Ian Bostridge, Jennifer France, James Atkinson, Wonsick Oh, Aron Goldin – Homelands (2023)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/192 kHz | Time – 01:12:24 minutes | 2,28 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © RUBICON
‘Homelands’ is a powerful album of classical art song about exile, featuring Ian Bostridge, Jennifer France, James Atkinson, Wonsick Oh, and pianist Aron Goldin, who curated the project.
The songs (including many favourites by Tchaikovsky and Faure) are on the theme of exile and yearning for home.
Read moreIan Bostridge, Brad Mehldau – Mehldau: The Folly of Desire (2023)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/192 kHz | Time – 01:07:54 minutes | 2,26 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © PentaTone
Brad Mehldau presents The Folly of Desire, a song cycle inquiring the limits of sexual freedom in a post-#MeToo political age, together with tenor Ian Bostridge, one of the greatest song interpreters of our times. Setting poetry by Blake, Yeats, Shakespeare, Brecht, Goethe, Auden and Cummings, Mehldau’s music shifts seamlessly between a jazz idiom and Classical art song, and the work explores a theme as timeless as it is topical. The stylistic diversity of this project is underlined by adding a selection of jazz standards, as well as a Schubert lied.
Read moreIan Bostridge – Berlioz: Les nuits d’été – Ravel: Shéhérazade – Adams: Le livre de Baudelaire (After Debussy’s L. 64) (2019)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 01:03:54 minutes | 1,04 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Seattle Symphony Media
Tenor Ian Bostridge joins Ludovic Morlot and the Seattle Symphony in an album exploring the music of iconic French composers renowned for their inventive spirit: Berlioz, Ravel and Debussy. Hailed by The Seattle Times for his “warm tone quality and beautiful expression” during the performance of Berlioz’s Les nuits d’ete, the live-in-concert track is paired with studio recordings of Ravel’s imaginative Sheherazade and Debussy’s colorfully rich Le livre de Baudelaire, orchestrated by John Adams. With naturalistic imaging, depth of field and dynamic range, all Seattle Symphony Media recordings have been engineered to audiophile standards and aim to capture as realistically as possible the sound of the orchestra performing on the Benaroya Hall stage. The present release was mastered by 2017 Grammy Award Winner Dmitriy Lipay.
Read moreIan Bostridge, Julius Drake – Songs by Schubert Vol. 3 (2017)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 01:19:26 minutes | 1,21 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Wigmore Hall Live
Ian Bostridge, one of the outstanding tenors of our time, earning widespread praise for his intelligent and nuanced performances, resumes his partnership with Julius Drake for their latest disc of Schubert Lieder. From Schubert s joyful tribute to the natural world in Der Einsame to the desolation of Der Wanderer an den Mond , this delicately shaped programme explores the theme of longing in various guises. This release, the third volume in this Wigmore Hall Live series, captures some of the most exquisitely crafted songs of the 19th century.
Read moreIan Bostridge, Antonio Pappano, Vilde Frang, Nicolas Altstaedt – Beethoven: Songs & Folksongs (2020)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 01:02:05 minutes | 1,02 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Warner Classics
Conductor Antonio Pappano gladly trades in his conductor’s baton for his piano keys in this recording during which he accompanies some of the greatest voices in music today. He plays in perfect complicity with English tenor Ian Bostridge in this exciting program devoted to a selection of Beethoven’s Lieder.
The centrepiece of this album is, of course, An die ferne Geliebte (“To the distant beloved”), which is considered to be the first ever Lieder cycle in the history of music. The six poems depict an unknown woman that the composer had idealised from their very first encounter, quickly followed by their separation. His longing for her caused him so much torment that even the joyous awakening of spring could not take away his melancholy in this heart-rending lover’s lament.
