Albert Dohmen, Estonian National Male Choir, BBC Philharmonic & John Storgårds – Shostakovich: Symphony No. 13 – Part: De profundis (2024)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 01:09:31 minutes | 1,15 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Chandos
John Storgards’s acclaimed series of Shostakovich symphonies continues with this recording of Symphony No. 13. The BBC Philharmonic is joined by the bass-baritone Albert Dohmen and the Estonian National Male Choir. The symphony, subtitled ‘Babiy Yar’, caused a great deal of tension and controversy in the lead-up to its premiere, in December 1962 – not because of the music, but the poetry. Shostakovich had chosen to set Yevgeny Yevtushenko’s Babiy Yar. Ostensibly an outraged response to the lack of a memorial for the thousands of Jews murdered by the Nazis and dumped in a ravine near Kyiv, the poem implicitly criticised the anti-Semitism then still rife in the Soviet Union. Originally planned as a short cantata, the work grew in stature as Shostakovich chose additional poems by Yevtushenko for inclusion, finally settling on the form of a five-movement symphony. The tone of the poems was as near to being openly subversive as any Soviet literary material could be at the time without actually being banned by the authorities, but the eventual premiere was a triumph. Arvo Part’s De profundis was composed for male voices, organ, and percussion in 1980. Here we hear the composer’s later adaptation of the piece for male voices and chamber orchestra, from 2008. The short work is a perfect example of the style the composer termed ‘tintinnabuli’ and an aesthetic that others would later label ‘holy minimalism’.
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Michael Collins, BBC Philharmonic, Rumon Gamba – Arnold: Clarinet concerto and Orchestral works (2023)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 01:08:50 minutes | 1,17 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Digital Booklet, Front Cover | © Chandos
Rumon Gamba leads the BBC Philharmonic in this collection of lesser-known pieces by the British composer Sir Malcolm Arnold. Born in 1921, he was inspired by Louis Armstrong to take up the trumpet at the age of twelve. Following study at the Royal College of Music, in London, he became Principal Trumpet of the London Philharmonic, in 1943 – a post he held (bar one season at the BBC Symphony Orchestra) until he moved to composing full time, in 1948. Arnold was active in many genres, writing nine symphonies, two operas, five ballets, and more than 100 film scores, including The Bridge on the River Kwai for which he won an Oscar. This album features music from across his compositional career, from Larch Trees (1943) to the Philharmonic Concerto (1976) – both works written for the London Philharmonic. His Divertimento was written for the newly formed National Youth Orchestra, whilst the BBC commissioned the Commonwealth Christmas Overture for the twenty-fifth anniversary of King George VI’s first Christmas Broadcast, in 1932. The Clarinet Concerto No. 1, expertly performed here by Michael Collins, was written for Frederick (‘Jack’) Thurston who gave the premiere, in 1949, at the Edinburgh Festival. The album concludes with Philip Lane’s o rchestration of The Padstow Lifeboat, originally composed for brass band to celebrate the launch of a new lifeboat in Padstow in 1968.
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James Ehnes, BBC Philharmonic & Andrew Davis – Stravinsky: Violin Concerto, Orchestral Works (2024)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 01:09:56 minutes | 1,20 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Chandos
One of the foremost musicians of his generation, James Ehnes continues to dazzle audiences around the world. Here he joins the BBC Philharmonic and Sir Andrew Davis in a recording of Stravinsky’s Violin Concerto. Written for the Polish virtuoso Samuel Dushkin, the four-movement work takes the music of Bach as its inspiration, and is built around a chord of the notes D, E, and A, which Stravinsky described as his ‘passport to the concerto’ and with which the solo violin part opens each movement. Dushkin gave the première, conducted by Stravinsky, in Berlin in 1932. Apollon musagète, a ballet in two parts for string orchestra, was written in 1927 – 28, and demonstrates the composer’s complete rejection of the Russian folk music and idioms that had been so instrumental in his previous ballets (The Firebird, Petrushka). They are replaced by a concentration on ‘pure form’, which became known as his neo-classical style. The album is completed by his two orchestral suites – light-hearted music arranged from piano duets he had written in the 1910s – and Scherzo à la russe, a showpiece for the Paul Whiteman band that he composed in the early 1940s when newly arrived in California.
