This week’s Vinyl’s Revenge digs out an old cassette I acquired in the early 1980’s featuring the music of Ottorino Respighi inspired by music composed by his compatriot, Gioacchino Rossini. Respighi had written the ballet La Boutique fantasque for Léonide Massine and Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes in 1919, basing it on short piano pieces from Rossini's collection Péchés de vieillesse (Sins of Old Age). Massine described how, in Rome for a ballet season, Respighi brought the score of Rossini's Péchés de vieillesse to Diaghilev. Toulouse-Lautrec was an influence on the period setting and style of ..read more

For our second post featuring the symphonies of Jean Sibelius, I am featuring Cover2Cover a disc I acquired (of all places) at the Virgin store at Heathrow Airport about 15 years ago. Since the beginning of his recording career, Colin Davis has been a champion of the music of Jean Sibelius, and his highly regarded cycle of the seven symphonies recorded between 1975 and 1979 with the Boston Symphony Orchestra has been a mainstay of many LP and CD collections over the years. This disc, however, is much more recent, part of anther Sibelius cycle from the early 2000’s with the London Symphony on ..read more

This week's Vinyl's Revenge post is the first of two Tuesday musings featuring the symphonies o Jean Sibelius. It is fair to say that Eugene Ormandy had the good fortune of performing the music of some great Late Romantic compsers he had the pleasure of meeting himself: Bela Bartok, Sergey Rachmaninov, and Jean Sibelius figure especially in his repertoire. Eugene Ormandy talks about Sibelius: Meeting Sibelius for the first time, I had the impression of being in the presence of someone almost superhuman. Here was a being I had admired and looked up to all my life — and suddenly I was in his ..read more

This week’s Cover2Cover is part of a week-long series on our podcasting channel I have dubbed “The One-Two Punch”, focused on pairs of concerti that follow that numerical sequence. Our share is focused on the coupling of Chopin’s two piano concerti featuring the late great Arthur Rubinstein. Here is a post tken nearly verbaim from Classics Today by Jed Distler: [Rubinstein’s 1961 Chopin E minor concerto recording is easily] the finest of Rubinstein’s three recorded versions (indeed, one of his best recordings of anything), where panache and poetry fuse to magical, impeccably timed effect. Ob ..read more

This week’s Vinyl’s Revenge digs out an old cassette I acquired in the early 1980’s featuring the music of Ottorino Respighi inspired by music composed by his compatriot, Gioacchino Rossini. Respighi had written the ballet La Boutique fantasque for Léonide Massine and Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes in 1919, basing it on short piano pieces from Rossini's collection Péchés de vieillesse (Sins of Old Age). Massine described how, in Rome for a ballet season, Respighi brought the score of Rossini's Péchés de vieillesse to Diaghilev. Toulouse-Lautrec was an influence on the period setting and style of ..read more

This week’s Cover2Cover is part of a week-long series on our podcasting channel I have dubbed “The One-Two Punch”, focused on pairs of concerti that follow that numerical sequence. Our share is focused on the coupling of Chopin’s two piano concerti featuring the late great Arthur Rubinstein. Here is a post tken nearly verbaim from Classics Today by Jed Distler: [Rubinstein’s 1961 Chopin E minor concerto recording is easily] the finest of Rubinstein’s three recorded versions (indeed, one of his best recordings of anything), where panache and poetry fuse to magical, impeccably timed effect. Ob ..read more

My last Tuesday Blog for 2021 follows the classic format we brought back this year. My mom would have been 90 this year, and in some small way, this post is a wink in her direction. As an awkward teenager, my mom tried to teach me (and my brother before me) what she thought to be a basic life skill – ballroom dancing. She tried her best to get us to learn the basic steps to Latin dances, particularly the cha-cha and rumba. Her go-to vinyl record was an old Mercury disk featuring Xavier Cugat and his orchestra. Xavier Cugat (1900-1990) was a Calatan musician and bandleader who spent his forma ..read more

This week’s Vinyl’s Revenge is one of many available couplings of Georges Bizet’s most popular suites from his stage works, notably his two suites from the incidental music he wrote for Alphonse Daudet's play L'Arlésienne and musical selections from his final opera, Carmen. The incidental music Bizet composed for L'Arlésienne consists of 27 numbers (some only a few bars) for voice, chorus, and small orchestra, ranging from short solos to longer entr'actes. Bizet himself played the harmonium backstage at the premiere performance, which took place 1 October 1872 at the Théâtre du Vaudeville in ..read more

Blogger’s Note: As we review our many musical shares from our musical forum activities under our ongoing “222 Day Binge Challenge”, today's quarterly podcast revisits a Tuesday post originally issued on November 6, 2012. The programme reuses some of the same works and the below commentary is taken almost verbatim from the original post. In the early 1980's, “CBC Stereo” was the FM classical music network that has since evolved into CBC Music. The CBC Stereo lineup used to feature shows originating from specific cities – not just the home office in Toronto. You had Mostly Music with Sheilag ..read more

Our Cover2Cover post this week is another Brilliant Classics share in our series of collections. It is a five-disk set featuring the complete Beethoven piano trios; this set contains also the shorter works for piano trio, arrangements, and the transcription of the Symphony No. 2 for piano trio, by Beethoven himself. The following notes are from the official promotional page for this set: The piano trio existed, in other guises, long before Ludwig van Beethoven got his hands on it. But he was the composer who would expand the genre beyond all recognition, using his relentless creativity to ex ..read more