Emma Tring, BBC National Orchestra of Wales & Martyn Brabbins – John Pickard: Symphonies 2 & 6; Verlaine Songs (2024)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 01:12:51 minutes | 1,25 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © BIS
John Pickard is best known for his powerful orchestral and instrumental works, and his music has been widely praised for its large-scale sense of architecture and bold handling of an extended tonal idiom. This recording brings together three works composed over a period of almost forty years, providing a glimpse of the composer’s creative range. The Second Symphony, completed when Pickard was 23, is an extremely impressive and concentrated work. Its starting point was John Hersey’s book Hiroshima, which describes how vegetation quickly reasserted its presence amid the city’s ashes. The Verlaine Songs feature six poems by the French poet Paul Verlaine. Chosen for their broad range of expression, the poems were grouped in an order that provides dramatic contrast and an overall progression of mood. The cycle was composed for the soprano Emma Tring, with her particular vocal characteristics very much in Pickard’s mind. The Sixth Symphony, which completes this recording, was composed at the height of the Covid-19 pandemic, and is dedicated to Robert von Bahr, founder of BIS Records. After a first movement dominated by a feeling of unease, the second offers relief from the darkness. This recording was the work’s first performance.
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BBC National Orchestra of Wales, Martyn Brabbins – Pickard: Symphony No. 5 (2017)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 01:02:49 minutes | 1,04 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Digital Booklet, Front Cover | © BIS
John Pickard is a respected English composer best known for his orchestral works. This release from the BBC National Orchestra of Wales and conductor Martyn Brabbins features the engaging Symphony No. 5 as well as the evocative Sixteen Sunrises and Pickard’s arrangement of the Toccata from Monteverdi’s L’Orfeo for modern orchestra.
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BBC National Orchestra of Wales, Richard Blackford – Richard Blackford: La Sagrada Familia Symphony & Babel, A Cantata (2024)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 01:04:08 minutes | 1,09 GB | Genre: Choral Music (Choirs)
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Lyrita
Antoni Gaudí’s monumental temple La Sagrada Familia is a universe within a building. Its mass of stone and metal is bathed in coloured light diffused from dazzling stained glass windows. The colossal structure is supported by great pillars inspired by the shapes of tree trunks that re-inforce the impression of a spiritual forest. Around the main access points to the basilica are three great facades; Nativity, Passion and Glory. Each is a visual world unto itself, stylistically apart yet united by Gaudí’s grandiose vision. These three facades are the inspiration of my three-movement La Sagrada Familia Symphony. The visual journey, from the representational to the abstract, is something I also tried to mirror in the music. When I visited La Sagrada Familia in October 2019 there was still scaffolding to support the work on the remaining towers. Whereas my symphony is inspired by that monumental building, I hope that my musical structure can stand alone as an homage to Gaudí in its own right. The two parts of the cantata begin similarly, presenting first the children of Seth – then in the second part, the children of Noah. Realizing that the aftermath of the destruction of the Tower of Babel could be anti-climactic, I left part of the Noah story unfinished at the end of Part I, and concluded it as an Epilogue. I wanted God’s promise to be the note on which the work should end, a message of hope that the divinity would protect His creation throughout the seasons: “While earth remains, seedtime and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, and day and night shall never cease.” These beautiful words are taken up by the choir and soloists contrapuntally and lead directly to the hymn: Praise My Soul The King Of Heaven, whose melody was woven into the closing section of Part One. Following Britten’s inspiration in Noye’s Fludde and St Nicholas, I invite the audience to join in the hymn, celebrating creation and the world that has been entrusted to us. Babel uses the chorus extensively to narrate both stories, as well as to evoke the terror of the flood and the exuberance of the construction of the tower. In addition to set pieces, such as the Nimrod baritone aria, and the soprano aria, “Do not fear the largeness of the showers,” the three soloists often sing together in close harmony as the other-worldly voice of God. The instrumental forces are relatively modest, with the piano duet supported by the sustaining power of the organ, backed by two percussionists. This sound world is redolent of those Britten masterpieces for amateur choirs, ensembles and audiences, which have inspired many composers since, and to which I too am gratefully indebted.