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Juliana Koch, BBC Philharmonic, Rumon Gamba – Gipps Orchestral Works, Vol. 2 (2022)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 01:15:57 minutes | 1,25 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Digital Booklet, Front Cover | © Chandos
Ruth Gipps (1921-1999) was born in the English seaside resort of Bexhill-on-Sea. Encouraged as a child by an ambitious pianist mother, she appeared locally as a prodigy pianist. She was accepted by the Royal College of Music in 1937, at the age of sixteen, having won the Caird Scholarship. She quickly matured, both as composer and pianist. She studied with Vaughan Williams and Gordon Jacob, and later the oboe with Leon Goossens. During the Second World War she gained a position as oboist with the City of Birmingham Orchestra and devoted a great deal of her time to composing.
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BBC Philharmonic & John Storgårds – Weinberg: Dawn; Symphony No. 12 (2023)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 01:13:33 minutes | 1,25 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Chandos
Every five years the Soviet Union celebrated the anniversary of the October 1917 Revolution with large-scale public events, to which the country’s leading artists were expected to contribute. Mieczyslaw Weinberg, like his friend Shostakovich, enjoyed mixed fortunes with his efforts. The symphonic poem Dawn (Zarya), Op. 60, dedicated to the fortieth anniversary of the Revolution, seems to have remained unperformed during his lifetime, despite its ideologically irreproachable content. Its première was finally given in the BBC studios in Manchester, on 15 May 2019, by the BBC Philharmonic under John Storgårds. When Shostakovich died, on 9 August 1975, it had been five years since Weinberg composed his last symphony.
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BBC Singers, Hallé Choirs, BBC Philharmonic, Ben Gernon, Vimbayi Kaziboni – Emily Howard: The Anvil (2023)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/48 kHz | Time – 01:00:52 minutes | 594 MB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Delphian Records
The imagined sounds of mass protest run through composer Emily Howard’s and poet Michael Symmons Roberts’s The Anvil, commissioned by BBC Radio 3 and the Manchester International Festival to mark the bicentenary of the 1819 Peterloo massacre, in which crowds protesting for universal suffrage in St Peter’s Fields, Manchester, were brutally crushed.
To a solo soprano who narrates and remembers and a baritone who seems caught in the action, the work adds the immense forces of four choirs – each given music tailored to its particular capabilities, from professional to amateur – and the BBC Philharmonic to ask: what future was being forged in the tragic events that took place that day?
A second collaboration between Howard and Symmons Roberts, Elliptics, is quieter, more elegiac: a meditation on love and death, and on what we hope will survive.
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Martin Owen, BBC Philharmonic & John Wilson – Martin Owen Plays Strauss, Schumann & Weber (2023)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 01:05:32 minutes | 1,14 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Chandos
Regarded as one of Europe’s leading horn players, Martin Owen appears as a soloist and chamber musician around the world. Currently principal horn at the BBC Symphony Orchestra, he has previously served as principal horn of the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra and as solo horn of the Berliner Philharmoniker. Weber’s Concertino was written for the old, valveless ‘natural horn’; its limited range of notes (tied to the harmonic series) was extended mechanically with additional tubing (‘crooks’) and, more artfully, by virtuoso players bending notes, and varied hand stopping. The technical demands of the Concertino are testament to the extraordinary facility of the hornists of the period. The first Horn Concerto by Richard Strauss, written at the age of nineteen, whilst a student, is widely considered his first uncontested masterpiece. Although the influence of Brahms and Schumann are evident, his own compositional voice is unmistakable. Strauss would continue to write significant parts for horn in all of his orchestral scores (possibly an influence of his father, who was a virtuoso hornist), but the second Concerto was not composed until 1942 – some sixty years later. The style is much more neo-classical, even ‘Mozartian’. Schumann’s riotous Concertstück for four horns opens the programme, and features three more outstanding soloists: Christopher Parkes (Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra, Sinfonia of London), Alec Frank-Gemmill (Gothenburg Symphony Orchestra), and Sarah Willis (Berliner Philharmoniker).
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BBC Philharmonic, Gianandrea Noseda – Rachmaninov: Symphony No. 3 – Prince Rostislav – Caprice bohémien (2011)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 01:13:44 minutes | 1,25 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Chandos
This is the sixth volume in our highly acclaimed Rachmaninoff series, performed by the BBC Philharmonic under Gianandrea Noseda. Of Symphony No. 1 on a previous volume in this series (CHAN10475), BBC Music magazine said: ‘Noseda and the BBC Philharmonic have the work’s measure and their performance has a full-blooded intensity and fire.’ The series has been well received by the public and reviewers alike, and many of the recorded works will be performed by Noseda and the BBC Philharmonic at this year’s Proms.
