The shortlist for Gramophone Artist of the Year has now been announced. Once again, Gramophone invites you to log on to www.gramophone.co.uk and select the musician who has over the past 12 months, most impressed you. This year's list, chosen by the Gramophone editorial team includes two Chandos artists - Jean-Efflam Bavouzet and Sarah Connolly.
The editorial team comment:
Jean-Efflam Bavouzet: Even at a time when great pianists are hardly thin on the ground, Bavouzet all but demands attention with his superb series of Debussy discs for Chandos.
Sarah Connolly: Her recent triumph on disc in Purcell's Dido and Aeneas merely underlined this mezzo-soprano's ascension to the royal line of great British mezzos, a worthy successor to Dame Janet Baker et al.
Other artists nominated this year include: Perre-Laurent Aimard, Diana Damrau, Gustavo Dudamel, Gerald Finley, Rene Jacobs, Mariss Jansons, Bryn Terfel and The Sixteen.
Please be sure to visit Gramophone and place your vote for this coveted accolade.
Tuesday, 30 June 2009
Monday, 8 June 2009
June editorial
Last month, Chandos celebrated its thirtieth anniversary in style on board a boat on the Thames. The turnout was exceptional. The boat was laden with artists, press, producers, presenters, orchestra representatives, agents, distributors, the Chandos staff – everyone who had contributed to Chandos’ success over the past thirty years. It suddenly occurred to me, how long ago thirty years was.
In 1979 we lived practically on a different planet. The ‘Winter of Discontent’ as it was known in the UK. No laptops, mobile phones, internet, decent coffee vendors, air conditioning. Flares had just gone out of fashion and Britain was just about to enter the Thatcher era. It is hard to believe that Chandos started when the Ford Cortina MK IV was the best selling rep-car on UK roads.
It is funny that the early 80s seem more dated than the swinging 60s (nothing dates more quickly than the recent past). Personally, I loathed the 1980s: the fashion, pop music – all of it synthetic and manufactured. It was the decade when market forces completely took over and the world became just that bit colder. But it was also the decade when Chandos Records emerged, and although the world is now completely different – for better and worse – we have remained here – still doing what we do best, producing top quality recordings which are enjoyed by the music-loving world.
Despite the fickle nature of fashion, one thing remains constant: the playing and recording of great music. True, classical music has its fashions too: Mahler hardly wrote his symphonies in the same way that Haydn wrote his – but the works of both have survived. It is probably impossible to tell which music of today will survive: we are too close to it, and it will depend on the course music takes in coming years, but I expect very little of it will have staying power. Also, a naughty part of me cannot help thinking that enough music has already been written. After all, how many of us know all Haydn’s 104 symphonies, never mind the scores of string quartets, piano sonatas and piano trios (oh yes, and his operas and oratorios). And that is just one composer!
Of course, I do really think that new music should be encouraged and now that it is OK for serious classical composers to write in styles other than ‘intellectual’ serialism, modern classical music has got rather better. Music, though, invariably reflects the period in which it was written. One only has to hear a wah-wah guitar and instantly the 1970s are evoked (and what a great sound it is – it survived until the late 1970s, even making an appearance in the theme music of To the Manor Born, 1979). However, it remains a period sound.
The odd thing is, when one listens to the great works of Beethoven, Brahms, Schubert and Mendelssohn – one tends not to think particularly of the nineteenth century (though their music is very much a product of that century) but rather of a very ‘here and now’ kind of musical expression.
Perhaps that is what defines great music, a certain timeless, ageless quality – and it may also explain why Chandos Records is still going strong thirty years after it was founded, during that chilly time of the ‘Winter of Discontent’.
In 1979 we lived practically on a different planet. The ‘Winter of Discontent’ as it was known in the UK. No laptops, mobile phones, internet, decent coffee vendors, air conditioning. Flares had just gone out of fashion and Britain was just about to enter the Thatcher era. It is hard to believe that Chandos started when the Ford Cortina MK IV was the best selling rep-car on UK roads.
