It is simply amazing the type of library we can have in our own homes, and without taking up all that shelf space!

 

Arthaus/Naxos

Arthaus/Naxos

This opera gala from Cologne comes from 2005 and was a benefit performance in support of the German AIDS Foundation. Apart from the marvellous lineup of singers, where else are you going to see and hear Spanish baritone Carlos Alvarez sing Bless Your Bautiful Hide from Seven Brides for Seven Brothers! Local music-lovers will be interested to see Markus Stenz wielding the baton. Thanks once again to the ever growing Naxos Video Library for this, and many other, terrific arts documentaries and performances.

 

Arc Music/Alexander Street Press

Arc Music/Alexander Street Press

Okay I admit it, I’ve been known to follow pipe bands around the city in a type of celtic daze, and you will either understand that or not. Whilst the effect is never quite the same on record, the sound of massed pipes and drums can still be pretty stirring to the bagpipe inclined, so why not choose a band to suit your bonnie wee fancy from the Alexander Street Press Contemporary World Music collection, and get marching. Just don’t look back……

 

Blue Note/Naxos

Blue Note/Naxos

The Naxos Jazz Library is a real treasure trove of the great, the good and the unbearably cool, and Bobby Darin certainly fits into that last category, and probably the other two as well! Multi-talented and almost quintessentially hip, Darin had one of those effortless voices that just seemed tailor-made for jazz, and to hear him spin one of those classic American songs is to be transported to the same realm inhabited by the likes of Frank Sinatra and Mel Torme. Coooooool……….

 

Erato/Naxos

Erato/Naxos

Despite the fact that he only managed to write one opera, Fidelio (and what an opera it is!), Beethoven was a dab hand at churning out overtures; he wrote four for Fidelio alone. You can listen to all four of these, plus four non-Fidelio ones (you know what I mean), here via the Naxos Music Library. These exhilirating performances conducted by British wunderkind Daniel Harding positively leap out at you and we can sometimes forget, with our historical distance, just how “modern” and confronting Beethoven’s music must have been to an audience still steeped in the more polite Classical era.

You can access these, and other treasures, from home if you’re one of our registered Victorian Library members.

 

Bobby Darin journeys to Oz, by train…..

 

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