Isao Tomita’s ‘Planets’ from 1976 takes Holst’s symphonic work and puts it into the electronic realm. Most of Tomita’s albums have been pretty much out of print for years, except a few on RCA released in the 1990’s that have stayed around. Fortunately ‘The Tomita Planets’ is still available, and also re-released and remade too! There are several releases of the Planets, and all are different in format or actual performance. Took a while, but figured out the versions…
Ted Libbey, author of ‘The NPR Guide to Building a Classical CD Collection’ has a feature on NPR called ‘The NPR Classical 50’. Libbey and host Fred Child discuss popular classical works and have recommendations of recordings. These are short reviews with some interesting antedotes and sound clips from 2009. http://www.npr.org/series/99866406/the-npr-classical-50 I have had Libbey’s book for years, and found it overall to be a good primer for those looking to explore the classics. The writing is casual, with a…
There are a lot of places that you can get free classical music, so I am going to try and find a new recording every day for the month of May. Many of them are from archive.org, so they could be old 78’s or live performances, but to have the chance to hear some new works or a conductor that is unfamiliar is always a good thing. I will be posting these at my blog at http://www.basicrep.com if you want to…
Sometimes I go searching for original artwork for a CD or an MP3 album I have purchased, especially the classical releases that get repackaged over and over again. I ran across a treasure trove of older album images at Piano Piano’s Flickr page. Wow, literally thousands of photos of albums. A great resource for those looking to get some information on an old release. A lot of the images are of the back side liner notes too. A great find!…