Who Paid The Piper

Andrew Graham-Dixon explores the history of the Royal Collection, the dazzling collection of art and decorative objects owned by the Queen. Containing over a million items, this is one of the largest art collections in the world - its masterpieces by Van Dyck, Holbein, Leonardo da Vinci, Vermeer and Canaletto line the walls of Windsor Castle, Hampton Court and many other palaces, museums and institutions around Britain.

To paraphrase Marc Antony, the listener may not be able to decide whether to praise Mickey Newbury or bury him. This record hits one with the full Newbury experience, because, debut album or not, he comes across as a fully developed artist. His originality and talent is wonderfully evident in a series of songs that, whether brilliant or dreadful, always reveal an incredible amount of care being taken. Newbury never settled into any kind of standard arrangements or simple combo sound in his career, preferring to perform solo on acoustic guitar. But he and his producers went wild in the recording studio, baking in multiple layers that are likely to include any and all possible instruments, combined in a manner both audacitious and typical of the anything-goes '60s.

For the whole of the 1970s, the Philly Sound was a leading and immediately identifiable component of black American music. A crack team of producers, songwriters and musicians raised worldwide awareness of Philadelphia soul to the level the Motown Sound had enjoyed during the previous decade. Anyone with half an ear for music could spot a Philly soul record by its opening bars, whatever the location of the label on which it appeared. In the same way the Motown Sound really came together after the company started recording almost exclusively in its own premises, the Philly Sound quickly took shape once Joe Tarsia, the former chief engineer at Cameo-Parkway Studios, opened Sigma Sound in 1968.

With this and several other albums issued in 2019, Eloquence celebrates the art of Thurston Dart, the harpsichordist, conductor and editor who played a leading role in the early-music revival in postwar Britain. After his death in 1971 at the age of just 49, his fellow harpsichordist Igor Kipnis paid fulsome tribute to 'a man of many parts', whose 1954 volume on The Interpretation of Musichad attained testamentary authority among his fellow musicians, matched by the skill, style and flourish of his many recordings. 'He was the ideal musicologist-performer.'