BBC Symphony Orchestra – Sibelius: Orchestral Works (2019)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/48 kHz | Time – 01:11:34 minutes | 673 MB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Chandos
Chief Conductor of the BBC Symphony Orchestra since 2013, Sakari Oramo has a special affinity with the music of his compatriot the Finnish composer Sibelius, which this recording admirably demonstrates. Sibelius’s ever-popular Lemminkäinen-Suite is complemented here with the early Spring Song and the lesser-known Suite from Belshazzar’s Feast. Sibelius composed the Lemminkäinen-Suite (also called the Four Legends, or Four Legends from the Kalevala), Op. 22 in the 1890s. Drawing on material originally conceived for a mythological opera, Veneen luominen (“The Building of the Boat”), the suite focuses on the character Lemminkäinen from the Finnish national epic, the Kalevala.
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Rachel Barton Pine, BBC Symphony Orchestra, Andrew Litton – Elgar & Bruch: Violin Concertos (2018)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/48 kHz | Time – 01:16:23 minutes | 747 MB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Avie Records
Billboard chart-topping violinist Rachel Barton Pine releases her 36th album and fourth for AVIE with her first recordings of two repertory staples, violin concertos by Edward Elgar and Max Bruch. The two works – Elgar’s only concerto for violin and Bruch’s first – straddle the turn of the 20th century but have in common a Romantic hue which Rachel probes with her rich, soulful tone.
The album is dedicated to “the memory of a musical hero and generous friend, Sir Neville Marriner,” who was to have reunited with Rachel on this album. She was fortunate to work with him on the scores, with Sir Neville vividly relating accounts of his teacher Billy Reed, former leader of the London Symphony Orchestra, who collaborated with Elgar on the creation of his violin concerto. Grammy Award-winning conductor Andrew Litton brings his own Romantic pedigree to the recording, as does the BBC Symphony Orchestra and celebrated producer Andrew Keener who himself has overseen award winning versions of the Elgar and Bruch concertos.
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New London Chamber Choir, BBC Symphony Orchestra, Jiri Belohlavek – Suk: The Ripening & Symphony No. 1 (2010/2022)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 01:18:31 minutes | 1,42 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Digital Booklet, Front Cover | © Chandos
The Czech maestro Jirí Belohlávek performs works by his countryman Josef Suk, conducting the BBC Symphony Orchestra, with whom he is their Chief Conductor.
As a composer, Josef Suk followed in the tradition of Smetana and Dvorák, the latter of whom was not only his professor at the Prague Conservatory, but also became his father-in-law – Suk married Dvorák’s oldest surviving daughter, Otilie, in 1898, and the death of Dvorák in 1904 and ‘Otilka’ a year later resulted in the composition of one of the composer’s most powerful and deeply felt works, the Asrael Symphony – also recorded by Belohlávek (CHAN 9640).
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Matthias Goerne, The Synergy Vocals, BBC Symphony Orchestra, Josep Pons – Berio: Sinfonia – Mahler: Lieder (2016)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/48 kHz | Time – 01:01:27 minutes | 619 MB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © harmonia mundi
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.
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Martyn Brabbins, BBC Symphony Orchestra – Vaughan Williams: Sinfonia antartica & Symphony No 9 (2022)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 01:18:44 minutes | 1,39 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Hyperion Records
Two late, great Vaughan Williams symphonies: with the ‘Antartica’ and No 9, Martyn Brabbins and his BBC forces complete a cycle enthusiastically acclaimed by Radio 3 Record Review as ‘unmissable’.
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Louis Lortie, BBC Symphony Orchestra, Edward Gardner – Szymanowski: Symphonies Nos. 2 & 4 & Concert Overture (2013)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/88,2 kHz | Time – 01:10:57 minutes | 1,14 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Chandos
This recording of orchestral works by Karol Szymanowski form part of the Polish Music series on Chandos, and is performed by the BBC Symphony Orchestra and Edward Gardner. These performers have impressed in their Lutoslawski survey, which is part of the same series; in a review of volume 1, Gramophone described them as a veritable ‘dream team’.
Symphony No. 2 by Szymanowski is a work of great power and ingenuity, with many passionate and varied contrasts in its use of solo instruments. Composed in 1909 – 10, it is widely considered the greatest orchestral work of the composer’s early period, not to mention one of the most important Polish symphonic compositions to date. Szymanowski himself thought very highly of it, and in August 1911 wrote in a letter to his fellow Polish composer Zdzislaw Jachimecki: ‘How happy I am that this Symphony impressed you as I had wanted. I will frankly admit that I feel somewhat proud about its value. In some miraculous way I have managed during my work on it to resist all those garish phantoms which seduce “young and inexperienced” artists and to produce pure and uncompromising beauty in the way I personally understand it.’