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BBC National Orchestra of Wales & Jonathan Berman – Franz Schmidt: The Symphonies (2023)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 03:29:55 minutes | 3,63 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Accentus Music
“In conversations about Franz Schmidt the recurring theme emerging for many is that listening to a performance of his music at a young age became the turning point in their lives –the realization of how powerful music can be,” says Jonathan Berman, whose longtime love of Franz Schmidt’s work has its origins in a performance preparation for his Fourth Symphony. Berman’s passion for Schmidt’s work and the composer’s upcoming 150th birthday in 2024 were key reasons for the conductor to approach the BBC National Orchestra of Wales to record all four symphonies together – a major project that also marks Jonathan Berman’s CD debut. The recordings were realized between 2020 and 2022 at BBC Hoddinott Hall, the home of the BBC NOW in Cardiff. In November 2023, Accentus Music releases all four symphonies in a high-quality box set that will also be made available across all digital platforms. BBC Music Magazine wrote about the digital pre-release of the first symphony in March 2021: “Jonathan Berman and the BBC National Orchestra of Wales deliver a terrific performance which provides a fine alternative to the excellent version from Paavo Järvi. […] [W]hat really makes this new recording so enticing is the sheer energy and enthusiasm with which conductor and orchestra communicate the vigour and optimism of the opening movement.
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Thomas Søndergård and BBC National Orchestra of Wales – Sibelius: Symphonies 1 & 6 (2017)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 01:06:47 minutes | 1,11 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Linn Records
Their recording debut, Symphonies 2 & 7, revealed Søndergård to have a profound understanding of the great Finnish composer. Sibelius has been a major feature of Søndergård’s relationship with the BBC NOW since their debut eight years ago; their widely acclaimed Proms performance of the symphonies was a highlight.
Symphony No. 1 combines the best of Russian romantic orchestration and melodic magic with a distinctive Nordic character and wonderful contrasts of texture and colour.
In the Sixth, Søndergård’s detailed reading highlights the many felicitous touches in Sibelius’ writing and conjures heavenly tones from the strings in the closing bars.
This recording will cement their partnership as one of the great new Sibelius teams.
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Chorus of the BBC National Orchestra of Wales, BBC National Orchestra Of Wales, Owain Arwel Hughes, Susan Bullock, Paul Carey Jones, Rhodri Prys-jones – Arwel Hughes: Oratorio Dewi Sant (2023)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 01:13:46 minutes | 1,24 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © RUBICON
Arwel Hughes (1909-1988) was the tenth son of a Welsh coal miner, and his progress through life was a remarkable one. Along the way, he studied composition at the Royal College of Music, where his tutors were Gordon Jacob, Gustav Holst and, importantly, Vaughan Williams.
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Simon Callaghan, BBC National Orchestra of Wales, Stephen Bell & George Vass – British Piano Concertos, Vol. 2 (2023)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 01:12:31 minutes | 1,20 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Lyrita
Lyrita releases British Piano Concertos Volume 2 with Simon Callaghan and the BBC National Orchestra of Wales (SRCD.416) on 1 September 2023, with three world première recordings of works by John Addison, Gordon Jacob and Edmund Rubbra. The album is conducted by Stephen Bell and George Vass.
