I’m still not managing to post here as often as I would have liked. I probably never will.

Among CDs I’ve listened to recently, I finally got round to Mark Elder’s recording of Gerontius, which was highly enjoyable, though I’ll still go back to Sargent with Heddle Nash! Somm’s reissue of Boult conducting Walton’s First Symphony and Belshazzar’s Feast was a fantastic listen – I’d forgotten quite how quickly Boult takes some parts of the great choral work. Also on British vocal music, Divine Art’s reissue of 2CDs worth of 78s of works by Peter Warlock was enthralling, with Peter Dawson, Roy Henderson and Dennis Noble particularly involving.

In the LP and 78 area, my collection of recordings by Franz André continues to grow, and more of these will reach my website in the coming months. These include his recordings of works by Coates, Elgar and Gershwin, and his 1812 overture. I also got hold of a French LP of Mozart recordings on “disques vogues”. It contains Jean Witold conducting Eine Kleine Nachtmusik, Pauline Aubert playing the Rondo alla Turca on harpsichord, and two of the K107 Piano concertos (arrangements of JC Bach sonatas) played by Robert Veyron-Lacroix and the Collegium Musicum de Paris under Roland Douatte. The sound balance in the concerti may need some work, but the recordings are all quite interesting. The sleeve notes include an excitingly multi-coloured spectrum illustrating the full range of human hearing, as reproduced on the record, and the brief descriptions of the recordings are translated from French to rather bad English. Eine Kleine Nachtmusik contrives on sleeve and label to have its second movement split in two as “Romance” and “Andante”.

The latest update to my website will be live in the next couple of hours, and contains the following:
Fabien Sevitzky conducts the Philadelphia Chamber String Sinfonietta in Arensky’s Variations on a Theme of Tchaikovsky (1942)
Marie Novello plays Liszt’s Hungarian Rhapsody No.2 (abridged, 1921)
Thorpe Bates sings the Captain’s Song from HMS Pinafore, with chorus of Ernest Pike, Stanley Kirkby, Peter Dawson (1906)
Joseph Batten conducts “March of Victory” for the National Savings Movement, with baritones Thorpe Bates and Walter Saull (1945)
Henry Wood conducts Vaughan Williams’s Serenade to Music (improved transfer 1938)
Michael Zacharewitsch plays violin solos (c1920)