Colin Anderson

Profile

Colin Anderson has been a very keen concertgoer and record collector for more than thirty years. He started young! Indeed he was eleven when Saint-Saëns’s Carnival of the Animals made a tremendous impression – thanks to a music master at Erith Grammar School playing records (LPs) to his class. He was Mr Palmer, who Colin discovered, years later, to be the father of singer Felicity Palmer. The Saint-Saëns, quickly followed by Colin Davis conducting Mozart, opened the door for Colin to the hitherto unsuspected world of classical music and was soon listening to a serendipitous collection of LPs – The Planets (Bernard Herrmann, Decca Phase 4), Mahler 1 (Giulini), Debussy’s Images (Munch), Alexander Nevsky (Reiner), excerpts from Swan Lake (Rozhdestvensky) – before upgrading to the complete performance on 3 LPs – and, thanks to Decca’s reissue programme on The World of the Great Classics, was developing a still-active appreciation of Ernest Ansermet.

An avid reader of Records and Recordings, and then Gramophone, and listening to BBC Radio 3, Colin harboured ambitions to write on music. It took a while, but Colin now contributes to Gramophone, International Record Review, International Piano, Fanfare (and notched up numerous interviews and opera reviews for the now-defunct What’s On in London) and has written booklet notes for Decca, Danacord, BBC Legends and Naxos. He also edits The Classical Source website (www.classicalsource.com).

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A few easy pieces from Colin...

• An Avoidance of Cliché  January 2008 Editorial for Classical Source
• Royal Festival Hall Restored June 2007  Classical Source Editorial
• Too Much Mahler ... And Not Enough Overtures April/May 2007  Classical Source Editorial

Look for features and reviews by Colin Anderson in the Annual Indexes