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Ruby Hughes, BBC National Orchestra of Wales & Jac van Steen – Clytemnestra: Orchestral Songs (2020)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 54:46 minutes | 917 MB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © BIS
In 2015, when Ruby Hughes discovered Clytemnestra by the Welsh composer Rhian Samuel, the work had not been performed since its première some 20 years earlier. Hughes describes the 24-minute score as ‘sun-scorched and luscious’ as well as ‘intensely visceral’, but in it she also heard echoes of Gustav Mahler and Alban Berg, two of Samuel’s influences. For her first album as soloist with orchestra, she has therefore devised a programme which brings together the three composers but which also spans a wide range of emotions and moods. For his Rückert-Lieder, Mahler selected five highly intimate and subtle poems by the great Romantic poet Friedrich Rückert, using his large orchestral forces sparingly in a chamber music style. Ten years later, in 1911, Berg found his texts closer at hand as he set contemporary poems by Peter Altenberg, one of the main proponents of Viennese impressionism. Berg’s advanced harmonic language caused a scandal at the first performance in 1913, and the songs were only performed in their entirety in 1952, sixteen years after Berg’s death. For Clytemnestra, finally, Rhian Samuel assembled her own text, based on Aeschylus’ tragedy Agamemnon and focusing Clytemnestra’s deep anguish at the death of her daughter and her need for revenge. Bringing this wide spectrum of human emotions to life, Ruby Hughes is supported by the BBC National Orchestra of Wales and conductor Jac van Steen.
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BBC National Orchestra of Wales, Martyn Brabbins – Symphony No. 5 (2017)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 01:02:49 minutes | 1,04 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Digital Booklet, Front Cover | © BIS
John Pickard is a respected English composer best known for his orchestral works. This release from the BBC National Orchestra of Wales and conductor Martyn Brabbins features the engaging Symphony No. 5 as well as the evocative Sixteen Sunrises and Pickard’s arrangement of the Toccata from Monteverdi’s L’Orfeo for modern orchestra.
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Clarissa Bevilacqua, BBC National Orchestra of Wales – Clarissa Bevilacqua plays Augusta Read Thomas: Dream Catcher (2023)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 01:02:51 minutes | 1,14 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Nimbus Records
“Nimbus is delighted to release a stunning debut album of violinist Clarissa Bevilacqua performing a complete collection of mainstay composer Augusta Read Thomas’s works for solo violin, as well as the world premier recording of her Violin Concerto No. 3 ‘Juggler in Paradise’ in conjunction with the BBC National Orchestra of Wales, conducted by Vimayi Kaziboni. Each and every piece has a different character and tells its own story, and these seemingly unrelated, abstract pieces of a puzzle come together during the course of the album to create a dream-like journey. Violinist Clarissa Bevilacqua is known to enchant audiences with her dazzling technical skills and deeply inspiring musicality. Music director and conductor Terry Lowry says she possesses that ‘rare star quality that is difficult to describe, but impossible to miss.’ Clarissa debuted at the Pritzker Pavilion in Chicago in front of ten thousand people when she was nine years old. She has performed solo recitals and concerto engagements at venues throughout North America and Europe. Winner of several international competitions, she was awarded First Prize, Audience Award and Special Barenreiter Award at the International Mozart Competition Salzburg. She was also awarded the Grand Prize at the Cape Symphony International Violin Competition. She is an Affiliate Artist of the Guarneri Hall Program in Chicago. Passionate about historic violins, at age fourteen Clarissa was selected as the youngest violinist to perform regularly with the Stradivari collection of the Violin Museum in Cremona. She now performs on a violin by Zosimo Bergonzi, Cremona c.1748, courtesy of Guarneri Hall NFP and Darnton & Hersh Fine Violins, Chicago.”
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Emmanuelle Bertrand, Pascal Amoyel and BBC National Orchestra of Wales – Shostakovich: Cello Concerto No. 1 (2013)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 01:03:05 minutes | 1,08 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © harmonia mundi
10 stars out of 10 – “This is one hell of a performance of Shostakovich’s First Cello Concerto. Emmanuelle Bertrand and conductor Pascal Amoyel team up to produce one of the most intense and neurotic versions yet of this intense and neurotic piece”. – Classics Today
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Dan Jones, BBC National Orchestra of Wales, Esther Yoo – On Chesil Beach (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack) (2018)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/48 kHz | Time – 01:14:45 minutes | 686 MB | Genre: Soundtrack
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Decca Music Group Ltd.