Symphony No. 3 is the most expressively Russian of all Rachmaninoff’s symphonies, particularly in the dance rhythms of the energetic finale. Rachmaninoff wrote the symphony for the Philadelphia Orchestra, having spoken fondly of the ensemble, calling it ‘my very favourite orchestra’. The premiere was conducted by the charismatic Leopold Stokowski, but reviews were mixed – leaning towards the negative – and it was not until the re-evaluation of Rachmaninoff’s works in the 1970s that this symphony finally got the recognition that it deserves.
Rarely recorded and performed today, the symphonic poem Prince Rostislav is one of Rachmaninoff’s earliest surviving compositions for orchestra. Based on a short ballad by Alexey Tolstoy, the highly atmospheric and evocative music speaks of the ill-fated Prince of Kiev who was tragically drowned in the Ukrainian river Dniepr.
Equally unfamiliar is Capriccio bohémien, the colourful fantasy by Rachmaninoff on a gypsy theme, which takes much of its inspiration from one of the composer’s other works, the opera Aleko, based on Pushkin’s The Gypsies.
BBC Philharmonic, Gianandrea Noseda – Rachmaninov: Symphony No. 2 – The Rock (2010)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 01:14:48 minutes | 1,25 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Chandos
Under Gianandrea Noseda, the BBC Philharmonic’s epic Rachmaninoff series continues with a recording of Symphony No.2, coupled with The Rock.
Unlikely his First Symphony, Symphony No.2 is standard orchestral repertoire. A recent concert at the Bridgewater Hall, elicited the review, ‘Noseda showed his remarkable affinity with Rachmaninoff’s style. He combines an ability to sustain the long structures of its emotional climaxes with a vocalistic approach to phrasing which lifts the tunes out of the texture and lefts them sing. It’s almost operatic in its vividness.’ City Life.
The challenge of making his mark with that ultimate big statement, a symphony, still faced Rachmaninoff as he headed into his mid-thirties. Posterity now accepts that he had probably cracked a tough nut with his First Symphony (CHAN 10475). Yet the 1897 premiere, poorly conducted under disputed circumstances by Glazunov, was so unfavourably received that it forced Rachmaninoff into creative silence for the next three years. Rachmaninoff’s Second Symphony was drafted alongside an equally ambitious Second Piano Sonata in a charming garden villa in Dresden, where the whole family had settled in late 1906. The finished product turned out to be one of the longest of all Russian symphonies. Breadth, though, is of the essence of the Second Symphony’s wealth of lovingly wrought and subtly interlinked thematic material. As one critic observed at the 1908 St Petersburg premiere, conducted with his usual first-rate flexibility by Rachmaninoff, ‘the new E minor Symphony… may be slightly over long for the general audience, but how fresh, how beautiful it is’.
The accomplished fantasia of 1893, The Rock offers an excellent example of Rimsky-Korsakov’s orchestration as acknowledged by Rachmaninoff’s original dedication.
BBC Philharmonic, Gianandrea Noseda – Rachmaninov: Symphony No. 1 – The Isle of the Dead – Youth Symphony (2008)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 01:14:34 minutes | 1,24 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Chandos
Regarded as one of the most remarkable composers of the twentieth century, Serge Rachmaninoff wrote three romantically inclined symphonies, two of which are now standard orchestral repertoire. However, the premiere of Symphony No. 1 was such a disaster that Rachmaninoff refrained from composing anything more for the next three years. The conductor, Glazunov, is reputed to have been drunk, and Rachmaninoff was unable to attend the entire performance. He reacted by tearing up the score. Thankfully for posterity, the instrumental parts were preserved and rediscovered in 1945, permitting the work to be restored. It is a work full of youthful fervour, distinctive and sweeping themes, and nationalist sentiments, and is now widely regarded as a vivid example of his early talent. It is complemented here by the ‘Youth Symphony’, the first movement of a projected but never completed symphony in D minor, composed when Rachmaninoff was only seventeen, and the great symphonic poem The Isle of the Dead, inspired by Arnold Böcklin’s painting of the same name which Rachmaninoff had seen on display in Paris in 1907.
Composed in 1909, it is still a relatively early work, but contains some of the dark Russian spiritual qualities which Rachmaninoff was to develop further in his later compositions.
