Recent Blogs Posts

This week’s installment of Vinyl’s Revenge is a mid-1980’s coupling of violin concertos featuring Latvian violinist Gidon Kremer and the Philharmonia Orchestra under Riccardo Muti.

If we were to create a pie chart of all the concerti for solo instrument and orchestra, I’d hazard to guess at least 2/3 of the pie would be occupied by concertos for either keyboard or violin. The violin concerto repertoire is huge, mostly composed of baroque and classical-era works – Vivaldi contributed

0 Likes

...

This week's musical share is a series of tracks downloaded mainly off the old MP3.COM between 2001 and 2003. They feature three guitarists.

The English-born guitarist, Tomo Iwakura, began to learn the guitar with Iwao Suzuki when he was 12 years old. After his completion of a faculty of law at "Gakusuin Univaersity" in Tokyo, he studied the guitar with Michael Koch at the "Peter-Cornelius Konservatorium" in Mainz, Germany. Also he took lessons of Narciso Yepes,

0 Likes

...

This week’s Cover 2 Cover post completes our month-long look at Mahler symphonies, and in particular the set composed between 1903 and 1906. After the Eighth and Seventh (on my podcast this past Friday), now the Sixth.

Mahler’s Symphony No. 6 is a symphony in four movements, composed in 1903 and 1904 (scoring repeatedly revised). Mahler conducted the work's first performance at the Saalbau concert hall in Essen on May 27, 1906. Mahler composed the symphony at what was apparently

0 Likes

...

On December 2nd 1923, when an unwanted third child was born to immigrant Greek couple Goerge and Litsa Kalogeropoulos at Flower hospital, Manhattan, neither could have imagined that this soon-to-be chubby and awkward little girl would one day become the quintessential epitome of Opera.


Maria Callas was, and still is, a legendary household name among Opera connoisseurs and neophytes alike, as well as outsiders of the genre who stumble upon her haunting recordings in one way

0 Likes

...

This was the second time we saw Rachel Podger and it was once again beautiful and compelling.

Rachel is so engaged, not only with her music but also with the other players, the audience, and the venue. She plays as if it is all a delightful game, but a game which expresses all the joy of the universe

0 Likes

...