I have to admit that I’m a real sucker for big collections of classical music CDs, especially if they are of composers, conductors, artists and musical genres. Or even of a nostalgic recorded music period in my life when RCA Living Stereo and Mercury Living Presence recordings in the years when stereo first came out, … Read more
David Bowie (born David Robert Jones on 8 January 1947), the retired English musician and singer, turned 66 years old yesterday and released his first single in a decade. Now I must confess that I’ve never been a fan of David Bowie, but this morning I was greeted with the news of his new single … Read more
This post is about the Der Ring des Nibelungen individually numbered Limited Edition recently issued by Decca as a tribute to 100 years since the birth of Sir Georg Solti, KBE on 21 October 1912. He died on 5 September 1997. You can about Solti’s remarkable life in this article in Wikipedia. The article states that Solti’s … Read more
The feature photo for this post is a crop from the portrait of the young Queen Elizabeth II painted in 1954-55 by the Italian painter Pietro Annigoni. The painting made him world famous. The painting is shown below without cropping. I’m not sure if the colours shown below are true to the paining, as there are number of variations … Read more
My last post was published on Tuesday (and was about), the 60th anniversary of the Queen’s Accession Day. I had been thinking a few days beforehand that perhaps I should do something to celebrate the day (as a reminder of an event when I was 14 years old). By sheer chance, or stroke of … Read more
When I was a teenager in Mount Gambier, working as a clerk in The Commercial Bank of Australia Limited, one of my work colleagues was a lovely young girl (Jenny Balnaves) who played in the Blue Lake Ladies Highland Pipe Band (well that’s how I remember what it was called). She introduced me to the … Read more