It is funny that the early 80s seem more dated than the swinging 60s (nothing dates more quickly than the recent past). Personally, I loathed the 1980s: the fashion, pop music – all of it synthetic and manufactured. It was the decade when market forces completely took over and the world became just that bit colder. But it was also the decade when Chandos Records emerged, and although the world is now completely different – for better and worse – we have remained here – still doing what we do best, producing top quality recordings which are enjoyed by the music-loving world.
Despite the fickle nature of fashion, one thing remains constant: the playing and recording of great music. True, classical music has its fashions too: Mahler hardly wrote his symphonies in the same way that Haydn wrote his – but the works of both have survived. It is probably impossible to tell which music of today will survive: we are too close to it, and it will depend on the course music takes in coming years, but I expect very little of it will have staying power. Also, a naughty part of me cannot help thinking that enough music has already been written. After all, how many of us know all Haydn’s 104 symphonies, never mind the scores of string quartets, piano sonatas and piano trios (oh yes, and his operas and oratorios). And that is just one composer!
Of course, I do really think that new music should be encouraged and now that it is OK for serious classical composers to write in styles other than ‘intellectual’ serialism, modern classical music has got rather better. Music, though, invariably reflects the period in which it was written. One only has to hear a wah-wah guitar and instantly the 1970s are evoked (and what a great sound it is – it survived until the late 1970s, even making an appearance in the theme music of To the Manor Born, 1979). However, it remains a period sound.
The odd thing is, when one listens to the great works of Beethoven, Brahms, Schubert and Mendelssohn – one tends not to think particularly of the nineteenth century (though their music is very much a product of that century) but rather of a very ‘here and now’ kind of musical expression.
Perhaps that is what defines great music, a certain timeless, ageless quality – and it may also explain why Chandos Records is still going strong thirty years after it was founded, during that chilly time of the ‘Winter of Discontent’.
Wednesday, 3 June 2009
Soundstage website reviews The Classical Shop
June 1, 2009
The Digital Music Revolution: What Download Sites Have to Offer -- Part Eight
My latest download stop was The Classical Shop (www.theclassicalshop.net), a site presenting a few frustrations, but boasting a catalog of titles and labels so extensive that it’s well worth the effort required to snag some.
The Classical Shop is owned and run by Chandos Records, a pioneer label in the digital revolution. One of the very first digital recordings I heard, long before the launch of the Compact Disc, was Chandos’s LP edition of Holst’s The Planets, with Sir Alexander Gibson conducting the Scottish National Symphony Orchestra. It makes sense that Chandos should be at the forefront of the new digital-download movement. And Gibson’s recording of The Planets is available at the Classical Shop, still proudly standing up to the competition 30 years later.
The site is a good-looking one, with "New Releases" and "Recently Added Highlights" sections. It operated very much as do many of the sites I’ve already visited. After filling out a brief profile, you sign in with a user name and password. It’s then easy to access an account and attach downloads to it. The Classical Shop takes most major credit cards.
The higher-quality downloads are all lossless, but most are at only the standard CD resolution of 16-bit/44.1kHz. There were quite a few at 24/44.1, but I found only one at 24/48. I know that many Chandos masters were recorded at 24/96; it seems it will be only a matter of time before that resolution, too, is offered for download. Meanwhile, the resolutions Chandos offers now are not to be sneezed at.
I believe in using numerical measurements as guidelines, but ultimately it’s my ears that matter, and 95% of the recordings I downloaded from the Classical Shop sounded excellent -- as good as any CD I’ve ever heard, and better than many. The remaining 5% were below par not because of lower sampling rates but because of faulty microphone placement or some other original technical problem, such as a difficult recording location. The Classical Shop also offers its titles as MP3s, but that will be little significance to audiophile readers.
