Radio Finland

21 Feb. 2013: The link in the next paragraph to the free music appears to redirect somewhere else now.

Will Benton provides a link to some free music. I love to find free music that’s not just more pop. There are a few problems here, however: the site is hosted by YLE Radio in Finland, and is (go figure) in Finnish, which is a beautiful language that is completely foreign (not “foreign but I can figure it out” like Spanish, but foreign like “I recognize the alphabet but it looks like all my favorite letters were strung together by toddlers from another planet”). Even the names of some familiar composers are spelled a little differently, and there are umlauts all over the place. Also, many of the downloads are single movements from larger works. And the recordings are prefaced by a man introducing them, in mellifluous tones, in a language that I would bet is Finnish. But many of the recordings are of historical interest, such as Landowska performing in 1923. And, as I think I did mention, it’s all free.