Recent Blogs Posts

About a year ago, we shared a montage of music for the symphonic organ – works by three giants of the French Organ tradition – exploiting the palette of organs built mainly in the 1800’s in France. This week, we revisit the idea of symphonic organ music, this time with organs adding to the palette of a symphony orchestra.

As large organs became more common in new concert halls in the later 19th century, a modest repertoire of celebratory music for organ and orchestra also began to develop.

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During Lent, I usually program some organ music, and expect a pair of posts this week and next (for our Fifth Tuesday montage) where I will do just that.

Johann Pachelbel was an acclaimed Baroque composer, organist, and teacher who brought the south German organ tradition to its peak. He composed a large body of sacred and secular music, and his contributions to the development of the chorale prelude and fugue have earned him a place among the most important composers of the middle

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The Tap Dance Kid. Book by Charles Blackwell; Music by Henry Krieger; Lyrics by Robert Lorick. With Jimmy Tate (Willie); Martine Allard (Emma); Hinton Battle (Dipsey); Samuel E. Wright (William); Gail Nelson (Ginnie); Jackie Lowe (Carole); Alan Weeks (Daddy Bates). Polydor Records, 1984.

In 1974, the late, Tennessee-born author Louise Fitzhugh wrote a novel for adolescents called Nobody’s Family Is Going to Change. In 1980, the novel became a thirty-minute film called The Tap

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Certainly an arresting opening track! The thick, forceful sonorities are unashamedly blasting away in the foreground for the first six minutes of the large scale Mysterious Anjuna Bell before dissipating into quieter sonic landscape, showcasing the bells quite a fair bit more literally. However, the whole idea of bells, and bell-like sonorities permeates the work, sometimes implicitly through a wash of sound evoking a bell choir.

This is a composer who comes at music from a very

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This week’s Vinyl’s Revenge is part of our #Beethoven2020 series and features Romanian pianist Radu Lupu in a pair of Beethoven piano concertos, taken from his Beethoven cycle recorded with the Israel Philharmonic in the early days of the DIgital era.

Beethoven’s early career in Vienna, where he settled in 1792 after leaving his native Bonn, established him first of all as a pianist. He had already tackled a piano concerto in 1784, at the age of fourteen, but Piano Concerto No.1

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