The Classical Shop offers lossless downloads in the FLAC, AIFF, WAV, and WMA formats. There’s no onboard download manager for the first three, but with WMA you can download up to 20 tracks at once. All of the Shop’s downloads border on the painfully slow, especially if you’re used to the simplicity of HDtracks’ fast and simple process. But loading one track at a time, very slowly, using FLAC, AIFF, or WAV, was beyond the call of duty for me, so chose WMA files, which were converted to Apple Lossless when I loaded them into iTunes. All of the tracks loaded properly, even titles comprising more than 20 tracks each -- I downloaded them in two separate chunks to the same folder on my desktop, and everything was sorted out correctly.
All of the files offered at the Classical Shop are free of Digital Rights Management (DRM); once you’ve bought them, you can use them however you see fit. Costs vary: Because Chandos is based in the UK, the prices are in pounds sterling, and the rate of exchange changes daily. As I write, the pound is worth $1.52 USD, so the cost of each download is between $12 and $18 -- not cheap, but not as high as the downloads from the UK sites of Linn and Gimmell.
The list of titles is enormous. The Chandos catalog alone has hundreds, and Chandos is but one of about 50 labels offered here. You can search for recordings by "New Releases" or "Advanced Search"; the latter lets you search by composer, artist, label, genre, or any combination of those fields. And you can listen to samples before you buy -- a handy feature for a site that offers so much lesser-heard music.
Some specific recommendations on Chandos: William Alwyn’s symphonies and film music, conducted superbly by Richard Hickox; Arnold Bax’s symphonies and tone poems in definitive readings by the late Vernon Handley, as well as Handley’s Grieg disc, featuring the Symphonic Dances; Leif Segerstam’s cycle of Mahler symphonies, spaciously recorded with no loss of detail; Gennady Rozhdestvensky’s dramatic Nielsen symphony cycle and his thoroughly idiomatic recordings of the symphonies of Borodin; any title in Chandos’s film-music series, but especially the Korngold; and some big oratorios, done to a turn by Hickox, who was the backbone of the Chandos conducting staff, and whose sudden death last year is being felt in many ways: Elgar’s The Kingdom, The Apostles, and Caractacus, and Vaughan Williams’ The Pilgrim’s Progress.
As for other labels, one in particular stands out: Arts Music. Regular readers of my columns know that I’ve raved about the Baroque music performances of Diego Fasolis and I Barocchisti on Arts Music SACDs, and you’ll find them at the Classical Shop. Perhaps even more important, you’ll find a large number of performances led by the late Peter Maag. The Swiss maestro was very well known in the early days of stereo for his impeccable recordings with the London Symphony of works by Mendelssohn and Mozart. Late in his life, Maag re-recorded these works for Arts. Though these later recordings were made with lesser orchestras from Venice and Madrid, they played like world-class ensembles for Maag. He had a way with Mendelssohn that surpasses any other conductor’s touch, and for Arts he did all of the composer’s symphonies. Also at the Classical Shop you’ll find all of Maag’s recordings of Mozart’s late symphonies, his Beethoven symphony cycle (all studio recordings except for No.6), and much more.
Each of the other labels at the Classical Shop also has special qualities and offers specific repertory. It’s like the Metropolitan Museum of Art: there’s a lot to see. Plan to spend a long time looking around.
. . . Rad Bennett
radb@soundstageav.com
The Digital Music Revolution: What Download Sites Have to Offer -- Part Eight
My latest download stop was The Classical Shop (www.theclassicalshop.net), a site presenting a few frustrations, but boasting a catalog of titles and labels so extensive that it’s well worth the effort required to snag some.
The Classical Shop is owned and run by Chandos Records, a pioneer label in the digital revolution. One of the very first digital recordings I heard, long before the launch of the Compact Disc, was Chandos’s LP edition of Holst’s The Planets, with Sir Alexander Gibson conducting the Scottish National Symphony Orchestra. It makes sense that Chandos should be at the forefront of the new digital-download movement. And Gibson’s recording of The Planets is available at the Classical Shop, still proudly standing up to the competition 30 years later.
The site is a good-looking one, with "New Releases" and "Recently Added Highlights" sections. It operated very much as do many of the sites I’ve already visited. After filling out a brief profile, you sign in with a user name and password. It’s then easy to access an account and attach downloads to it. The Classical Shop takes most major credit cards.
