Classical rest

 

It's been an odd week here not least for feeling rather under the weather really but one thing I had spent some of the evenings doing laying very much in the catbasket has been listening to the last week of this years Sir Henry Wood promenade concerts that this year have included an orchestrated Florence and The Machine concert, a evening of Henry Mancini, the film and stage show composer who gave us Peter Gunn, Moon River and the Pink Panther theme beloved as a child, even played on Saturday in the second half of the Last Night with Sir Steven Hough playing piano.

Talking of him the classical music label Hyperion last month did issue five brand new classical lps, something they hadn't done since the very late 1980's drawn from their modern catalogue and I did get his brilliant account of Chopin's Waltzes in that format.

Classical music on vinyl isn't where rock and pop is - in the centre of a revival - with lots of reissues and many new titles being issued at the same time on record, cd and digital mediums, being more of a nostalgia driven thing with "classic" accounts from the late 1950's to the end of the 1970's often highly regarded by hifi types being issued by specialist companies so it is rare we get modern recordings.

That one sounded great with silent surfaces and I'd like to see them issue around fifteen to twenty a year a mixture of back catalogue and the most desired brand new recordings so we can have a wider choice of in print new classical pressings.