The other twenty or so Lieder on this album, including the famous Adelaide, which was also set to music by Schubert, are a testament to Beethoven’s mastery of the lied and popular songs, which he liked to harmonise. Ian Bostridge and Antonio Pappano interpret these rare gems with sensitivity and sophistication. © François Hudry/Qobuz
Details of original recording : Recorded 2–4.X.2019, St Jude-on-the-Hill, London (England)
Read moreIan Bostridge & Thomas Adès – Schubert: Winterreise, Op. 89, D. 911 (Live) (2019)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 01:12:26 minutes | 1,20 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © PentaTone
Just like Pears and Britten, Ian Bostridge worked with the composer Thomas Adès on this recording of Schubert’s Winterreise, made at a concert at London’s famous Wigmore Hall in 2018. With his unique voice and style, the British singer divides opinion. Love him or hate him, he evokes strong feelings. As we fall into the former camp, we couldn’t recommend this recording strongly enough. It is very different from the studio version recorded some years before for EMI, with the great Norwegian pianist Leif Ove Andsnes. Compared to that splendid record, this new version is simpler, almost calmer. Thomas Adès makes use of original manuscripts to build a fine accompaniment, that gives voice to the overwhelming melancholy of the young composer who knows himself to be doomed. Fatal wanderings, seen through a lens of solitude, regret and resignation. The first volume of a trilogy which will eventually bring together Schubert’s great cycles, in live recordings by these same musicians. – François Hudry
Read moreIan Bostridge & Saskia Giorgini – Schubert: Die schöne Müllerin, Op. 25, D. 795 (Live) (2020)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 01:01:28 minutes | 1,11 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © PentaTone
Ian Bostridge continues his new exploration of Schubert song cycles with a recording of Die schöne Müllerin, together with pianist Saskia Giorgini. Die schöne Müllerin (1823) was Schubert’s first song cycle, and simultaneously Bostridge’s first extended introduction to the Lied and all its wonders. Schubert initially conceived the cycle together with poet Wilhelm Müller as a party game among friends, but gradually got captivated by the profundity of this apparently naïve love story. Bostridge is equally fascinated by the way in which this playful, folk-inspired piece gradually transforms into a cosmic lullaby in the final lines of the last song ‘des Baches Wiegenlied’. For pianist Giorgini, the key to – but also the greatest challenge of – interpreting Schubert’s music, and particularly Die schöne Müllerin, lies in the oceanic experience and hypnotic power of repetition.
Read moreIan Bostridge & Julius Drake – Schubert 4 – Wigmore Hall Live (2018)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 01:09:25 minutes | 1,04 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Wigmore Hall Live
Ian Bostridge, ‘one of the world’s great lieder tenors’ The Telegraph, praised for his sensitive and distinctive performances, is joined once more by Julius Drake as they continue to explore the genius of Schubert’s songs. From the strikingly dramatic ballad ‘Der Zwerg’ to the melancholic tenderness of ‘An Den Mond’, the duo examine the emotions of every word and every note in this delicately curated programme, recorded live at Wigmore Hall, London, on 16 May 2015.
Read moreIan Bostridge & Antonio Pappano – Requiem: The Pity of War (2018)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 58:24 minutes | 982 MB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Warner Classics
Two composers who in one way or another sang about the horrors of war, and two who lost their lives in it: Ian Bostridge’s takes a successful gamble here, with masterful accompaniment on the piano by Antonio Pappano. The first two are from Kurt Weill with Four Walt Whitman Songs in which the poet laments over the soldiers who died in the War of Succession, and Gustav Mahler, three of whose Lieder(s) taken from Knaben Wunderhorncruelly and repugnantly evoke the lives of poor young people, peasants and people who are barely through with their school years, sent to be torn apart on every possible and imaginable front. More directly concerned, if one may say so, are George Butterworth – who fell at the Somme in 1916, aged thirty-one, and whose A Shropshire Lad is without a doubt the greatest masterpiece here. Rudi Stephan fell at the Galician front in 1915 aged twenty-eight. His cycle Ich will dir singen ein Hohelied is a climax of unsettling eroticism… Would the fate of German music have been different if this genius had been able to act as a counterbalance, for example, to the emerging dodecaphonic music? Bostridge gives it his all here in this sad centenary of the end of the “war to end all wars”, which we know was tragically not the case.