Elizabeth Atherton, Peter Rose, Jess Dandy, BBC Philharmonic & John Storgårds – Shostakovich: Symphony No. 14, Six Verses of Marina Tsvetayeva (2023)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 01:14:47 minutes | 1,25 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Chandos
John Storgårds and the BBC Philharmonic continue their survey of Shostakovich’s late symphonies with this recoding of the 14th, with Elizabeth Atherton and Peter Rose as soloists. Completed in the spring of 1969, and premiered later that year, the symphony is written for soprano, bass and small string orchestra with percussion, setting eleven linked setting of poems by four authors. Most of the poems deal with the theme of death, particularly that of unjust or early death, and indeed all four of the poets had died prematurely and / or in unnatural circumstances – Wilhelm Küchelbecker in Siberian exile for his part in the 1825 Decembrist uprising, Federico García Lorca assassinated during the Spanish Civil War, in 1936, Rainer Maria Rilke of blood poisoning following an accident in 1926 and Guillaume Apollinaire in 1918 during the Spanish influenza pandemic. The Six Verses of Marina Tsvetayeva were composed in 1973, originally for contralto and piano, and subsequently arranged for chamber orchestra (the version we hear here, with Jess Dandy as soloist). The recording was made at Media City in Salford, Manchester, in Surround Sound, and is available as a hybrid SACD and in Spatial Audio.
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Jean-Efflam Bavouzet, Adam Walker, BBC Philharmonic & Yan Pascal Tortelier – Pierre Sancan: A Musical Tribute (2023)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 01:13:21 minutes | 1,13 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Chandos
Pierre Sancan was a tremendously influential figure in French musical life, as a composer, pianist, teacher, and conductor, but remains relatively unknown outside France. Born in Mazamet, in 1916 – the same year as Dutilleux – he received his early musical training in Morocco and, later, Toulouse. He entered the Paris Conservatoire in 1934 where he studied with Jean Gallon, conducting with Charles Munch and Roger Désormière, piano with Yves Nat, and composition with Henri Busser. He won the Prix de Rome in 1943, and eventually joined the staff in 1956, teaching there until his retirement, in 1985. A list of his piano students reads like a who’s who of French pianists and includes Michel Béroff, Jean-Bernard Pommier, Daniel Varsano, Jacques Rouvier, Jean-Philippe Collard, and Jean-Efflam Bavouzet. Yan Pascal Tortelier, whilst not a direct student of Sancan, attended the Paris Conservatoire while he taught there, and remembers his influence: ‘of course through his extraordinary pianistic imagination but even more so by his physical allure and overwhelming personality’. This programme of the Piano Concerto, orchestral works, works for solo piano, and the flute Sonatine (played by Adam Walker) serves as a personal tribute to Sancan from both pianist and conductor, who very much hope that it will help to raise awareness of this gifted composer and his music.
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Jakob Kellermann, Vivane Hagner, Julianna Koch, BBC Philharmonic & Christian Karlsen – Takemitsu: Spectral Canticle (2023)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 53:53 minutes | 999 MB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © BIS
The first Japanese composer to achieve international status, Tōru Takemitsu proposed a fusion between Western music and the culture of his country. His music radiates a lyrical intensity that comes as much from his roots in the early modernists Debussy and Alban Berg as from his affinity with the more overtly experimental mid-twentieth-century styles of John Cage and Morton Feldman. Played throughout the world, he is considered one of the most important composers of the second half of the 20th century.
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Lawrence Zazzo, BBC Philharmonic, Timothy Redmond – The Orchestral Music of Jonathan Dove (2019)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 01:19:22 minutes | 1,39 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Orchid Classics
To mark the 60th birthday of British composer Jonathan Dove, Orchid Classics presents an album devoted to his extraordinary orchestral music, performed by the BBC Philharmonic. Under the direction of Timothy Redmond, the BBC Philharmonic performs works which span nearly two decades, from The Ringing Isle of 1997, to Gaia Theory, premiered at the BBC Proms in 2014. The Ringing Isle was inspired by Handel’s observation about the bells he heard upon arriving in England; Dove uses bell-ringing patterns and allusions to Gaunt’s famous ‘scepter’d isle’ speech from Shakespeare’s Richard II. Other highlights include Run to the Edge, a thrilling, vibrant work bursting with energy and colour; Airport Scenes, extracted from Dove’s comic opera, Flight; and Hojoki, a setting of a Japanese text which, appropriately, reflects on the significance of reaching the age of 60, and is sung here by countertenor Lawrence Zazzo, who gave the work’s premiere.
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Lawrence Power, Martyn Brabbins, BBC Philharmonic – MacMillan: Symphony No 4 & Viola Concerto (2020)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 01:12:29 minutes | 1,29 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Hyperion Records
MacMillan’s viola concerto was written for Lawrence Power, who brings a unique authority to this, its first recording. The fourth symphony—a major addition to the repertoire—is a generous and appropriate coupling, both works incorporating and alchemically transforming musical elements from the distant past.
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