BBC Symphony Orchestra / Edward Gardner VERKLÄRTE NACHT

 

VERKLÄRTE NACHT

 

BBC Symphony Orchestra ANNA CLYNE Mythologies

MYTHOLOGIES

 

BBC Symphony Orchestra / Sakari Oramo ALWYN Miss Julie

MISS JULIE

EDITH CANAT DE CHIZY Times

TIMES

BBC Symphony Orchestra / Martyn Brabbins VAUGHAN WILLIAMS Symphony No. 3 "Pastoral" - Symphony No. 4

SYMPHONY No. 3 - SYMPHONY No. 4

BBC Symphony Orchestra / Sakari Oramo ETHEL SMYTH Mass in D - Overture to "The Wreckers"

Ethel Smyth was one of England’s foremost Victorian composers, and a prominent suffragette. She was the first female composer to be honoured with a Damehood. She studied composition with Carl Reineke in Leipzig (alongside Dvorák, Grieg and Tchaikovsky) and then privately with Heinrich von Herzogenberg (who introduced her to Brahms and Clara Schumann). Her Mass in D is her only large-scale religious work, although it was certainly composed for the concert hall rather than the church. Scored for 4 soloists, choir, and orchestra, the Mass in D sets the usual six parts of the mass, but is performed with the Gloria at the end, not second, at the instruction of the composer. Her opera The Wreckers, set in mid-eighteenth-century Cornwall, is considered by some critics to be the ‘most important English opera composed during the period between Purcell and Britten’. The Overture sets the scene wonderfully, as well as introducing the main thematic material to follow. Sakari Oramo and his BBC forces are joined by an outstanding quartet of soloists for this Surround Sound recording.

Dong Hyek Lim / BBC Symphony Orchestra / Alexander Vedernikov RACHMANINOV Piano Concerto No. 2 - Symphonic Dances

Lim Dong-hyek, the South Korean pianist, released his Rachmaninov Piano Concerto No. 2 album on Warner Classics. Four years ago, he put on a collaboration concert with BBC Symphony and Alexander Vedernikov and issued a Chopin Preludes album, which was chosen as one of the Gramophone Magazine’s Editor’s Choice recordings, and this marks Lim first concert recording. The pianist also played Rachmaninov’s Symphonic Dances for four hands with his teacher and sponsor Martha Argerich for his album. 

Piano Concerto No. 2 is one of Rachmaninov’s most popular works. His skills as the best contemporary technician are well demonstrated, with long and rich melodies and the sentimentality unique to the Russian composer deeply resonating.

Lim still boasts the intelligent and clinical precision that he showed off as teenager. The ability to interpret both lyrical and realistic sides of the work and mix them together with subtlety is his unique forte. In this aspect, Lim is much like his teacher Argerich. And the new album shows such a feature. In the second theme of the first movement, he drops the speed of his piano. This offers a detailed glimpse into Lim Dong-hyek's rubato. The diminishing dynamics causes an uncanny tension. This intelligent interpretation makes the conversation with the strings even more vibrant, accentuating Rachmaninov’s sentimentality. The same holds true in the slow theme of the third movement.

Symphonic Dances is the number that earned Lim and his teacher a standing ovation in their performance last Tuesday at Seoul Arts Center for “Beppu Argerich Festival in Seoul.” After playing this in Hamburg, Germany last year, Argerich said her best lifetime performance of the Symphonic Dances was with “Limichenko,” a nickname Argerich gave to Lim Dong-hyek.”

Marking their concert in Seoul, the album was released first in South Korea on Tuesday. Global release is scheduled in mid-September. Last year, a constellation of young pianists such as Daniil Trifonov, Yevgeny Sudbin, and Denis Matsuev, presented their interpretation Rachmaninov’s concerto album. Lim’s new album will certainly make a different voice among many.

Guy Braunstein / BBC Symphony Orchestra / Kirill Karabits TCHAIKOVSKY TREASURES

Tchaikovsky has dedicated some of his finest music to the violin, but this new album expands the instrument’s repertoire even further. Inspired by greats such as Sarasate, Heifetz, Kreisler and Joachim, violinist Guy Braunstein reanimates a tradition of violin and orchestra rhapsodies with new arrangements of famous excerpts from Tchaikovsky’s Eugene Onegin and Swan Lake. Together with the extraordinary Violin Concerto, Valse Scherzo and Sérénade mélancolique, they constitute a collection of glittering Tchaikovsky Treasures.