Read moreIan Bostridge – Respighi: Songs (2021)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/192 kHz | Time – 01:07:32 minutes | 2,24 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © PentaTone
Flord impressionism and folk songs. After their acclaimed recording of Schubert’s Die schöne Müllerin, Ian Bostridge and Saskia Giorgini present a programme of rarely-recorded songs by Ottorino Respighi. This selection of songs demonstrates Respighi’s stylistic versatility and broad literary inspiration, from settings of Ada Negri’s compact verses to florid, Symbolist d’Annunzio poems as well as folk melodies, including Scottish songs. Respighi’s Liriche unveil a fascinating, little-known Italian branch of musical Impressionism. What binds them together is a longing for a past still so close, but at the same time inevitably gone.
Read moreIan Bostridge, Antonio Pappano – Beethoven: Songs & Folksongs (2020)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 01:02:05 minutes | 1,02 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Warner Classics
At the heart of this programme of Beethoven songs performed by Ian Bostridge and Sir Antonio Pappano is the song cycle An die ferne Geliebte (To the distant beloved). Bostridge describes it as “the distillation of Beethoven as lover”. Among the other items are the rapturously lyrical ‘Adelaide’, the sombre ‘In questa tomba oscura’ and a selection of Beethoven’s settings of folksongs from the British Isles, which elicit the participation of violinist Vilde Frang and cellist Nicolas Altstaedt. “When we all play together,” says Pappano, “it’s like a family making music at home.”
Read moreIan Bostridge – Tormento d’Amore (2022)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/192 kHz | Time – 01:08:50 minutes | 2,41 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Digital Booklet, Front Cover | © Warner Classics
With the 10 arias on Tormento d’amore, Ian Bostridge demonstrates the important place that the tenor voice held in Italian opera from the mid-17th to the mid-18th century – often thought of as the era of the castrato. At this time, there were two main centres of opera in Italy: Venice, where such composers as Cavalli, Vivaldi, Cesti, Stradella, Sartorio and Legrenzi were active, and Naples, home to Provenzale, Caresana, Vinci and Fago. In addition to arias – two of them in world premiere recordings – the album offers five instrumental sinfonie and a traditional Neapolitan song, ‘Lu cardillo’, or ‘The Goldfinch’, a songbird closely associated with Naples. Bostridge is partnered by conductor Antonio Florio and his ensemble Cappella Neapolitana.
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Ian Bostridge – Schubert Night Songs (2023)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 06:14 minutes | 105 MB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © PentaTone
Tenor Ian Bostridge and the late pianist Lars Vogt present two nocturnal Schubert songs. While Der Wanderer an den Mond has a folksy walking rhythm, the repetitive chords of Nacht und Träume create a sense of being suspended in time, fully immersed in the mysteries of night. The two songs bring together essential elements of Schubert’s Romantic music and persona.
Read moreIan Bostridge, Lars Vogt – Schubert: Schwanengesang (2022)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 01:09:24 minutes | 1,21 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © PentaTone
Tenor Ian Bostridge completes his Pentatone trilogy of Schubert song cycles with a rendition of Schwanengesang, performed with renowned pianist Lars Vogt. Schwanengesang was compiled and published after Schubert’s death, and the pieces literally belong to his swan songs. From the romantic “Ständchen” to the somber “Der Doppelgänger,” these songs are imbued with a deep melancholy and longing. Like Winterreise, they are best suited to mature performers, both vocally and in terms of life experience, and this recording captures Bostridge’s mature interpretation, enhanced by Vogt’s masterful playing. Swan Song is coupled with the extensive song Loneliness, which adds to the album’s bleak but ultimately comforting character.
Read moreGianandrea Noseda, Ian Bostridge, Simon Keenlyside, Sabina Cvilak, London Symphony Chorus, Choir of Eltham College, London Symphony Orchestra – Britten: War Requiem (2012)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/48 kHz | Time – 01:23:44 minutes | 726 MB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Digital Booklet, Front Cover | © LSO Live
Premiered in 1962, the War Requiem is one of the twentieth century’s defining works. Britten was commissioned to write it for the re-dedication of Coventry Cathedral, which was destroyed during the Second World War. Interspersing the Latin mass of the dead with texts by war poet Wilfred Owen he created a work that both mourned the dead and pleaded the futility of war.
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