The internationally acclaimed pianist Louis Lortie joins the orchestra and conductor in Symphony No. 4 of 1932, which the composer subtitled ‘Symphonie concertante’ in recognition of the near-soloistic role played by the pianist. Whereas Szymanowski’s early and middle works clearly reflect Wagner, Strauss, and Scriabin, this work is strongly influenced by Prokofiev, particularly in the finale, an agitated and daring movement reminiscent of the Russian composer’s Piano Concerto No. 3, composed about a decade earlier.
Written in 1904 – 05 in a style recalling Wagner and Strauss, the Concert Overture is characterised by enormous expressiveness and gusto in the way it handles the expanding themes. Szymanowski inscribed the original score with part of the poem Witez Wlast by his friend Tadeusz Micinski: ‘I will not play you sad songs, O Shades! but will give you a triumph proud and fierce…’. This vivid imagery is perfectly in keeping with the music’s exuberant and vivacious character.
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Janis Kelly, Kathryn Guthrie, Antonio Figueroa, Richard Morrison, BBC Symphony Orchestra, Jayce Ogren – Rufus Wainwright: Prima Donna (2015)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/48 kHz | Time – 02:07:50 minutes | 1,24 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Digital Booklet, Front Cover | © Deutsche Grammophon (DG)
‘Prima Donna is an opera composed by Canadian-American singer-songwriter Rufus Wainwright to a French language libretto which he co-authored with Bernadette Colomine. It is about ‘a day in the life of an aging opera singer,’ anxiously preparing for her comeback in 1970s Paris, who falls in love with a journalist. It premiered at the Palace Theatre, Manchester on July 10, 2009 during the Manchester International Festival. The U.S. premiere was presented by New York City Opera at the Brooklyn Academy of Music on February 19, 2012. In March 2014, Wainwright began raising funds via PledgeMusic to record a two-disc album recording of the opera.’….’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.’
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BBC Symphony Orchestra, Jiri Belohlavek – Josef Suk: Prague – A Summer’s Tale (2012)
SACD ISO (2.0/MCH): 3,83 GB | 24B/88,2kHz Stereo FLAC: 1,23 GB | Full Artwork: 106 MB
Label/Cat#: Chandos # CHSA 5109 | Country/Year: UK 2012 | 3% Recovery Info
Genre: Classical | Style: Late Romantic, Early 20th Century
In my review of the excellent Chandos disc of Josef Suk’s orchestral music Suk: Ripening, Symphony in E major – Belohlavek in September 2010 I expressed the hope that there would be a follow-up disc – well here it is. Once again the performers are the BBC Symphony Orchestra under Jiri Belohlavek – now at the end of his tenure as the orchestra’s chief conductor – and like the earlier release this new one has been recorded in the spacious acoustic of Watford Colosseum in January this year by the capable team of Brian Pidgeon (producer) and Ralph Couzens (sound engineer).
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BBC Symphony Orchestra – Richard Flury: Orchestral Music, Vol. 3 (2023)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 01:16:59 minutes | 1,30 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Digital Booklet, Front Cover | © Toccata Classics
The First and Fourth Symphonies of the Swiss composer Richard Flury (1896–1967) both have a strong sense of place. They retain a hint of Bruckner but are fluid rather than monumental. The First is lyrical and grandiose in equal measure, perhaps reflecting the grandeurs of the Swiss landscape. The Fourth was inspired by memories of childhood visits to Liechtenstein and spins out tunes and atmosphere with the profligacy of a Hollywood film score. The existing material for both works was full of errors; this recording is the first to return to Flury’s manuscripts and expunge the wrong notes.
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![Jean-Efflam Bavouzet, Yan Pascal Tortelier, BBC Symphony Orchestra - Jean-Efflam Bavouzet plays Debussy, Ravel & Massenet (2010/2022) [Official Digital Download 24bit/96kHz] Download](https://imghd.xyz/images/2022/03/21/yikfgg2gq2aia_600.jpg)
Jean-Efflam Bavouzet, Yan Pascal Tortelier, BBC Symphony Orchestra – Jean-Efflam Bavouzet plays Debussy, Ravel & Massenet (2010/2022)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 01:16:56 minutes | 1,20 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Digital Booklet, Front Cover | © Chandos
The exclusive Chandos artist Jean-Efflam Bavouzet is a master of this repertoire. This is his second concerto recording for the label, after his survey of the complete piano concertos by Bartók (CHAN 10610) which was released in September to high acclaim and voted ‘Orchestral Choice of the Month’ by the magazine BBC Music. Bavouzet’s complete recording of the piano music by Debussy also scooped awards from BBC Music and Gramophone, which wrote: ‘This could well be the finest and most challenging of all Debussy piano cycles.’
