BBC Music Magazine

5 min read

Oboe Concerto in E flat, Wq. 165; Oboe Concerto in B flat, Wq. 164; Symphony in G, Wq. 180; Symphony in F, Wq. 181 Xenia Loeffler (oboe); Akademie für Alte Musik Berlin/Georg Kallweit Harmonia Mundi HMM 902601 63:12 mins All the music recorded on

Guitar Techniques

3 min read

Born in the same year as last issue’s featured composer JS Bach, the German-turned-British composer George Friedric Handel (1685-1759) is also regarded as one of the greatest and most influential composers of the Baroque era, and indeed the entire ca

REVOLUTION DIGITAL

2 min read

It was through his collection of Ferdinand Berthoud marine chronometers that Karl-Friedrich Scheufele, the co-president of Chopard and founder of the brand’s technically brilliant in-house manufactured L.U.C division, first began to forge an emotiona

Audio Technology

5 min read

Review: Preshan John I still remember the first time I used a ribbon mic — a pair of Coles 4038s on drum overheads tracked in a lively old church building. The drum kit seemed to have a rugged ‘realness’ that a pair of condensers couldn’t quite captu

Guitar Techniques

3 min read

In this latest issue, we return to a wonderful work by the operatic composer Christoph Willibald Gluck (1714-1787). Gluck was born in Bavaria, and was urged to follow his father’s profession of forester. Thankfully for the development of Western musi

Guitar Magazine

2 min read

Eddie Van Halen sadly passed away in October 2020. In addition to his seismic impact on the guitar and guitar playing, long universally acknowledged, the line of signature gear he left behind will ensure that his name and legacy will never be forgott

What Hi-Fi?

5 min read

Vinyl is the music format that just won’t go away. In fact, did you know that in 2022 vinyl sales beat CD sales for the first time since 1987? Well, now you do. We are thrilled by the vinyl revival, but what good is loving vinyl if you don’t have a d

dune buggies and hot VWs

3 min read

HAVE YOU EVER DREAMED OF driving your vintage Volkswagens in the Fatherland, visiting all kinds of VW-related landmarks and museums? A few months ago, we took you to Germany, covering one of two premier vintage Volkswagen meetings, the Bad Camberg VW

What Hi-Fi?

3 min read

View online review whf.cm/Model15A SME has quite some pedigree. It was founded in 1946 and originally known as the Scale Model Equipment Company. As the name implies, the company designed and manufactured intricate models for the exhibition and model

BBC Music Magazine

1 min read

I colori dell’ombra: Cello Concertos RV405, RV416, RV424, RV788, etc; Double Cello Concerto in G minor, RV531; Concerto for Cello & Bassoon, RV409; arias, etc Ophélie Gaillard, Atsushi Sakai (cello); Lucile Richardot (mezzo-soprano) Delphine Galou (c

BBC Music Magazine

9 min read

Beethoven: Cello Sonatas, Op. 5; Variations on ‘Bei Männern, welche Liebe fühlen’; Pleyel: Nocturne ‘Souvenir de la Flûte enchantée’ Raphaël Pidoux (cello), Tanguy de Williencourt (piano) Harmonia Mundi HMM902410 64:44 mins Following Beethoven’s

Guitarist

4 min read

Well known for powering the backlines of guitar gods such as Guthrie Govan, Richie Kotzen and Rabea Massaad, Victory has also had considerable success in the pedalboardsized preamp and amp niche with its award-winning V4 series. The V4 amps are inten

Music Tech Focus

3 min read

Defining ‘a vintage sound’ is becoming more and more difficult. Modern pop music effectively kicked off with the rock of the 1950s, so we have seven decades to plunder for that vintage ideal. Really though, we’re probably talking up to the 1980s – a

Guitar Techniques

2 min read

Sometimes referred to as the Chopin of his time, Giuseppe Domenico Scarlatti was born in the Italian city of Naples in 1685, at the epoch of the hotbed of musical discovery and innovation that was the Baroque period. The sonata is a musical form that

What Hi-Fi?

