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South Philly Review I’m thrilled about the latest Billie Holiday revival. The film UNITED STATES VS. BILLIE HOLIDAY, starring Andra Day, has fueled much of the interest. (You can stream it on Hulu). I haven’t seen it, but I understand that Holiday — known by music lovers as “Lady Day” — is portrayed as a civil rights hero, in part because of a song she recorded called STRANGE FRUIT. For years, the song was banned from radio airplay. It graphically depicts the lynching of blacks in the South (… ”Black bodies swinging in the southern breeze. Strange fruit hanging from the pop...

(4 out of 5 stars) "Mozart's piano sonatas are sometimes devalued by critics as "lesser compositions" in Mozart's vast output. Of course when there are 626 works in total, some will be truly monumental, some merely masterful and others somewhat average and less consequential compared to the creme. To fully appreciate the piano sonatas of Mozart, one needs a little perspective. In Mozart's piano sonatas we see a bit more of the utilitarian need to produce music suitable for the "home market" - sometimes even used merely for musical lessons for a patron's child. What we often have here is ...

Robert Layton obituary Brian Jarman My friend Robert Layton, who has died aged 90, was a musicologist and Radio 3 producer for more than 30 years who specialised in Scandinavian music and wrote biographies of Sibelius and the Swedish composer Franz Berwald. Bob was born in Chadwell Heath, east London, the younger child of Edward Layton, a stockbroker, and his wife, Rhoda (nee Aaron), a homemaker. He learned the piano from the age of nine, and excelled at it by the time he was 11. He gave a piano recital of Ravel’s Jeux d’Eau on the BBC Third Programme in 1948, when he was...

(5 out of 5 stars) "I haven't listened to this recording as closely as some of the other reviewers that have pointed out imperfections in the performance. My perspective is that the performance just plain blows me away, where the Gardiner performance just doesn't seem to muster enough power. (And this is from someone who believes that some of Gardiner's Baroque performances border on the miraculous.)" By rights this should be a triumph, but it isn't quite Santa Fe Listener | 02/25/2007 (3 out of 5 stars) "Since he took over the BSO a few years ago, I have come to admire James Levine enor...