Great Britain’s famous Proms concerts usually end with a program that is British to the core, featuring many favorites that English audiences expect in the same way that Viennese audiences expect their Radetzky March on New Year’s. Let’s make this clear, then, from the start. This is not an actual Proms performance but a studio recording of music that is usually heard at that event. It is English to the core; about four tracks in, you’ll feel like you should be saluting as the Queen passes by.
The Masque of Alfred - apart of course from its finale "Rule Britannia" - has in the 1990s reached CD. Just two years ago a version was issued with the BBC Music Magazine and now we have this more complete account (though there were several variants in Arne's own day) from Nicholas McGegan, an experienced exponent of 18th Century music, recorded in America and using mainly American performers. And very welcome is it. If offers 76 minutes of music, 25 minutes more than the BBC CD and if the OAE's playing on the latter under Nicholas Kraemer often seems rather superior, the Philharmonic Baroque Orchestra are fully equal to Arne's demands which include often atmospheric parts for oboes, horns and flute as well as the basic strings. McGegan uses only four solo singers against the BBC's six.
This recording is the culmination of 10 years of research by Dr Emily Baines, and it brings to dazzling life the fascinating and effervescent performance style found in eighteenth-century mechanical musical instruments. It contains never before heard transcriptions of music, found in eighteenth-century barrel organs and musical clocks.
Esoteric Recordings releases of a newly remastered 5CD clamshell boxed set comprising the two original ‘Archive Collection’ albums by celebrated composer and Genesis founder member Anthony Phillips. Aside from his work as a solo artist, Anthony has been a composer of music for television for many years, going back as far as 1976 and those compositions form the backbone of these collections.
On the eve of his centenary in 2018, Sony Classical releases the most important collection, Leonard Bernstein’s classic American Columbia recordings, remastered from their original 2- and multi-track analogue tapes. This has allowed for the creation of a natural balance (for example, between the orchestra and solo instruments) that brings the quality of these half-century-old recordings, excellent for their time, up to the standards of today’s audiophiles. In addition, there has been a meticulous restoration of some earlier masterings in which LP surface noise was too rigorously eliminated at the expense of the original brilliance.