Recent Blogs Posts

We restart our bi-monthly Tuesday Blog shares with Vinyl’s Revenge, and an old all-Mendelssohn EMI recording featuring Riccardo Muti and the Philharmonia.

From the late 1950s to the early 1970s the Philharmonia Orchestra's chief conductor was Otto Klemperer, with whom the orchestra gave many concerts and made numerous recordings of the core orchestral repertoire.

In 1972, Klemperer announced his retirement from the directorship of the orchestra (briefly known as the

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My final Tuesday Blog for 2020 features a CD I acquired in the early 2000’s, from an early set of self-produced discs by the Royal Philharmonic under their own label. These disks, distributed in North America by Intersound, spanned the repertoire from Mozart to Leonard Bernstein.

According to Discogs, this album was originally released in 1993 and features the Royal Philharmonic under guest conductor Jane Glover in a coupling of Mozart’s final two numbered symphonies (40 and 41)

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December’s Vinyl’s Revenge post is a record I acquired when I was a member of the Columbia Record and Tape Club. It is a performance of Rachmaninov’s Third Piano Concerto featuring Andrei Gavrilov as soloist. The disc was originally released in the Soviet Union under its flagship Melodiya label, but reissued by CBS Masterworks.

Melodiya was established in 1964 as the "All-Union Gramophone Record Firm of the USSR Ministry of Culture Melodiya". By 1973, Melodiya released some

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To conclude our #Beethoven2020 series on the Tuesday Blog, we consider Beethoven’s Choral Symphony and Consecration of the House overture, which were both premiered at the same concert, on 7 May 1824.

The recording I selected today is a historic recording featuring Felix Weingartner, a contemporary to Mahler and Toscanini in one of the earliest available recordings of this seminal work . Weingartner was respected as much for his musical scholarship as his conducting. In 1906, he

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We usually take time in November to remember great artists we have lost, and it is in that context that we remember the thirtieth anniversary of the passing of Leonard Bernstein.

Further, this is also “Remembrance Week” (tomorrow being Remembrance Day) and the 75th anniversary of the end of World War II. It is in that context that I am sharing a pair of works by Igor Stravinsky that were composed during the 1939-45 timeframe.

Stravinsky wrote a symphony at the very

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