Romanticism has proved more durable than seemed possible a half-century ago, when the brutal violence and icy pointillism of Pierre Boulez were all the rage and Samuel Barber was considered as passé as ornate Victorian ...

The music of German composer Kurt Albrecht (1895-1971) is at once modern and very much in the noble lineage of Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms. It balances compact, readily identifiable motives with sinuous, long-lined melodies in ...

These are modern-era “concert tangos,” not vernacular numbers danced on stages and in ballrooms, cabarets, and bars around the world. Some are modernist, post-tonal, even subversive, whether angular or recondite or vaporous, splashing tone-clusters up ...

American roots-music has moved to the cities. Only a few old-timers and hardy ex-urbanite pioneers are still playing the fiddle tunes, dance ditties, country blues, rags, chain-gang hollers, minstrel songs, and mournful mountain-music ballads of ...

This is an orchestration of Isaac Albeniz’s 1887 piano suite, here conducted by Rafael Frühbeck de Burgos who did the—gorgeous!—scoring himself. So idiomatically and effectively did Burgos accomplish this task that you’d never guess the ...

Holst’s orchestral spectacular seems designed as an audiophile showpiece, and as you probably know there are several recordings of it that hit the sonic jackpot. Here’s another such, but with a twist: this one’s played ...

Wonder of wonders—the great German classical recording company Deutsche Grammophon has issued its first LP in a quarter-century (on 180-gram vinyl, no less): Gustavo Dudamel conducting the Vienna Philharmonic, in a December 2011 live-in-concert performance ...

Vinyl collectors know David Canfield for his mail-order sales of vintage classical LPs, but he’s also an accomplished composer, as these pieces he wrote for saxophone virtuoso Kenneth Tse show: four sonatas (one for each ...

Though doubtless the greatest Polish composer between Szymanowski and Lutoslawski, Grazyna Bacewicz (1909- 69) is (unlike them) known more for her chamber music than her orchestral works. This new release collects three of her mid-century ...