The Europadisc Review
I Holst - Discovering Imogen
Alice Farnham, BBC Singers, BBC Concert Orchestra
£12.83
2024 is not just the 150th anniversary of Gustav Holst’s death but also the 40th anniversary of the death of his daughter Imogen (affectionately known as ‘Imo’ by her friends). Imo devoted her life to music, promoting her father’s music as well as being an assistant to Benjamin Britten. As a noted conductor in her own right, she founded the Purcell Singers in 1952, and had a passionate commitment to music education. She also set up the Holst Foundation, which was instrumental in enabling the creation after her death of NMC Recordings, and which in its turn continued her commitment to the work ... read more
2024 is not just the 150th anniversary of Gustav Holst’s death but also the 40th anniversary of the death of his daughter Imogen (affectionately known as ‘Imo’ by her friends). Imo devoted her life to music, promoting her father’s music as well as be... read more
I Holst - Discovering Imogen
Alice Farnham, BBC Singers, BBC Concert Orchestra
The Spin Doctor Europadisc's Weekly Column
The Other Schoenberg 11th September 2024
11th September 2024
This week marks the sesquicentenary of the birth of Arnold Schoenberg (1874–1951), one of the most radically consequential composers of the 20th century and a key figure in the development of musical modernism. To many music-lovers he is still a modernist bogeyman, one of the main culprits who knocked music off-course by dragging it, kicking and screaming, into the realms of atonality and serialism. During this anniversary year, even his musical champions have tended to celebrate the occasion with the more 'listener-friendly' music of his pre-atonal period: works such as Verklarte Nacht, Gurrelieder and Pelleas und Melisande, which stretch and densen but do not essentially break with the late-Romantic tonality of Wagner and Mahler.
If, 150 years since the his birth, Schoenberg's music can still be forbidding to many, his legacy is still a considerable one: not just as... read more