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Works in Focus: Haydn’s ‘Seven Last Words of Our Saviour on the Cross’
16th April 2025
Holy Week – the seven days leading up to the feast of Easter – has traditionally been the time for some of the richest, most spiritually searching music in the church year. As Christians contemplate Jesus’s final days and crucifixion, they have done so to a soundtrack comprising some of the greatest music ever composed for a liturgical context. Performances of Passion settings are still widespread, though more usually in the concert hall than as part of a formal liturgy, while the more reflective context of the Tenebrae... read more
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John Nelson: The Consummate Berlioz Conductor
8th April 2025
The death at the age of 83 of the American conductor John Nelson has robbed the musical world of one of the most devoted champions of the works of Hector Berlioz. Nelson had already recorded two of Berlioz’s operas – Béatrice et Bénédict in 1991 (Erato) and Benvenuto Cellini in 2003 (Virgin Classics – when his magnificent 2017 live account of Les Troyens, released on Erato and starring Joyce DiDonato, Michael Spyres and Marie-Nicole Lemieux, was greeted with critical superlatives and scooped a host of high-profile... read more
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Early Music Highlights
1st April 2025
The first three months of 2025 seem to have flown past, despite the persistence of dispiriting headlines, helped along by a generous flow of new releases to delight lovers of early music in its varied forms. Does the past gain in attraction when the present seems so devoid of good news? What we can state with certainty – and some satisfaction, given the widespread impression that the arts in general and classical music in particular are under attack – is that the proliferation of excellent ensembles shows no sign of... read more
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Celebrating Boulez
25th March 2025
This week, many in the musical world will be marking the centenary of the birth one of the most consequential figures in post-war classical music: Pierre Boulez. He was born on 26 March 1925 in Montbrison, in the Loire department of central France. Over the course of a musical career which lasted from 1945 (the date of his first acknowledged composition, the 12 Notations for solo piano) until a few years before his death on 5 January 2016, he went from being a confrontational enfant terrible and scourge of those composers... read more
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More Supraphon Treasures: Lovro von Matačić
18th March 2025
The name of Lovro von Matačić is one respected by conducting aficionados but less familiar to the wider classical community, perhaps because the career path of this Croatian aristocrat among maestros never took in a truly long-term high-profile post and the recording contracts that might have gone with it. Yet for those in the know he was unquestionably one of the great conductors of the last century, and his relatively few recordings are rightly prized by collectors.
Matačić was born 1899 in... read more