Perhaps I should start by admitting a bias: Many years ago, lying on Boston's grassy Esplanade by the Charles River on warm summer nights, I learned what a symphony orchestra should sound like, with Arthur Fiedler conducting the Boston Pops Orchestra. Those concerts were free; these seven compact discs are not--not quite. But for any lover of light classical music, they are certainly one of the ...
Now the dust has settled somewhat around the phenomenon that is Vanessa-Mae, this three-CD re-release of recordings she made in the early 1990s as a young teenager reminds us what all the fuss was about in the first place. The discs are divided into Russian, Viennese and virtuoso albums, and the first cannily begins with the Kabalevsky Concerto, which was written to appease Stalinist criticism in ...