You're a beautiful woman probably...

New Year's Day can be pretty grim - one way of lightening things is to go out for a walk (which I'll be doing soon); another is to listen to some good music (my plan for later on). Catching the famous theme from Brief encounter on Classic FM one Sunday morning reminded me of how wonderful I think Rachmaninov's Piano Concertos are - and there are more reasons than that film why Number 2 is his most popular. Later on, listening to Radio 4's Desert island discs (and exercising my prejudices, thinking that some of the guests' musical choices are unbelievably poor) made me think of my own list of favourite records. Try it yourself - if you have any love of music at all, it's quite hard to get it down to eight! Debussy's La mer (strangely enough, not all about his mother...). Debussy was a pioneer of a whole new musical sound, dubbed "impressionism", and this is probably my favourite example. Finzi's Severn Rhapsody . An encapsulation of everyth...

I was listening to some Villa-Lobos today and it raised my mood so much that I had to post here about how neglected this composer still is. Eccentric, original, clumsy, haphazard, funny, noisy, stunningly beautiful - his music is all of these things at different times. I see him as rather like an eccentric old uncle who, when you first meet him, you dismiss as just weird. Once you get into his music, it's incredibly loveable. He wrote a huge body of work including seventeen string quartets, at least three of which are masterpieces, five piano concertos and nine Bachianas brasileiras (Brazilian Bach-pieces), twelve symphonies and fourteen Chôros , including two sadly lost. Obviously, not everything he wrote is brilliant, but he's a master of musical development. I first heard Villa-Lobos' music more than twenty years ago. This was when recordings of many of his works were only just starting to appear. Thanks to the Marco Polo and Naxos CD labels, people now at least have th...