Verne / Homewood - Sea - AUDIO BOOKS [CD]

Les Misérables is set in Paris after the French Revolution. In the sewers and backstreets we encounter 'the wolf-like tread of crime', and assassination for a few sous is all in a day's work. We weep with the unlucky and heartbroken Fantine, and we exult with the heroic revolutionaries of the barricades; but above all we thrill to the steadfast courage and nobility of the soul of ex-convict Jean Valjean, always in danger from the relentless pursuit of the diabolical Inspector Javert. Reader Bill Homewood is well known for his innumerable television performances and leading credits in the West End and for the RSC. His other recordings for Naxos AudioBooks include She, Tom Jones, Allan Quatermain, The Red & the Black, The Three Musketeers, The Hunchback of Notre Dame and the Four Just Men series.

Small treasures, as promised by the song Pennies from Heaven in the eponymous 1936 film with Bing Crosby, are assembled on the latest from the Mandelring Quartet favorites, individual movements and encores which the Mandelring Quartet regularly play in concert, but also works which don't fit into - or at the end of - standard concert programmes and are therefore presented on this album. Whether classical or non-classical, original works or felicitous arrangements for string quartet all pieces are much loved by the ensemble. After spending weeks searching through their music archives, accumulated over more than thirty years, and sifting out the highlights from a huge body of works, the Mandelring Quartet now present a colorful mixture of miniatures from diverse genres across the centuries. They include rarely played compositions of the classical repertoire, such as a movement from the very first string quartet by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart; pieces which the Mandelring Quartet like to play as encores, such as the Allegretto, which Dmitri Shostakovich distilled from his ballet The Golden Age; tango classics such as Cafetín de Buenos Aires, stylishly arranged by Werner Thomas-Mifune; earworm candidates such as the Andante cantabile from Piotr Tchaikovsky's String Quartet in D major; trouvailles such as the adaptation of the St. Louis Blues, which the violinist Sebastian Schmidt discovered whilst on tour in the US when he visited a music shop in Los Angeles in order to buy a music stand because his suitcase had been lost. This compilation combines InchPennies from HeavenInch from highly diverse musical spheres into a musical treasure trove - and at the same time presents the Mandelring Quartet at their most personal.

Impoverished young aristocrat Eugène de Rastignac is determined to climb the social ladder and impress himself on Parisian high society. While staying at the Maison Vauquer, a boarding house in Paris's rue Neuve-Sainte-Geneviève, he encounters Jean-Joachim Goriot, a retired vermicelli maker who has spent his entire fortune supporting his two daughters. The boarders strike up a friendship and Goriot learns of Rastignac's feelings for his daughter Delphine. He begins to see Rastignac as the ideal son-in-law, and the perfect substitute for Delphine's domineering husband. But Rastignac has other opportunities too, as the notorious criminal Vautrin, 'The Death Dodger', offers to murder the brother of a wealthy woman, giving the ambitious young lawyer a clear path to her fortune... Profound and realistic, Father Goriot is a startling glimpse into the vanity and selfishness of 19th-century Paris. It is considered one of the finest works of Balzac's La Comédie Humaine.