CLASSICAL MUSIC ON THE WEB (UK) www.musicweb.uk.net March was an important month for classical music lovers with the launch of International Record Review. We were given a small write-up but the proposed exchange of reviews, previously notified, got lost and will not now happen until the May issue. We have been subject to the attention of a hacker all this month. This person is located in Washington DC and uses a programme that logs on to the site several days a week and refreshes pages for up to 17 hours. This results in an excessive download of up to 200Mbytes a day. Naturally this has an effect on the speed of the site although log stats show that it has not put you off from visiting. ISPs are investigating but to no effect so far. The April reviews are now available (over 110 CDs) There are several collective reviews: Tony Duggan continues his Mahler survey with the Sixth Symphony Ian Lace presents details of his pre-concert talk on Schubert and Vienna with appropriate CD reviews and a new series carried over from Film Music on the Web "If only they had written fo films". This month he dicusses the music of Kurt Atterberg. Rob Barnett discovers Joly Brag Santos (9 CDs reviewed), Hilding Rosenberg and Hans Huber and some live recordings of Evgeny Mravinsky In the individual reviews there are several from the latest batch of EMIs Great Recordings of the Century including Klemperer's Mahler 2nd, Barbirolli's English String Music and Michelangei's rightly famous Rachmaninov/Ravel disc. Marc Bridle has looked again at the BBC releases of Das Lied von der Erde discussed last month by Tony Duggan. There is a marked and interesting divergence of views. Marc also waxes lyrical about the Testament set of Brahms symphonies conducted by Toscanini (we hope to have the re-release by Adrian Boult next month) EMI has finally re-released Barbirolli's Sibelius recordings and Rob Barnett tells us what he has found in that set. Andy Daly has discovered a number of unusual recordings for guitar including Koshkin playing his own work and the Andalusian elegy "Platero and I" There are lots of new artists and many less well known composers: Cassuto, Dodgson, Eotvos, Fernstrom, Guerrer, Guilmant, Karlsen, Marx, Pinto, Unander-Scharin, Zahnhausen ..... Drop by and do tell us what you think by using the on-site questionnaire. Regards Len Mullenger and Rob Barnett.