On this first PENTATONE album, Braunstein plays with the renowned BBC Symphony Orchestra, led by maestro Kirill Karabits.

BBC Symphony Orchestra / BBC Symphony Chorus / Sir Andrew Davis ELGAR The Music Makers - The Spirit of England

Distinguished British music interpreter Sir Andrew Davis joins forces with the BBCSO once again, this time with acclaimed soloists Dame Sarah Connolly and Andrew Staples, in this thoughtful presentation of the last two substantial choral works of Sir Edward Elgar.

The maturity of Elgar as an orchestrator is obvious in both works on this disc, notably, in The Music Makers (1912), during passages in which he quotes from Sea Pictures and the Violin Concerto, and in representing the sound of aircraft in The Spirit of England (1917).

Elgar uses self-quotation to reflect: The Music Makers is a canvas of self-reflection, written quickly following a period of illness. The orchestral introduction is introspective, melancholic and noble, before the words of Arthur O’Shaughanessy’s poem and much self-quotation within the music offer an insight into the sense of nostalgia and awareness of the loneliness of the creative artist felt by the composer. The Spirit of England reflects on the sadness and desolation of war felt by a nation, with the inclusion of quotations from The Dream of Gerontius in some of the more negative stanzas that Elgar found harder to set. Specified in the score for tenor or soprano, all three movements are sung here by a tenor in a recording first.

BBC Symphony Orchestra / Sir Andrew Davis FINZI Cello Concerto - Eclogue - New Year Music - Grand Fantasia and Toccata

A broad and meticulous selection of orchestral works and concertos by Gerald Finzi is here matched by a first-class cast of soloists, supported by the BBC Symphony Orchestra under the direction of Sir Andrew Davis, expert in British repertoire and conducting this year’s Last Night of the Proms.

Paul Watkins displays exhilarating virtuosity in the Cello Concerto, a central work on this album, composed in the wake of the devastating news that Finzi was terminally ill, but yet filled with ‘vigorous, almost turbulent thematic material’, as he wrote in the programme note for the work’s premiere at the Cheltenham Music Festival in 1955.

Louis Lortie, for his part, tackles the high-spirited and majestic Grand Fantasia and Toccata, the Fantasia originally conceived as part of a concerto for piano and strings and first performed on two pianos. This contrasts with the more restrained Eclogue for Piano and Strings, timeless, and blessed with a mood of benediction.

This album also features the orchestral Nocturne (subtitled ‘New Year Music’), dark, misty, and at times ironic.

“… it [Cello Concerto] ranks as one of the finest British works for cello and orchestra. When he [Finzi] started writing it in 1951, he already knew he did not have long to live, and the wistful land of lost content that never seems too far away in any of his music pervades this work. Watkins’ performance captures that mood perfectly. Nothing is exaggerated or over-assertive … Louis Lortie is the soloist in the ruminatively beautiful Eclogue for piano and strings, and is spiritedly athletic, with full orchestra, in the neo-baroque Grand Fantasia and Toccata. Andrew Davis and the BBC Symphony Orchestra make a fine job of the one near rarity in this collection, the strikingly atmospheric Nocturne …” (Andrew Clements / The Guardian)

BBC Symphony Orchestra & Chorus / Sir Andrew Davis ARTHUR BLISS The Beatitudes

Commissioned for Coventry’s new cathedral in 1961, Bliss’s cantata The Beatitudes was destined to be overshadowed by Britten’s War Requiem, and the fact that the work’s first performance was relocated to the city’s Belgrade Theatre (instead of the cathedral) did not serve its reputation well. Bliss was, not surprisingly, disappointed and hoped that it would, one day, be heard in the environment for which it was written. This did not occur, however, until the Golden Jubilee of the cathedral in 2012.

