Robin Holloway

Label to love

Label to love

issue 26 March 2005

Every music-lover loves Hyperion Records; our debt to this company is difficult to quantify or to overestimate. From its pioneering days in the Eighties right up to the present (for the future, read on) it has quintessentialised a mix of imaginative repertory, inspired performances, flawless technical standards, generous accompaniment of notes and texts, and (last, least, but by now an expected extra) cover-art that is enticing, appropriate, beautiful.

The range has been enormous: eschewing the blockbusters of grand opera and large symphony orchestra, the company has concentrated mainly upon a bewildering multiplicity of richly rewarding specialities. Early music from Hildegard of Bingen onwards (Gothic Voices with around 20 discs!); mediaeval, renaissance and baroque and Bruckner handsomely covering religious choral music; reams of off-beat Vivaldi and Handel; neglected pathways of the ‘English Orpheus’ over four centuries, from John Jenkyns’s viol-fantasias, through Lawes, Locke, Blow, Greene, Boyce, Arne, Dibdin, Thomas Linley the Younger (boyhood friend of Mozart, a genius cut off at 22), Attwood, Wesleys (father and son), to Bantock, Boughton and Bax; romantic rarities from Russia; delectable French songs and salon music (Chabrier, Chausson, Chaminade); Percy Grainger and Louis-Moreau Gottschalk; classics of light music; and much more.

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