The higher-quality downloads are all lossless, but most are at only the standard CD resolution of 16-bit/44.1kHz. There were quite a few at 24/44.1, but I found only one at 24/48. I know that many Chandos masters were recorded at 24/96; it seems it will be only a matter of time before that resolution, too, is offered for download. Meanwhile, the resolutions Chandos offers now are not to be sneezed at.
I believe in using numerical measurements as guidelines, but ultimately it’s my ears that matter, and 95% of the recordings I downloaded from the Classical Shop sounded excellent -- as good as any CD I’ve ever heard, and better than many. The remaining 5% were below par not because of lower sampling rates but because of faulty microphone placement or some other original technical problem, such as a difficult recording location. The Classical Shop also offers its titles as MP3s, but that will be little significance to audiophile readers.
The Classical Shop offers lossless downloads in the FLAC, AIFF, WAV, and WMA formats. There’s no onboard download manager for the first three, but with WMA you can download up to 20 tracks at once. All of the Shop’s downloads border on the painfully slow, especially if you’re used to the simplicity of HDtracks’ fast and simple process. But loading one track at a time, very slowly, using FLAC, AIFF, or WAV, was beyond the call of duty for me, so chose WMA files, which were converted to Apple Lossless when I loaded them into iTunes. All of the tracks loaded properly, even titles comprising more than 20 tracks each -- I downloaded them in two separate chunks to the same folder on my desktop, and everything was sorted out correctly.
All of the files offered at the Classical Shop are free of Digital Rights Management (DRM); once you’ve bought them, you can use them however you see fit. Costs vary: Because Chandos is based in the UK, the prices are in pounds sterling, and the rate of exchange changes daily. As I write, the pound is worth $1.52 USD, so the cost of each download is between $12 and $18 -- not cheap, but not as high as the downloads from the UK sites of Linn and Gimmell.
The list of titles is enormous. The Chandos catalog alone has hundreds, and Chandos is but one of about 50 labels offered here. You can search for recordings by "New Releases" or "Advanced Search"; the latter lets you search by composer, artist, label, genre, or any combination of those fields. And you can listen to samples before you buy -- a handy feature for a site that offers so much lesser-heard music.
Some specific recommendations on Chandos: William Alwyn’s symphonies and film music, conducted superbly by Richard Hickox; Arnold Bax’s symphonies and tone poems in definitive readings by the late Vernon Handley, as well as Handley’s Grieg disc, featuring the Symphonic Dances; Leif Segerstam’s cycle of Mahler symphonies, spaciously recorded with no loss of detail; Gennady Rozhdestvensky’s dramatic Nielsen symphony cycle and his thoroughly idiomatic recordings of the symphonies of Borodin; any title in Chandos’s film-music series, but especially the Korngold; and some big oratorios, done to a turn by Hickox, who was the backbone of the Chandos conducting staff, and whose sudden death last year is being felt in many ways: Elgar’s The Kingdom, The Apostles, and Caractacus, and Vaughan Williams’ The Pilgrim’s Progress.
As for other labels, one in particular stands out: Arts Music. Regular readers of my columns know that I’ve raved about the Baroque music performances of Diego Fasolis and I Barocchisti on Arts Music SACDs, and you’ll find them at the Classical Shop. Perhaps even more important, you’ll find a large number of performances led by the late Peter Maag. The Swiss maestro was very well known in the early days of stereo for his impeccable recordings with the London Symphony of works by Mendelssohn and Mozart. Late in his life, Maag re-recorded these works for Arts. Though these later recordings were made with lesser orchestras from Venice and Madrid, they played like world-class ensembles for Maag. He had a way with Mendelssohn that surpasses any other conductor’s touch, and for Arts he did all of the composer’s symphonies. Also at the Classical Shop you’ll find all of Maag’s recordings of Mozart’s late symphonies, his Beethoven symphony cycle (all studio recordings except for No.6), and much more.