A hybrid work, like its forbear Morning Heroes, it consists of the nine Beatitudes from the Gospel of Matthew, interspersed with an anthology of 17th-century poetry by Taylor, Vaughan and Herbert (some of which will be familiar from Vaughan Williams’s Five Mystical Songs), an adapted section from Isaiah and a poem by Dylan Thomas. Not only do these words provide a religious subtext but they also furnish a coherence to the Beatitudes themselves which otherwise, as the composer wisely adduced, might well have caused unnecessary monotony. Indeed, conversely, it is in the choruses of selected texts that the ‘meat’ of the work is to be found (for which the Beatitudes function, for the most part, as tranquil ‘intermezzos’). To hear Herbert’s ‘Easter’ and ‘I got me flowers’ (a beautiful elegy for soprano and chorus) in a quite different and poignant context is deeply moving. Bliss’s unusual style of choral writing, its preponderant homophony dependent so much on harmonic variety and textural variation, contrasts effectively as an instrument enveloped by the composer’s finely graded orchestration. Bliss’s affinity for strong marches emerges in ‘The lofty looks of man shall be humbled’ (Isaiah) and his ability to create moments of rapt beauty is striking in Herbert’s ‘The Call’, a part-song for chorus and orchestra. The orchestral Prelude and central Interlude remind us of the Bliss of Checkmate and Miracle in the Gorbals, an idiom where he excelled, and the Scherzo of this symphonic canvas is manifested in the angry setting of Thomas’s ‘And death shall have no dominion’. The final Beatitudes (5 8) form an exquisite foil to the violent orchestral Interlude but it is in the last part of the work, ‘The Voices of the Mob’ and the closing ‘Epilogue’ using Jeremy Taylor’s ‘O blessed Jesu’, more Passion-like in genre, that the composer is most powerfully eloquent.

Andrew Davis clearly has a peculiar empathy for this music and the clean edges of Bliss’s orchestral palette, complemented by some lovely playing from the BBC SO and the two soloists, Emily Birsan and Ben Johnson. This is also apparent in a most welcome recording of the virtuoso Introduction and Allegro, written for Stokowski (1926; rev 1937), a compelling mélange of serenity and contrapuntal tour de force which builds on the brilliance of the Colour Symphony of 1922. (Jeremy Dibble / Gramophone)

Tenebrae / BBC Symphony Orchestra SYMPHONIC PSALMS & PRAYERS

While this intriguing Judaeo-Christian programme may not fit too well on the shelves of old-style, repertoire-led collectors, it lives up to Tenebrae’s stated core values of “passion and precision”.

Symphony of Psalms, which opens the anthology, seems less concerned with the first of those attributes, at least initially. The expert choir (featuring the female voices which Stravinsky viewed as second best) is relatively modest in size, the instrumental cohort placed further back than you might be used to. Nor is there any attempt to disguise the relatively confined acoustic. That said, everything is wonderfully clean and sharp-etched so that you never feel short-changed. And the timeless, implacable quality of the invention is not the only aspect highlighted as the music proceeds. The second movement brings not only flawless intonation from the woodwinds of the BBC Symphony Orchestra but eruptive, even muscular passion from the singers. The Psalm 150 setting works wonderfully too, finally combining glinting clarity with the trance-like rapture which can get lost in squeaky-clean performances.

Next up is the Schoenberg, notoriously difficult to bring off, especially when performed as here without the instrumental doublings for strings and wind the composer added in 1911 on the advice of Franz Schreker. The writing has probably never sounded less strained, nor more perfectly in tune. By 1923 Schoenberg was describing this final work in his original tonal style as “an illusion for mixed choir, an illusion, as I know today, having believed … when I composed it, that this pure harmony among human beings was conceivable.”

Tricky in a different way, Leonard Bernstein’s Chichester Psalms is marginally less successful if only because the balance sometimes seems to mute the strings unduly (this is not after all the reduced, economy version Tenebrae use in concert). Sentimentality is banished but so is some of the music’s escapist charm. Well to the fore is the countertenor of David Allsopp, a former Tenebrae singer. Some might have preferred a less forthright boy treble whatever the threat of sugariness. The final movement’s big tune is taken rather swiftly so as to make a bigger contrast with the psalmist’s subdued farewell.

Ascetic rigour is even less of the essence in Zemlinsky’s Psalm 23, a mildly chromatic pastoral dating from 1910 in which Michael Oliver detected “an ambience half-way between Hollywood and the Three Choirs Festival.” Taking its cue from one of the cutesier passages in the second movement of Mahler’s Eighth Symphony the invention is never hugely memorable but certainly makes for grateful listening, the scoring brightening at the very end in a tinkling recreation of the shepherd’s biblical soundworld of pipe, harp and timbrel.

