“[Carwithen’s Quartet No. 1]’s technical fluidity suggest a much more mature composer…Quartet No. 2 dates from five years later, and the emotional intensity has heightened. … It’s a compelling piece of musical argument, played with bold incisiveness by the Tippett Quartet. Alwyn’s Quartet No. 3…It’s tautly argumentative opening gives way to an Adagio whose generous, […]

“…the lava tumbles out with astonishing force from Mark Bebbington, who plays with tremendous authority, supported by a vivid recording with an appropriately wide dynamic range. In its orchestrated symphonic form…the music writhes with a tumult of colours; but Bebbington proves that Bax’s first thoughts, testing piano and pianist to the limit, have their own […]

“once upon a time the songs of Eric Coates were sung and recorded by the world’s most prominent artists…which is one reason why this interesting new anthology is welcome. Another is the warm, empathetic advocacy of…Kathryn Rudge. Her creamy, generous mezzo-soprano affectionately cossets the languorous melody of ‘In a Sleepy Lagoon’ and caresses the delicate […]

“[Peter Donohoe] appears to take early Beethoven as his interpretative trajectory with a gloves-off spontaneity that imbues these magical scores with a compelling vitality and freshness. Donohoe’s radiant cantabile — captured to perfection by producer Siva Oke and engineer Paul Arden-Taylor — illuminates event the most workaday of sequential passage-work. It’s underpinned by an uninhibited […]

Explore “…these ‘snapshots’ offer an unusually rounded portrait of Elgar. One strikingly effective song is ‘The Wind at Dawn’. Elgar’s 1888 setting of a poem by his soon-to-be wife Caroline Alice Roberts, heard in its magnificent 1912 orchestration, all the more memorable for mezzo Kathryn Rudge’s very distinctive singing. Indeed, Rudge generally has the best […]