Decca has gotten around the perennial problem of filling Mozart Piano Concerto CDs by splitting No. 25 between two discs, giving us 155 minutes of Mozart for the price of a single top-line CD. The performances are top-line, too, if you like big-orchestra Mozart. Ashkenazy performs this music in a public, large-auditorium style, without the intimacy or niceties we hear from period instruments or ...
In an introduction to this disc of Christmas music, John Rutter tellingly commends the Christmas carol as one of the few forms that permits "serious" composers to write tunes, regardless of whatever political correctness rules the avant-garde of the day. And he's been exploiting that licence with a vengeance ever since, as a Cambridge student, he composed the jaunty little number that remains his ...
Lerner and Loewe's elegant, indestructible musical is one of those rare Broadway triumphs to be transferred to the big screen with practically every note and lyric intact. Warner's plush film version also preserved for posterity the definitive performances of Rex Harrison as Professor Higgins (though Jack Warner originally wanted Cary Grant) and Stanley Holloway as Alfred Dolittle. But if the ...