Javier Perianes / BBC Symphony Orchestra / Sakari Oramo EDVARD GRIEG Piano Concerto - Lyric Pieces

Javier Perianes’s account of Grieg’s Piano Concerto was recorded live at London’s Barbican last October, at the end of a BBCSO tour. And it is an interpretation into which soloist and orchestra seem, gratifyingly, to have grown together. In the first movement, Sakari Oramo leads the orchestra off at a tempo that seems rather steady, but which leaves space for some careful phrasing: once the main theme gets to Perianes, it sounds almost like a statement and then a comment, rather than a single entity. Somehow, Oramo and Perianes make this sound interesting rather than fussy, and the romantic expansiveness that marks their interpretation overall is tempered by playing from both pianist and orchestra that is as crisp and highly charged as one could want. Paired with this is a selection of 12 of the solo Lyric Pieces, recorded in the studio, all individually characterised but reaffirming Perianes’s warm, spacious approach to Grieg’s music. (Erica Jeal / The Guardian)

Jean-Guihen Queyras / BBC Symphony Orchestra / Jirí Belohlávek EDWARD ELGAR Cello Concerto TCHAIKOVSKY Rococo Variations

French cellist Jean-Guihen Queyras explores the late Romantic repertoire on this 2013 Harmonia Mundi release and finds a kind of mirroring of intentions and expressions between Pyotr Il'yich Tchaikovsky's Rococo Variations on a Rococo Theme, Op. 33, and Edward Elgar's Cello Concerto, Op. 85. While this is a rather subjective understanding of the music that listeners can either take or leave, there's no denying that Queyras, conductor Jirí Belohlávek, and the BBC Symphony Orchestra offer performances of both works that are evocative and beautiful, with or without any underlying connections. Indeed, the polished soloist and the committed orchestra play effectively in both pieces, and Queyras' intense but controlled playing is well balanced by the orchestral accompaniment, which never overwhelms. For a break between the two heavyweight pieces, Queyras plays Antonín Dvorák's Rondo, Op. 94, and the tone poem, Silent Woods, Op. 68/5, which provide a lighter mood. Harmonia Mundi's reproduction is immaculate, with central placement for the soloist and realistic depth for the orchestral sections. (Blair Sanderson)

Louis Schwizgebel / BBC Symphony Orchestra / Fabien Gabel / Martyn Brabbins SAINT-SAËNS Piano Concertos 2 & 5

Of Camille Saint-Saëns’s five piano concertos, the G minor Second is the one most favoured. Its three movements cover majesty, wit and exuberance: a splendid piece altogether. Louis Schwizgebel (a success at the Leeds Piano Competition in 2012) brings weight, poise, deftness and sparkle to this endearing work, and is well accompanied by Fabien Gabel, the recording reporting a partnership of equals. Scarcely less fine as music is the ‘Egyptian’ Concerto (No 5). Saint-Saëns, an inveterate traveller, knew the locale first-hand. It’s a charming work, full of lovely tunes, affecting harmonies and oodles of atmosphere. Like Gabel, Martyn Brabbins is sympathetic to the music and to Schwizgebel’s intentions. If Rubinstein (in No 2), and Ciccolini and Hough in all five, should not be forsaken, then Schwizgebel is to be reckoned with, for both these performances are excellent and do these marvellous concertos proud – the finale of No 5 has the wind in its sails. Bon voyage! (Colin Anderson)

Tamsin Waley-Cohen / BBC Symphony Orchestra / Andrew Litton ROY HARRIS - JOHN ADAMS Violin Concertos

Tamsin Waley-Cohen has recorded a new disc of Roy Harris and John Adams Violin Concertos with the BBC Symphony Orchestra conducted by Andrew Litton. The recording will be released on Signum Records on CD and download on 30 September. This continues her series of concerto recordings on Signum, with these two contrasting works by American composers. 

Already considered by many to be a modern classic, John Adams 1993 Violin Concerto was described by the composer as having a ‘hypermelody’, in which the soloist plays longs phrases without stop for the duration of the 35 minute piece. Although composed in 1949, the first performance of Roy Harris’s Violin Concerto didn’t occur until 1984. Since then it has been championed for its “luminous orchestration and exalted tone”.

