Hiroshima. This release brings together three concertos written by Hosokawa since his first mature works in the late eighties. They range over a period of roughly ten years, and are each marked by similar musical concerns, concerns treated in different ways according to the particular instrumental forces utilised.

Alexander Balus brings to completion The King's Consort's series of Handel's four 'military' oratorios (the other three being Judas Maccabaeus, The Occasional Oratorio, and Joshua).
The story is a somewhat embellished retelling of chapters 10 and 11 from the first book of the Apocryphal Maccabees and involves complicated intrigues between the Jews, Syrians and Egyptians in the second century BC. To cut a long story short, Alexander Balus, King of Syria, is eventually defeated in battle by Ptolomee of Egypt and then killed by an Arab; but Ptolomee himself dies just three days later allowing Jonathan, the Chief of the Jews, to remind us of the fate of those who do not believe in the One God.