“[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 […]

“[The] Three Winter Poems trilogy of 1948 provides an unusual example of [William Alwyn’s] flair for pictorialism (which he had learnt through his composition for the big screen) combined with the sparer textures of the quartet. … The Tippett Quartet should be congratulated for their sympathetic interpretations of a neglected repertoire, though one that should […]

“As a chorister in the 1960s I can still remember the lines of the British Legion who would parade up to the village church and the war memorial to hear the names of the dead read out. My memories of those chilly, solemn November Sunday mornings are still vivid. They were occasions charged with deep […]

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 […]

Gramophone reviews the Dante Quartet’s recording of Charles Villiers Stanford: String Quartets Nos. 3, 4, & 7 in the October 2018 issue: “All three of the works on this disc are premiere recordings, an astonishing state of affairs for what must surely be the most significant quartet cycle by any British composer before Frank Bridge. […]

Gramophone Magazine reviews our Ariadne release of Bernstein: Broadway to Hollywood in the October 2018 issue: “[Iain Sutherland’s] Bernstein is strong and trenchant, often exhilarating, never sentimental. The dances from West Side Story blend energy with restraint, the opening bristling with tension, the Mambo hard-driven and electric, the ‘Somewhere’ Adagio clean and very reined in. […]

Gramophone critic Andrew Farach-Colton reviews Krysia Osostowicz and Daniel Tong’s Beethoven Plus, Volume One recording in the September issue of Gramophone Magazine: “Osostowicz and Tong’s interpretative style – patient, affectionate, warmly conversational, sensitive to harmonic detail – reminds me of Schneiderhan and Kempff’s classic mid-’50s set.…these are thoroughly engaging performances. The whole of Op 12 […]

Andrew Achenbach offers an “enthusiastic” welcome to the Royal Birmingham Conservatoire Chamber Choir’s new The Glory and the Dream recording in the September issue of Gramophone Magazine: “What an extraordinarily versatile and accomplished figure was Richard Rodney Bennett (1936-2012). As both performer and composer he possessed richly communicative gifts, and his sizeable output evinces an […]