Monthly Features
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Introducing Issue 11 – Summer 2024
Welcome to the Summer Issue. I am pleased to introduce a new contributor to Liner Notes: organist, composer, musicologist and author Robert James Stove. You can view a profile of him at the Ars Organi label website, for whom he has recorded several CDs – click here. He has written […]
Orquestra Pau Casals (1920-1939)
In an infamous radio broadcast from Seville on 17 July 1936, Franco’s brutal henchman and chief propagandist Gonzalo Queipo de Lano y Serra, one of the so-called ‘Four Insurgent Generals’, issued a grisly death warrant: “I will tell you what I will do to him if I catch him. I will put an end to […]
Bringing composers to life
Rediscovering great artists
Tristan Fry: 60 Percussive Years
“He’s a phenomenon – unlike anyone else” In 1967 I had just begun timpani and percussion lessons at Trinity College of Music with one of the most venerated players and teachers in the UK music profession. Lewis Pocock had been Principal Percussion and then Principal Timpani in Sir Thomas Beecham’s famous virtuoso Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, […]
Recording Reviews
Rafael Kubelík in Lucerne
Rafael Kubelík in Lucerne New Philharmonia Orchestra/ Rafael Kubelik Audite 95.745 [2 CDS: 84:30]Available on CD — click here to purchase. Immediately after the Russian suppression of Czechoslovakia’s “Prague Spring” in the summer of 1968, Rafael Kubelík (1914-1996), now an émigré living in his adapted city of Lucerne in Switzerland, organized for 8 September 1968 […]
Jose Iturbi: Chopin Recital
Jose Iturbi: Chopin Recital Forgotten Records FR 2066 [42:09] Available on CD — click here to purchase. Valencia-born pianist Jose Iturbi (1896-1980) will likely suffer permanent denigration for his Hollywood connection that began in 1943 and extended to 1949. But despite his concession to popular taste, Iturbi remained a formidable musician of power and persuasion, […]
Lazar Berman, piano – Vol. 8
Lazar Berman, piano – Vol. 8 Yves St-Laurent YSL 1215T [60:55] Available on CD — click here to purchase. Leningrad-born Lazar Berman (1930-2005) studied with Alexander Goldenweiser at the Moscow Conservatory; and long before his arrival In the West at venues like Carnegie Hall and 92 Street Y, he had been touted by luminaries Emil […]
Charles Reiner, piano, Vol. 2
Charles Reiner, piano, Vol. 2 Yves St-Laurent YSL T-1230 (2 CDS 93:55) Available on CD — click here to purchase. While Yves St-Laurent advertises discs devoted to the distinguished Canadian pianist and pedagogue Charles Reiner (1924-2006), it becomes obvious that the spotlight falls upon Polish-Mexican violin virtuoso Henryk Szeryng (1918-1988), with whom Reiner collaborated for many […]
Jennifer Vyvyan: Her 8 selected recordings, from the BBC broadcast of 18 July 1966
Jennifer Vyvyan’s Favorite of her 8 selections More history on the “Desert Island Discs” program and pictures in Issue 6 – available in your subscriber account – on page 160.