1 min read

Joining the vinyl revival needn’t cost the earth. Our pick of the best turntables under £500 are guaranteed to have you playing record after record and delighting in the experience and warmth that vinyl replay can provide. If your budget allows, our

Guitar Techniques

3 min read

In this issue we are playing a work by one of the most influential composers of the 19th century, Guiseppe Verdi (1813-1901). Verdi was an Italian composer whose impressive output of 28 operas (as well as songs and sacred works) has remained extremel

Sound and Image

1 min read

Not only a phono amp but one including valves in its processing, the Modwright PH 9.0 from US designer Dan Wright is something of a dream for analogue lovers. Modwright has a reference phono amp at three times this price (the PH 9.0 has an RRP of $49

BBC Music Magazine

9 min read

Music by Franck, Thalberg, Liszt, Chopin, Schubert Mariam Batsashvili (piano) Warner Classics 9029629061 67:19 mins In this glorious record, Mariam Batsashvili has matched a series of Liszt’s operatic ‘paraphrases’ with transcriptions from other comp

Performance VW

5 min read

One of the great things about those early Treffen years was the huge number of events and activities and the sheer amount of organisation that went into it all. There were designated areas in Reifnitz for fans to show off their cars–you didn’t need t

BBC Music Magazine

1 min read

JS Bach: Brandenburg Concerto No. 6; Orchestral Suite No. 2; Telemann: Ouverture-Suite for Viola da gamba and Strings, TWV 55:D6 Michael Schmidt-Casdorff (flute), Rainer Zipperling (viola da gamba); Orchestra of the 18th Century Glossa GCD 921130 57:

Best Buys – Audio & AV

6 min read

Italian manufacturer Gold Note is famous for its ‘Single Knob Control’, which means that a great many of its products have only a single control on their front panel. With its new PA-10 power amplifier, Gold Note has gone the full Monty and removed e

Decanter

4 min read

Nhere are three churches in Mt-Emilion, and when the Angélus bell is rung, it’s said there is just one spot where all three calls to prayer can be heard. Nhe Angélus rings at dawn, midday and sunset. Mo the label design was a no-brainer. Fortunately,

Australian HiFi

1 min read

The fascination with vinyl continues, for obvious reasons. We have recently added another turntable to our extensive stable — this time from Clearaudio, a company that co-incidentally started in 1978, the same year as Len Wallis Audio. Initially they

Performance VW

6 min read

At the time of writing we should have been taking part in the annual International Golf GTI Treffen in Wörthersee, Austria but Covid 19 raised its very ugly head and put pay to this plan and many others. While hugely disappointing, I guess we’ll be l

BBC Music Magazine

1 min read

Rinaldo Alessandrini (harpsichord) Naïve OP 30581 73:02 mins Arranging Bach’s enormous corpus of keyboard works for a recital or recording is problematic. Bach himself helps out with the various suites and partitas arranged by key, and Rinaldo Ales

Computer Music

1 min read

The stand-out plugin here – for us at least – is the completely original Eternity, but when crusty vintage vibes are called for, Tape -201 and Memory Brigade are the two to turn to. Manufactured between 1974 and 1990, Roland’s RE-201 Space Echo is

Performance VW

1 min read

There aren’t many events on the show calendar that are quite as highly anticipated as Leeds’ VW Festival, especially when the 2021 instalment was postponed due to Covid. But what exactly makes the hype for this show so huge each year? VW Festival is

Beat English

2 min read

When producing our Deep House track, we start - as so often - with the groove. We choose a tempo of 122 BPM and build a beat foundation for the track from drum loops and sounds from the Hy2rogen Deep House Session sample pack [1]. Now we need a crunc

The Big Issue

3 min read

I recall parental horror at my spending £7.99 on The Story of the Clash Vol 1 in 1988, so I dread to think what they’d make of Mr Morale & The Big Steppers [by Kendrick Lamar]. Today a new LP, admittedly often pressed in beautiful, heavyweight vinyl,

Electronic Musician

4 min read

Music technology in the 1980s went through a transformative period. The arrival of MIDI and digital synthesis on the scene superseded ‘old-fashioned' analog equipment such as the Minimoog, and sampling and sequencing were on the point of revolutioniz