“Roy Harris may be the most all-American composer you have never heard of...Waley-Cohen handles [the Adams's] gruelling solo part with athleticism and conviction, and both pieces benefit from the punchy playing of the BBC Symphony Orchestra and insightful conducting of Andrew Litton.” (The Guardian)

Matthias Goerne / BBC Symphony Orchestra / Josep Pons BERIO Sinfonia MAHLER / BERIO 10 Frühe Lieder

"Since it was first performed in 1969, Luciano Berio's Sinfonia has become a classic, certainly the most widely known of all his works and arguably the most successful concert piece by a composer of his generation." The Guardian

This release is dedicated to the pioneer of Italian modernism Luciano Berio. His 5-movement 'Sinfonia', is undoubtedly his most well-known work, written for the New York Philharmonic and dedicated to Leonard Bernstein. It has become one of the key works and principle musical manifestations of the 1960s bringing together collage technique and modernism.
A few years later, Berio went on to orchestrate a number of songs on texts from 'Des Knaben Wunderhorn', which Mahler had scored for piano and voice, as if they had been written at the time of the later 'Kindertotenlieder'. A symphonic backcloth tailor-made for the great baritone voice of Matthias Goerne [whose 'Knaben Wunderhorn' songs are already available on DVD, with Andris Nelsons, from Lucerne]. His warm, dark voice allows him to capture the sombre and tragic atmosphere of this music like no one else. (Presto Classical)

PIERRE BOULEZ (1925 -2016) Complete Works

More than anyone else’s, Pierre Boulez’s oeuvre has not known completion and never will. Doubtless like so many creators – and not the least important –, he undertakes projects that, without any particular explanation, he will not follow up on. In the ‘unfinished’ category, for instance, appears a score he had planned to write for Les Percussions de Strasbourg, of which we are mentioning the idea only for the record. But in an approach of which there are few equivalents in the history of music, Pierre Boulez considers each of his works like the exploitation of a material, from which arise, in the course of an unpredictable but carefully controlled proliferation of new compositions or, more precisely, new versions of a composition that, in the final analysis, and for a given, immeasurable time, will have been only the kernel of the final piece. This is less a matter of alterations, expressing doubts or regrets, reactions that are hardly Boulezian, than the pursuit of work that, even if resulting in public performances (and such has often been the case), preserves its potentialities, so many stages before – the material deemed exhausted – the recognition of paternity of a definitive piece at last.

The present set is therefore itself testimony to a particular compositional process, the inventory of a body in the process of edification, in which certain, perfectly closed opuses are inscribed, and at the highest level, in the repertoire of contemporary musical creation whereas others, already noticed by commentators, are relegated to a sort of antechamber, the exploration of which requires the greatest patience.

This set also gives the idea of a shattered chronology, unlike the classic catalogue of a musician organizing the various pieces in his development one after another. Examples abound: thus Livre pour quatuor, for which Pierre Boulez imagined the succession of six movements back in 1948. A first, partial performance took place in 1955, and then, in this year 2012, he composed one of the missing movements. Detachable pages, in a way, for which Boulez took Mallarmé as a model. Consequently, the usage of this set, work by work in the hopes of detecting an itinerary, is totally utopian, except that the Boulezian corpus, albeit manifold, is homogeneous in its references, coherent through its different models, also progressive, from the rigours of an initial post-Webernian period up to the flexibility – fantasy? – of writing that is no less precise but somehow liberated. 

Missing links? Boulez wants to turn over only finished works or parts of works to the public. The programme of this set reflects the Boulezian corpus as ‘work in progress’. 

Finally, the recordings, chosen in agreement with the, composer attest to a real-time interpretation, if we might say so. Foundations of a tradition on which future generations will be able to nurture themselves without being condemned, for all that, to strict observance, which would contravene all that the Boulezian philosophy has taught us. The composer provides the example; his practice of conducting, his frequenting classical composers, his thinking about his own approach, the (relative) flexibility of his own scores, and the abilities of a new generation of performers commit him to new perspectives; beyond the word-by- word of the notes: more flexibility, differentiation in sound and clarity. The confrontation of the two recordings of Le Marteau sans maître proposed in this set, recordings made some forty years apart, supply the proof. In this area, nothing is definitive. But now, in addition to the pleasure of listening, knowledge of such period documents is particularly enlightening. It stimulates the listener’s thinking as much as the commentator’s and indicates fruitful paths to performers that simple faithfulness to a tradition would be unable to satisfy. 

