Here is the link to my Spottify Playlist for this year. We kick off this year’s curated playlist with a delightful work by Ellen Taafe Zwilich, Upbeat! Lots of fun rhythmic play gets things off to a lighter start here for this year’s collection of music. First appearing in 1926, John Alden Carpenter’s Skyscrapers is an unjustly overlooked jazzy ballet with touches of Americana as we head into the big city. In a time of uncertainty we move into Umoja: Anthem of Unity by Val

(un)common threads Ariana Kim, violin. Roger Moseley, fortepiano. Shane Shanahan, percussion. Saffron Soul Records 519061 Total Time: 75:37 Recording: ****/**** Performance: ****/**** Ariana Kim, who teaches at Cornell University, has put together an album that explores both classic violin literature and global styles with a touch of improvisation. The album celebrates the sense of the latter with exploring some historical approaches to playing. The first half of t

Hope: 12 Prayers for Cello & Orchestra Andreas Graf, cello. London Symphony Orchestra/Ben Palmer Claves 50-3152 Total Time: 43:20 Recording: ****/**** Performance: ****/**** The concept album Hope is a collection of twelve new works for cello and orchestra. Each piece provides a different musical perspective on the human condition and wishes to inspire the listener with thoughts of a better world and our shared humanity. Cellist Andreas Graf shares how he was entranced

Dvorak/Simon Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra/Manfred Honeck Reference FR-769 Total Time: 58:53 Recording: ****/**** Performance: ****/**** When Antonin Dovrak came to visit America in 1892, he spent some time trying to inspire Americans to explore their own folk music traditions. He saw the value of spirituals as one avenue of possibility, less so the music of indigenous peoples (though how much he might have heard of this on his trip to Iowa is hard to say). His ninth

Film music writer and reviewer Roger Hall has spent a lifetime exploring music for the big screen along. He has reviewed hundreds of scores and honored a host of composers over the years on his Film Music Review and The Music Buffs web pages for decades. Now he has compiled a lot of that research into a complete book, Hooray for Hollywood, in a downloadable PDF format. Hall's invaluable work is a must for anyone wanting to learn more about film music. It is also an import

Mahler: Symphony No. 5 Grand Teton Festival Orchestra/Sir Donald Runnicles Reference FR-763 Total Time: 72:57 Recording: ****/**** Performance: ****/**** Back in 1962, the first music festival in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, began what has become the Grand Teton Festival. Musicians from across North America and Europe are invited each year to this gorgeous location to make great music together. They come from 84 different orchestras and 72 educational institutions each sum

Hidden Legacies: Weinberg and Korngold Kristina Reiko Cooper, cello. Kaunas City Symphony Orchestra/Constantin Orbelian Delos 3616 Total Time: 61:28 Recording: ****/**** Performance: ****/**** Hidden Legacies brings together works for cello and orchestra by two 20 th -Century composers whose lives were turned upside down by political turmoil and persecution of their Jewish heritage. One of them, Erich Wolfgang Korngold (1897-1957), is perhaps better known from his work

Here's the second installment of my personal survey of the symphony and recordings in my collection. The decade of the 1850s starts to see some rather unusual composers and works appear and it shows the growing availability of orchestras in new parts of the world. Saint-Saens: Symphony No. 1 (1852) French Radio & TV Orch./Jean Martinon Fry: Santa Claus Symphony (1853) Royal Scottish NO/Tony Rowe Smetana: Festive Symp

After picking up some boxed sets featuring music for the Ballets Russe and then the excellent stereo Sir Thomas Beecham set, I decided to explore my own large collection here by doing a little survey of symphonies across time starting in the 1820s and working my way forward. In this way, I could revisit some discs I had not had a chance to really just listen to in a long time. The choices of which performances to listen to grew out of that idea of making sure to explore so

The International Film Music Critics Association (IFMCA) announces its annual list of winners for excellence in musical scoring, in the 2025 IFMCA Awards, February 26. The award for Score of the Year goes to British composer Simon Franglen for his score for Avatar: Fire and Ash , director James Cameron’s second sequel to his epic space saga Avatar . IFMCA member Christian Clemmensen wrote that Franglen “continues his intelligent merging of James Horner origins with his co