Lisbon-born Artur Pizarro grew up hearing this music by two masters of keyboard composition from the other side of the Iberian Peninsula. His performances breathe with the natural ease of long familiarity. The pianist’s lyrical ...

Howard Shore’s many high-profile film scores include most of David Cronenberg’s movies, The Silence of the Lambs, and The Aviator. His grandest achievement, however, is his music for The Lord of the Rings—this earned him ...

For his hour-long song cycle, Steven Mackey’s protagonist is a “lovelorn psychologist”; 200 years ago, this sensitive soul would have been a poet. He’s holed up in a seedy motel, remembering, grieving, and mentally unraveling. ...

Mark Waldrep, the founder and leader of AIX Records and iTrax, does like being first. In his interview with me, presented in TAS issue 218 ("Mark Waldrep Knows What He's Doing"), the guy bragged on ...

John Corigliano, an honored stalwart among American composers, has written for the piano throughout his career. Ursula Oppens, joined by Jerome Lowenthal for a couple of two-piano works, surveys 50 years of music that’s amazingly ...

Selling for the quite reasonable price of $120, this six-LP box gives collectors a chance—another chance, actually, as Classic Records and Speakers Corner have already waded into these waters—to sample the great Mercury Living Presence ...

This Sleeping Beauty, arguably the finest of Tchaikovsky’s ballets, was recorded in 1959 with Ernest Ansermet on the podium leading L’Orchestre de la Suisse Romande. These meticulously manufactured Speakers Corner LPs demonstrate well what Kenneth ...

Perhaps Morten Lindberg was out to make a point about progress in audio technology when he decided that his label’s new program, Souvenir Part I from the Trondheim Soloists, would be released as 24/96 stereo, ...

For 30 years, “Professor” Keith Johnson and Reference Recordings have provided audiophiles with orchestral spectaculars to challenge high-end systems. This new CD of two perennially popular ballet favorites could be their best yet. The sense ...

Like many other symphonic institutions, the Toronto Symphony Orchestra has established its own in-house record label. All six TSO Live releases to date have been conducted by Peter Oundjian, the Orchestra’s music director since 2004. ...

Multichannel treatments of older rock recordings that truly serve the musical essence of the original are rare. Here’s one that does. The “You” of Wish You Were Here, Pink Floyd’s ninth studio album, is Syd ...

For the first release on their own label, the wizards at Zenph Sound Innovations reanimate primitive recordings by three preeminent Spanish composer/pianists. Isaac Albéniz was a child prodigy, a seasoned performer by mid-adolescence. The New ...

Examining this SACD’s program, the shrink-wrap still in place, the connection among the four 20th Century works programmed by Oregon Symphony music director Carlos Kalmar seemed apparent. But hearing the music several times through left ...

When I was an undergraduate trombone major in the early 1970s, my friends and I could name every member of the Chicago Symphony’s brass section the way other guys could rattle off the starting lineup ...