‘Every work is ambiguous: attached to the past, oriented towards the future. What is important to me,’ says Boulez, ‘is its current contribution.’ A limited, but nonetheless demanding, ambition. (Claude Samuel)
CD 1 - 3 / CD 4 - 6 / CD 7 - 9 / CD 10 - 13

Maxim Rysanov plays MARTINU

It makes perfect sense that Bohuslav Martinu was a fan of the viola; the instrument’s generous, conversational voice is exactly right for his music, and this recording from Ukrainian violist Maxim Rysanov is easy proof of why. Martinu grew up in a church tower in small-town Moravia, watching the sporadic stream of townspeople down below. Those organic real-life rhythms are everywhere in his music — listen to the second movement of the Rhapsody-Concerto (1952) to hear fleeting modal shifts, folk melodies laced with trepidation and motoric outbursts jostling against lush pastoralism. Rysanov clinches the shifting characters and always makes his lines sing; conductor Jiri Belohlavek draws warmth and brawn from the BBC Symphony Orchestra. In the sunny Three Madrigals (1947) and restive Duo No. 2 (1950) Rysanov soars and spars with violinist Alexander Sitkovetsky; the Sonata for Viola and Piano (1955) sounds like it’s been recorded from far away, but I love the stately breadth that Katya Apekisheva brings to the piano lines. (The Guardian)

BBC Symphony Orchestra / Jayce Ogren RUFUS WAINWRIGHT Prima Donna

 

Dear friends,

We are about to embark on an exciting project which will fulfill a powerful desire of mine – to properly record my first opera, “Prima Donna” with a fabulous orchestra and release a double CD and vinyl of that recording. I would love for you to be a part of this journey as we move through the process and create a magnificent product.
“Prima Donna,” was written and performed during the most dramatic period of my life to date, and considering my life, that’s pretty dramatic! New arrivals, death, terrible defeat and glorious triumph line the tale of this work both on stage and off, a tale that is still unfolding and that I would both like you to know and even more importantly, be a part of.
From the early rocky days with the Metropolitan Opera, the valiant premiere at the Manchester International Festival, sold out shows in London and Toronto and finally the firestorm involvement with the New York City Opera at BAM, the tale of “Prima Donna’s” coming to life is already well deemed for a grand opera legend and seems to be growing still.
This is where you come in, the final great chorus!
It is vitally important to me that “Prima Donna” be properly recorded and released so that I can tour a concert version of it in the coming year, and I have decided to do this with the help of both PledgeMusic and the incredible BBC Symphony Orchestra which in turn requires your generous support. Quality studio opera recordings are extremely expensive and too time consuming to pull off these days, and it seems that a once vibrant recording industry is no longer what it was and new methods are needed to get the music out. Though sad, the upside is that everyone in the field agrees that this is a great time to bring the audience into the wonders of the creative process and the myriad of stages the recording of an opera requires. Exciting rehearsals, deep conversations, strange and colorful characters, not to mention many a silly moment, all of this I’m truly excited to experience with you until that glorious moment when the conductor, myself the composer, the orchestra, the singers and the recording crew turn on the red light and put down for posterity my first magnum opus, “Prima Donna.”
For those who don’t know, the opera is a two act affair set on the day in the life of a great diva who is deciding whether or not to continue her career. With Paris as a backdrop, the opera both borrows from operatic myth and legend as well as my own very contemporary personal experiences as a singer. The themes of loss, fear, hope and ultimately acceptance are deeply explored in this work by both the soloists and the orchestra, and I’m very proud that for a first venture into the operatic world I love so much, though not a masterpiece perhaps (that will come much later in my life), “Prima Donna” is a solid and viable offering that both people love performing in and audiences enjoy watching and listening to. It’s vitally important we get a quality recording for generations to come.
Thanks for taking the time to consider this unique offer and rest assured that if you decide to come along for the ride, it’s gonna be a blast, opera style….which is big.
-Rufus