On this release, Bavouzet is accompanied by the BBC Symphony Orchestra and Yan Pascal Tortelier, a conductor steeped in the French tradition and utterly at home in this repertoire. The result is a totally idiomatic performance of these French masterpieces for piano and orchestra.
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Tamsin Waley-Cohen, BBC Symphony Orchestra, Andrew Litton – Roy Harris & John Adams: Violin Concertos (2016)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 01:02:20 minutes | 1,18 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Signum Records
Violinist Tamsin Waley-Cohen continues her series of concerto recordings on Signum with 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’ Violin Concerto didn’t occur until 1984. Since then it has been championed for its “luminous orchestration and exalted tone” and has been rarely recorded.
For this recording Tamsin Waley-Cohen is joined by the BBC Symphony Orchestra under American conductor Andrew Litton.
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Guy Braunstein, BBC Symphony Orchestra & Kirill Karabits – Tchaikovsky Treasures (2019)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 01:10:21 minutes | 1,21 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © PentaTone
Tchaikovsky has dedicated some of his finest music to the violin, but this new album expands the instrument’s repertoire even further. Inspired by great masters 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 recording, Braunstein plays with the renowned BBC Symphony Orchestra, led by maestro Kirill Karabits.
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Javier Perianes, BBC Symphony Orchestra, Sakari Oramo – Grieg: Piano Concerto & Lyric Pieces (2015)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 01:10:01 minutes | 1,06 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © harmonia mundi
Miniatures and large forms.The work of a young musician of 25, the celebrated Concerto of Grieg combines the great Romantic tradition (Liszt was one of its most fervent admirers) and Norwegian folk music, with the halling and springdans of its thrilling finale. Yet the composer never wrote another, for he felt more comfortable writing in miniature forms. In 35 years he produced no fewer than 66 Lyric Pieces, every one a gem, from the truculent March of the Trolls to the poetic meditations of Homesickness and Remembrances.
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Timothy Ridout, BBC Symphony Orchestra & Martyn Brabbins – Elgar: Viola Concerto – Bloch: Suite for Viola and Orchestra (2023)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/192 kHz | Time – 58:56 minutes | 1,86 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © harmonia mundi
Timothy Ridout gives us the opportunity to discover the splendid viola version of Elgar’s famous Cello Concerto – an arrangement approved by the composer, who conducted it’s premiere in 1930. In addition to this deeply moving work, he gives us a powerful, poetic reading of Bloch’s all too rarely performed Suite for Viola and Orchestra, in which the Swiss composer indulged his fascination with the Orient.
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Yevgeny Sudbin, BBC Symphony Orchestra, Sakari Oramo – Rachmaninoff Piano Concertos 2 & 3 (2018)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 01:15:12 minutes | 1,13 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © BIS
Oh no, it’s not the program of this album that’s any kind of news – after all, Rachmaninov’s Second and Third piano concertos have been recorded over and over again by dozen pianists since their very composition – but the interpretation of Russian pianist Yevgeny Sudbin, born in 1980 in Saint-Petersburg. Hailed by “The Daily Telegraph” as ‘potentially one of the greatest pianists of the 21st century’, Yevgeny Sudbin released his first album on BIS in 2005. Since then his recordings have met with critical acclaim and have been regularly featured as “CD of the Month” by the highly choosy BBC Music Magazine or “Editor’s Choice” by the none less choosy Gramophone. Sudbin performs regularly in prestigious venues such as London’s Royal Festival Hall and Queen Elizabeth Hall, the Amsterdam Concertgebouw, the Tonhalle Zurich, the Avery Fisher Hall in New York. Recent engagements have included performances with the Rotterdam Philharmonic Orchestra, City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra, Concertgebouw Orchestra, the Gewandhaus Leipzig, and Philharmonia Orchestra. His love of chamber music has resulted in partnerships with musicians including Hilary Hahn, Julia Fischer and the Chilingirian Quartet among others. Appearances at festivals include Aspen, La Roque d’Anthéron, Mostly Mozart and Verbier. In 2016 he was nominated Artist of the Year at the prestigious Gramophone Classical Music Awards.
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