The Naxos Blog

Born in Argentina in 1932, Lalo Schifrin journeyed from his early classical training to study with Messiaen in Paris, before transforming into a jazz pianist, composer and arranger whose services were sought after by no less a luminary than Dizzy Gillespie. The composer of more than a hundred scores for film and television, in addition Read More ...

Terry Riley’s breakthrough work, In C, was written in 1964, but it wasn’t until 1991 that he produced his first orchestral piece. Over the years, Riley has come under the influence of a wide range of musicians, including John Cage, John Coltrane, Miles Davis and Pandit Pran Nath, the master Indian classical singer. Raymond Bisha Read More ...

The music on this new release of orchestral music by the American composer Claude Baker occupies a wide expressive range, ricocheting between wild brilliance and deep introspection. He translates literary references into a uniquely rich and imaginative sound world, with allusions to music by other composers by turns subtle and explicit. Raymond Bisha introduces Baker’s Read More ...

French composer Camille Saint-Saëns, one of the most extraordinary musical prodigies in the history of western music, was born in 1835 (when Mendelssohn was still in full compositional flow) and died in 1921 (the best part of a decade after Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring had delivered its shock waves). Amid all this change, Saint-Saëns retained Read More ...

Sister Carrie, an opera by American composer Robert Aldridge, was first performed in 2012. Theodore Dreiser’s Sister Carrie, the novel on which the opera was based, was written in 1900. It was one of the first American novels about social status which, for women around the turn of the 20th century, depended almost entirely on Read More ...

Raymond Bisha introduces Boris Giltburg’s latest album of music by Sergei Rachmaninov that features the Études-tableaux Op. 33 and his ever-popular Piano Concerto No. 2. The latter charts a dramatic course: from the passion, darkness and pain of the first movement, through the dreamy idyll of the second, to the unequivocal victory of the finale. Read More ...

Raymond Bisha introduces a new recording of music by the Russian composer Georgy Sviridov (1915–1998); the programme features one of his cantatas, a song cycle, and music for chamber orchestra. Sviridov was a prolific composer (his output encompassed film scores, symphonic suites and several thousand songs) and was fortunate to have Shostakovich as one of Read More ...

Music by George Tsontakis adds to the ever-expanding Naxos American Classics Series with an inventive and colourful triptych of concertos, introduced on this podcast by Raymond Bisha. The works feature soloists Eric Berlin, member of Empire Brass and principal trumpeter of the Albany Symphony Orchestra; David Krakauer, one of the world’s finest klezmer clarinettists; and Read More ...

“Every time I do another podcast about Granados, I find new reasons to like his music,” says host Raymond Bisha. Join him as he marks the 150th anniversary of the birth of Enrique Granados, one of the leading examples of Spanish musical nationalism, in a broadcast that surveys Granados’ varied oeuvre—from chamber music, to opera Read More ...

Born in the United States in 1915, Vincent Persichetti’s contribution to music education eventually led him to a professorship at the Juilliard School of Music. Along the way, he composed prolifically for the harpsichord, including sonatas and other works, which rendered him one of the 20th century’s most important composers for the instrument. Raymond Bisha Read More ...

Born in 1729, the Spanish composer Antonio Soler entered holy orders aged 23 and died in his monastery in 1783, aged 54. Considering the fact that the order to which he belonged observed silence and solitude, it’s remarkable that he produced more than 500 works which clamour to be heard, including over 200 keyboard sonatas. Read More ...

This first full-length album of music by Mark Nowakowski affords a deeply affecting experience: the fusion of the composer’s Polish heritage and that country’s defiant survival of historical upheavals, his American upbringing, the influence of Catholic philosophy and mysticism, masterful playing by the Voxare String Quartet, and an ingenious use of mixed media. Raymond Bisha Read More ...

Raymond Bisha introduces the latest release in the Naxos Guitar Laureate series. The featured performer is Xavier Jara, winner of the 2016 Guitar Foundation of America Competition, adding to the artist’s ongoing string of successes. The acoustic guitar has an ancestry that can be traced back thousands of years; this recording presents music from the Read More ...

Heitor Villa-Lobos is probably the best known of all South American composers. His contribution to Brazilian music—in education, in community projects, in the concert hall—was all-pervasive. Raymond Bisha drops in on Naxos’ ongoing project to record all his symphonies in a new edition that was launched in 2011 by the São Paulo Symphony Orchestra’s publishing Read More ...

Published in 1638, Monteverdi’s Eighth Book of Madrigals reflects a genius at the height of his powers and parades an incredible emotional range, from bold proclamations to a beauty and sensuousness that’s almost painful in its intensity. Raymond Bisha introduces the latest recording from the Italian instrumental and vocal ensemble Delitiæ Musicæ, under their founding Read More ...