Originally released on Olympia and now fully remastered and released at mid price, this CD offers the listener the original two piano version of Holst’s “Planets”, Elgar’s own version of the two piano version of his “Serenade Op. 20” plus pieces by Frank Bury and Edgar Bainton – essential listing for lovers of English music.
With CDs approaching forty in number and a busy concert schedule stretching back more than a quarter of a century, the British piano duo Goldstone and Clemmow is firmly established as a leading force. Described by Gramophone as ‘a dazzling husband and wife team’, by International Record Review as ‘a British institution in the best sense of the word’, and by The Herald, Glasgow, as ‘the UK’s pre-eminent two-piano team’, internationally known artists Anthony Goldstone and Caroline Clemmow formed their duo in 1984 and married in 1989. Their extremely diverse activities in two-piano and piano-duet recitals and double concertos, taking in major festivals, have sent them all over the British Isles as well as to Europe, the Middle East and several times to the U.S.A., where they have received standing ovations and such press accolades as ‘revelations such as this are rare in the concert hall these days’ (Charleston Post and Courier). In their refreshingly
presented concerts they mix famous masterpieces and fascinating rarities, which they frequently unearth themselves, into absorbing and hugely entertaining programmes; their numerous B.B.C. broadcasts have often included first hearings of unjustly neglected works, and their equally enterprising and acclaimed commercial recordings include many world premières.
October 2012
****
“Elgar's Serenade sounds clunky rather than graceful on piano, but Goldstone and Clemmow are tremendous in The Planets, its dissonances startingly modern.”
Click on any of the works listed above for alternative recordings.