The film adaptation of On Chesil Beach pays tribute to the 2007 novella (and Booker Prize shortlist entry) by British writer Ian McEwan. Creating sweeping and poignant soundscapes to accompany the film is Dan Jones – a multi award-winning composer and sound designer whose recent credits include Louis Theroux’s documentary feature, My Scientology Movie, the primetime BBC drama series SS-GB and The Replacement, the second series of BBC’s hugely successful The Hollow Crown, Menno Meyjes’ feature, De Reünie, Carnival’s The Lost Honour of Christopher Jefferies and Ecosse Films’ The Great Fire. Other notable film credits include Shadow of the Vampire, starring John Malkovich and Willem Dafoe, which received two Oscar nominations (Dan himself being long-listed by Variety as an Oscar contender for his score); The Tonto Woman, also nominated for an Oscar in the short films category; and Max, starring John Cusack and Noah Taylor, for which he won his first Ivor Novello award. Musician Esther Yoo also features in the soundtrack, taking it to new heights. Esther has performed with the BBC orchestras, Deutsche Radio Philharmonic, Gävle, KBS, RTÈ and Iceland symphony orchestras, and the philharmonic orchestras of Seoul, Warsaw and Kansai. She has worked with conductors such as Vladimir Ashkenazy, Andrew Davis, Karina Canellakis, Jaime Martin, Micha? Nesterowicz, Santtu-Matias Rouvali, Osmo Vänskä and Christopher Warren-Green. Festival appearances include Seoul International Music Festival, Ghent Festival of Flanders, Festival de Fénétrange, Festival du Château de Chambord and Dvo?ák Prague Festival. Chamber music highlights also include her Wigmore Hall debut in 2016 and two BBC-recorded performances with the Z.E.N. Trio. Born in the U.S. and raised in Europe since the age of 6, Esther began playing the violin at the age of 4 and made her concerto debut aged 8. In 2012, she was one of the youngest ever prizewinners of the Queen Elizabeth Competition.
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Peter Cigleris, Deian Rowlands, BBC National Orchestra of Wales & Ben Palmer – Rediscovered: British Clarinet Concertos by Dolmetsch, Maconchy, Spain-dunk & Wishart (2021)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 01:17:17 minutes | 1,39 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Signum Records
Peter Cigleris performs with the BBC National Orchestra of Wales in a programme of four ‘rediscovered’ clarinet concertante works of the first half of the 20th Century.
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BBC National Orchestra of Wales, Kriss Russman – Butterworth: Orchestral Works (2016)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 01:15:32 minutes | 1,27 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Digital Booklet, Front Cover | © BIS
When George Butterworth joined the army in 1914, his most recent works included the song cycle Six Songs from ‘A Shropshire Lad’ as well as the Rhapsody ‘A Shropshire Lad’, which he called ‘an orchestral epilogue’ to his settings of A. E. Housman’s poems. The Rhapsody has since been described as ‘one of the greatest of all English orchestral works’ and when Butterworth left England to fight in the First World War, he was seen as one of the bright hopes of British music – a hope that in August 1916 was extinguished in the trenches at the Somme. When Butterworth joined up he stopped composing and also destroyed several manuscripts that he felt were inferior. An exception was an Orchestral Fantasia which he had started just before the war broke out: a 92-bar full score manuscript lasting some three-and-a-half minutes has been preserved. On the first page Butterworth wrote ‘see short score’ which implies that the work may have been completed – but if so, the score in question has been lost. The composer and conductor Kriss Russman has therefore taken up where the manuscript breaks off, adding some 5 minutes of music through a process which he describes in his liner notes as ‘developing Butterworth’s original ideas and combining them with additional material derived from an analysis of his other music.’ Performed by the BBC National Orchestra of Wales under Russman himself, the world première recording of the Fantasia closes the present disc which also includes some of Butterworth’s best loved pieces, such as The Banks of Green Willow. Russman has also made orchestral arrangements of the five-movement Suite for String Quartette and the Six Songs from ‘A Shropshire Lad’, both of which are recorded here for the first time. The soloist in the song cycle, and in the three songs that make up Love Blows as the Wind Blows, is James Rutherford, who has previously recorded the Shropshire Lad songs for BIS in the original version with piano accompaniment.
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