Each of the other labels at the Classical Shop also has special qualities and offers specific repertory. It’s like the Metropolitan Museum of Art: there’s a lot to see. Plan to spend a long time looking around.
. . . Rad Bennett
radb@soundstageav.com
Julian Lloyd Webber presides over Elgar Society
The society, which is the largest in the world dedicated to a single composer, was founded in 1951 and has previously been presided over by Sir Adrian Boult, Yehudi Menuhin and Richard Hickox.
Lloyd Webber, 58, won a discretionary BRIT award in 1987 for his recording of Elgar's Cello Concerto. The interpretation was named Best British Classical Recording of that year, and described by Elgar scholar Dr Jerrold Northrop Moore as 'the finest ever version' in BBC Music magazine.
'I am thrilled and honoured to accept the presidency of the Elgar Society,' said Lloyd Webber at a reception held at Elgar's birthplace in Broadheath, Worcester.
It has been an eventful few days for Lloyd Webber, who announced last week that he would marry fellow cellist Jiaxin Cheng on 4 July.
Julian Lloyd Webber will be performing Elgar's Cello Concerto on 9 June with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra at Cadogan Hall, London and on 1 November with the Philharmonia Orchestra at the Royal Festival Hall, London.
Thanks to Musolife.com
Lloyd Webber, 58, won a discretionary BRIT award in 1987 for his recording of Elgar's Cello Concerto. The interpretation was named Best British Classical Recording of that year, and described by Elgar scholar Dr Jerrold Northrop Moore as 'the finest ever version' in BBC Music magazine.
'I am thrilled and honoured to accept the presidency of the Elgar Society,' said Lloyd Webber at a reception held at Elgar's birthplace in Broadheath, Worcester.
It has been an eventful few days for Lloyd Webber, who announced last week that he would marry fellow cellist Jiaxin Cheng on 4 July.
Julian Lloyd Webber will be performing Elgar's Cello Concerto on 9 June with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra at Cadogan Hall, London and on 1 November with the Philharmonia Orchestra at the Royal Festival Hall, London.
Thanks to Musolife.com
Monday, 1 June 2009
Phoenix Chorale 'reveal' party shots!
This weekend the Phoenix Chorale received their much-awaited second grammy Award! What better way to celebrate than have a party, and being the best of musicians it looks like they know how to throw a good one!
Thursday, 28 May 2009
Christopher Gunning talks of his move to classical music
Symphony no 3, Symphony no 4, Concerto for Oboe and String Orchestra
Composing “serious” classical music is not a new thing for me - not at all! Throughout my school and college years I was intent on pursuing a career as a composer of concert music, and that intention has never left me. It’s just that there have always been more immediate concerns to be attended to. For a start I have had four daughters to feed and water, and anyway it’s virtually impossible to support yourself financially as a concert composer in this country - so you have to do something else. Most composers teach. I decided very early on that I wasn’t cut out to be a teacher, and preferred to make my way composing somehow, and it therefore had to be via the media. Since I already had great enthusiasms for films, pop music, and jazz, it didn’t seem like a dreadful cross to bear.
As a teenager I thought that one could compose film scores for six months of the year and compose one’s own music for the other six months. In fact I had read that was what Elizabeth Lutyens did, and later I could see that Richard Rodney Bennett managed several careers at once, so why shouldn’t I?
Little did I realise what demands the media would make! No, I’m not complaining - I have enjoyed nearly every minute of it, and have learned a fantastic amount through sheer hard experience. But it’s been a full time job; for example, when composing “Poirot” for about forty episodes, there was absolutely no time to think of anything else for months and months on end, and then, when a break happened, I was completely exhausted.
Perhaps another reason for “not getting down to it” was a growing concern about the very nature of concert music. The audience for contemporary music has been small, and I have felt it isn’t solely the fault of music lovers. The idioms favoured by most composers particularly during the 60’s and 70’s have been difficult. Indeed, much contemporary music is still just as difficult, and I have found myself out of sympathy with much of it. And yet, at the same time, I have not relished the thought of being a fuddy-duddy composer writing in worn out idioms. I suppose I was trying to define a way in which I could write music which communicates directly but is not hopelessly predictable or slave to the various “isms” which have cropped up over the past fifty years or so.
