Naxos Music Library eResource

Our colleague, Hiru at Kensington Central Library has taken a good look at one of our eResources.

Access our eResource, Naxos Music Library online for free, with your Kensington and Chelsea library card.

You can check out online music streaming with Naxos Music Library and much more. Whether it’s orchestral, ballet, opera, vocal, world, rock, jazz and even your favourite film music, you can listen in peace at home, in a crowded tube, among friends or at work.

Naxos Music Library is the world´s largest online classical music library. Stream over two and half million tracks, with 600 titles being added each month.

A selection of musical genres subscribers can choose from

Search results for Jazz Waltz

Learn about your favourite music, listen to samples of works to learn about a composer or genre. Try the different playlists or create your own. If you are a music student, try out the resources page, where you find aural training exercises and work analysis of different composers.

You will be amazed on what you can find on the Naxos Music Library. Just by typing Swan Lake in the keyword search on the Categories tab, you would find 492 recording to listen to:

Search results for the well know ballet, Swan Lake

Introduce children to classical music and stories from ballet:

Delve into world music, music of different countries, including the English Country Garden:

Immerse yourself into opera.  There are 821 recordings of the Barber of Seville:

You can stream on your laptop, tablet or smart phone.  No need for an app, just click on this link to login with your library card: https://rbkc.naxosmusiclibrary.com/login/library/card

Resources page on Naxos Music Library

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Musical anniversaries 2018

This month’s display of books from the Biography Collection at Kensington Central Library showcases musicians with significant anniversaries in 2018. Those we have most books on in the collection are Leonard Bernstein (born 1918), Claude Debussy (died 1918), and Gioachino Rossini (died 1868), but we include many others.

Gioachino Rossini

Other hard copy resources for music in our libraries are:

• Scores in at Kensington Central Library’s store

• CDs at Kensington Central Library

• DVDs of operas, shows etc and books on music, across all all our libraries

• A special collection of music reference books at Kensington Central Library

All these can be looked for on our library catalogue

We also have resources online:

• Naxos Music Library – we have a workshop about using this music streaming service, more details below

• Biographical and newspaper online resources useful for musician biographies and performance and recording reviews

Naxos Music Library workshop

Naxos Music Library workshop
Friday 26 January
2 to 3pm
Kensington Central Library

Come along to our workshop to find out more about the Naxos Music Library, the music streaming service which is free for library members. You will be shown how to:

• Access the service
• Find the sort of music you are interested in
• Find multiple recordings of a work, or all the recordings available on the site by one recording artist or composer
• Put together a playlist of your favourite music
• Share your favourite tracks or albums

This event is free, no need to book – just turn up.

The Biography Store Team at Kensington Central Library

Revolution at the library

This month’s display from the Biography Collection display, in the foyer of Kensington Central Library, commemorates the centenary of the Russian Revolution with a selection from our enormously wide range of books on the key figures of that event.

Finding books for this display was one of those occasions which reminds us how rich and diverse our biography collection is – scholarly biographies analyse the minutiae of developments in political thought amongst revolutionaries, while collections of deeply personal letters highlight the intimate relationships of those caught up in this epic drama of history.

We can get a sense of the eccentricities and excesses of the Imperial elite by reading the memoirs of Prince Felix Yussoupoff, best known for murdering Rasputin, which we have in an opulent violet covered hardback produced by the Folio Society in the nineties. Frances Welch’s Rasputin: A Short Life is a compulsively readable and at times very funny profile of one of the most bizarre and controversial figures of the period, and proves that fact can indeed be a lot stranger than fiction.

How did Trotsky choose to remember Lenin? We can find out by reading his famous essay from 1926. What was the 28 year old Joseph Stalin’s role in the revolution? Simon Sebag Montefiore’s scrupulously detailed Young Stalin answers this and numerous other fascinating questions that afford glimpses of alternative histories. Robert H. McNeal’s Bride of the Revolution: Krupskaya and Lenin reveals the intertwining of personal relationships and political imperatives.

Also from the collection, When Miss Emmie was in Russia by Harvey Pitcher allows us to glimpse the revolution through the eyes of English governesses working for aristocratic families as their world collapsed – often very young women whose previously narrow, parochial lives had not prepared them for front row seats in an arena of earth-shaking change.

These titles are just a tiny sample of what our collection holds, and we thought the range of our Russian Revolution-related books was so impressive that we would make them the subject of an event. If this is a topic that interests you, come along to Biographies and the Russian Revolution, on Wednesday 15 November, 2 to 3pm at Kensington Central Library. After a brief introduction to our Biography Collection, we will be seeking to answer the question “Is there such a thing as an unbiased biography of any prominent figure in the Russian Revolution?”, by looking at biographies written throughout the last century, and asking how their view of their subjects was influenced by their authors’ time, place and political standpoint. We’ll also be showing you how our online resources can enrich your knowledge of this period, and what the British journalists and cartoonists of 1917 made of events.

Also, if you have not yet discovered the treasures of our Naxos free online music streaming, we’ll be using music from revolutionary Russia to invite you into it.

Book your free place via Eventbrite 

The Biography Store Team at Kensington Central Library

New Arrival – Naxos Music Library!

Naxos Music Library (NML) is now available for RBKC library members!

With an unparalleled depth of classical music content, extensive background information, and improved search facilities that remain simple and effective, NML is a pleasure to use regardless of your prior music and/or technical knowledge.