Archive
The complete Open Letters Monthly Archive.
They're not great (in fact they're often mild and unoriginal), but the concertos of Muzio Clementi and Mozart's son, Frances Xaver, are nonetheless worth your time.
Read MoreThere used to be a truth, universally acknowledged across the record industry, that you could put out unfamiliar music with a famous artist or popular music with an unheralded performer but never attempt what Donald Rumsfeld might have called the unknown unknowns.
Read MoreThey may grate in other instances, but period instruments are well suited to Mendelssohn's Songs without Words, as this new recording demonstrates.
Read MoreTchaikovsky's violin concerto towers over all other Russian efforts in the genre, but these two by Glazunov and Khachaturian deserve a wider audience.
Read MoreIn an era replete with talented young competition winners, Lucas Debargue, who placed fourth in the 2015 Tchaikovsky Competition, stands out.
Read MoreThese three Shostakovich chamber works span the composer's whole career, and together they constitute a musical self-portrait with few equals.
Read MoreCameron Carpenter is virtuosic, effervescent, totally in command of his pipes and sometimes quirky enough to make you rethink the piece from core principles. But does that approach work in Bach?
Read MoreSteven Osborne takes on unexpected repertoire: the ascetic Morton Feldman and the extreme George Crumb.
Read MoreThese six early-classical concertos are close to the best music of their time and yet the composers of these six concertos are unknown.
Read MoreVaughn Williams' symphonies are too little played, and too rarely played well. The first disc of an exciting new cycle aims to change that.
Read MoreA new release of an old recording prompts the question: Why are orchestra chiefs still afraid of Joseph Haydn?
Read MoreJust months before his death, Nikolaus Harnoncourt made his final attempt to faithfully render Beethoven's scores into music. Norman Lebrecht assesses his valediction.
Read MoreMahler's Third is a challenge of both organization and interpretation. Does Jaap van Zweeden's new live recording deserve a place among the greats?
Read MoreThe DG represented in this massive box of rarities is a label under post-War reconstruction, fascinating in its rigour and frugality.
Read MoreMartha Argerich and Daniel Barenboim, born a year apart in Buenos Aires to Jewish mothers of Russian extraction, have left it until their mid-seventies to discover common ground.
Read MoreUnlike most composers, Lutoslawski's star has risen since his death. A new pairing of pairing of orchestral works shows why.
Read MoreOut of Russia's close-knit musical world, Ludmila Berlinskaya brings us Scriabin--and works from his son and the son of a man who painted him.
Read MoreBeethoven and Haydn scored Scottish and Welsh ballads for easy money; Britten set folk songs for tours of the front during World War II. Yet the results belie the music's incidental origins.
Read MoreA new album of rare quality features four works for violin and piano, all composed during World War I, all played flawlessly.
Read MoreConfiscated by US Customs during World War II, a reconstructed Britten concerto caps a disc of rare British music.
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