For me, the breakthrough happened about ten years ago, when I was out of work and badly needed something to do. I found myself writing a saxophone concerto (now recorded by John Harle) and then several other pieces. Of these I am most fond of the Piano Concerto - in it I found the basis of a style of working which had been eluding me to some extent. I’ve enlarged on that since, and my most recent efforts are the 3rd and 4th Symphonies, and the Oboe Concerto, newly released on the excellent Chandos label.
The two symphonies are each in single 20 minute movements, but they are quite different in tone from one another. I hardly dare describe the life events that led to the 3rd. My new wife, Svitlana, had become desperately ill, was misdiagnosed in a London hospital, and operated on in Kiev, Ukraine, in early 2005. She then developed peritonitis and was on life support for several days. From these two operations, Sveta did not recover for two years and her condition deteriorated to the point where we all thought she would pass away at any moment.
Simultaneously, I was diagnosed with a heart condition with pretty dreadful survival rates. So I couldn’t travel to Kiev, and the two of us endured these worrying times in separate countries. One of the doctor’s recommendations for my condition was to walk as much as feasible. I took this seriously and one of the places I loved to visit was Wales and the Brecon Beacons. I found the rawness of the mountains beguiling, and was particularly attracted to the changing light patterns which pervade the area. It is astonishing how the mountains can be hospitable one moment and the next anything but! I saw a parallel with certain musical devices - the same material changed, perhaps radically, by reworking the same notes to different effect. The result is that in this symphony everything is derived from the opening dissonant chords - for several weeks I was obsessed with them. And when I was at home I would look at pictures of Pen y Fan and want to be there.
By the time I came to write symphony no 4, much had changed, thankfully for the better. I had found a miraculous doctor in Kiev who, over the space of a couple of months, cured Sveta. And my own heart was pumping enthusiastically again. So, for the most part, Symphony no 4 is a far more optimistic affair. It even dares to be triumphant. And the idiom is much more tonal.
The Oboe Concerto presents another side of me - I suppose it’s more conventionally “classical” on some ways. I wrote it before the two symphonies, towards the end of 2004, and gave it to my 3rd daughter Verity as a Christmas present. If you know Verity, you might agree that it echoes her personality to some extent. Youthful, witty, and “poised.” She’s a great player! The outer movements are bright, but the middle movement is melancholic, and it was composed in a single day - the day Yasser Arafat died. No, it isn’t supposed to be a eulogy for him, but my mind was taken with a sense of sorrow for the appallingly tragic situation in Israel and Palestine.
The recordings of these three pieces took place in March 2008 at Air Studios, with my dear friend Chris Dibble engineering. The RPO pulled out the stops for me - superbly musical and efficient, and I’m so grateful to everyone involved. I’d love to work with them again soon, and I’m hoping that Symphony no 5, which is well on the way, can be recorded before too long.
Christopher Gunning
Wednesday, 27 May 2009
Glyndebourne then and now
Tomorrow marks the anniversary of the first ever Glyndebourne.
28 May saw the very first performance at Glyndebourne, Sussex. Who would have thought that it would be thriving 75 years later. Having only visited for the first time last year I am utterly in love with the festival and cannot wait until I have the opportunity to attend again. Look out for Chandos artists, Sarah Connolly who appears in Julius Caesar, Lucy Crowe in The Fairy Queen and Jirà Belohlávek who conducts Rusalka this season.
Happy birthday, Glyndebourne!
28 May saw the very first performance at Glyndebourne, Sussex. Who would have thought that it would be thriving 75 years later. Having only visited for the first time last year I am utterly in love with the festival and cannot wait until I have the opportunity to attend again. Look out for Chandos artists, Sarah Connolly who appears in Julius Caesar, Lucy Crowe in The Fairy Queen and Jirà Belohlávek who conducts Rusalka this season.
Happy birthday, Glyndebourne!
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