Some General Updates

It has been a rather full Fall working on a variety of composition projects including a multi-movement orchestral work whose shape is still in progress. So far there are 2 movements with one of them being a passacaglia.

The holiday music continues to be popular both in the chamber music pieces and in the choral selections all of which are linked to JW Pepper from the WORKS LIST page.

Rejoice-A Holiday Overture was one of the projects from this Fall with a slight reworking of the British string music reference to help with ease of play and some other minor edits to smooth out a transition or two. At present there are at least 2 anticipated performances of this in December! Hopefully more to come.

On the review side, the transition to mostly digital media appears to be complete. I'm not a fan of listening to classical music on my computer so that has meant a lot fewer reviews here for the blog. There are a few film scores reviewed here and there and will pop some in here if there are additional classical reviews to help provide some additional content and variety as needed.

I finally bit the bullet and bought Warner's Ballets Russes 25CD box which featured a great deal of music I had not heard before but also some great performances by Markevitch and others from bygone times of the LP era. Now I'm sort of luxuriating in another boxed set I purchased that covers Sir Thomas Beecham's stereo recordings. I've always been a huge fan of his Beethoven and Schubert, and of course have most of his Delius so the set will duplicate some things (though it is a mix of cassette and LP media).

I've also been working through my cassette collection and beginning the weeding process. It is fun to rediscover some of these recordings that I first heard some 35-40 years ago! So far about 3 out of 4 are listenable and the ones that are not doing so well I am either trying to repair, or replace if possible. A Ruth Laredo Ravel cassette is perhaps the biggest loss so far, but I'm hoping to get that to still work. It is funny to me that the "cheap" budget cassettes, and many of the old Musical Heritage Society recordings have held up while those from major labels seemed to fare less well. Just an odd observation...

For the many of you who have subscribed and enjoyed the reviews here, I thank each of you! There will be some content going forward as time permits so bear with me! Many of the labels that used to provide content no longer do so and import fees are also beginning to have an impact as well.