This Helicon release of a 1985 concert with the Israel Philharmonic brings to five the recordings of Mahler’s Ninth by Leonard Bernstein, which span his early advocacy of the composer in the 60s through to ...

When I played him Rapsodie espagnole from a test pressing of Chad Kassem’s soon-to-be-released (October 8), 200-gram Analogue Productions’ reissue of RCA LSC-2183 The Reiner Sound, my buddy and TAS Music Editor Mark Lehman, whose ...

Benjamin Britten’s song cycles are among his best and best-known works. Though some maintain that versions by Peter Pears, Britten’s artistic and domestic partner for most of his creative life, are “definitive,” that singer’s voice ...

There was a time when the Bartók quartets were the toughest challenge a string quartet could face, and when no one played them as well as the Juilliard Quartet. Yet the foursome’s pathbreaking stereo recording ...

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 world of music has suffered a great loss: the great cellist and distinguished teacher Janos Starker died on April 28, 2013. Starker’s public career was at the highest level of distinction. Like most great ...

Arvo Pärt’s music, both choral and instrumental, often uses religious texts for a starting point. How apt that the 75-year- old composer based his Symphony No. 4, commissioned by the Los Angeles Philharmonic, on the ...

Veljo Tormis, born in 1930, is one of the best of the many great Estonian choral composers. This disc collects five pieces, the first of which is a half-hour setting of the Seventeenth Canto from ...

Richard Aldrich, writing of Dvorak in the 1904 New York Times, said that he “seemed, indeed, the last of the naive musicians, the direct descendant of Haydn, Mozart, and Schubert, rejoicing in the self-sufficient beauty ...

Tchaikovsky and Dvorak are in the same boat in one way—you’d think they only wrote three symphonies, but numbered them 4, 5, and 6 in Tchaikovsky’s case, and 7, 8, and 9 in Dvorak’s. While ...

For a composer who could have become a concert pianist instead, Dmitri Shostakovich wrote little for solo piano. The two sonatas are good but not great; the 24 Preludes, op. 34, are solid but not ...

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 ...

The Greatest (Record) Show on Earth! - A representation of dealers from across the Midwest - Selling a wide range of classical LPs/CDs/Open Reels, from early music to 20th century (many priced as low as ...

Valery Gergiev, highly regarded for his passionate performances of Russian repertoire, Wagner, and Mahler, affirms his versatility with compelling interpretations of three Ravel staples. His Daphnis et Chloe— the entire ballet, complete with chorus—is voluble ...

Everything on this superbly played recital of modern music for clarinet and piano by four American composers is flavored, whether openly or more subliminally, by that most American musical invention, jazz. Gershwin’s catchy Three Preludes ...