Ismo Eskelinen, Lapland Chamber Orchestra & John Storgårds – Kalevi Aho: Guitar Concerto; Quintet for Horn; Contrapunctus XIV (2024)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 01:04:57 minutes | 1,07 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © BIS
Although the Finnish composer Kalevi Aho is best known as a symphonist, his constantly expanding catalogue includes numerous concertos as well as countless chamber works and arrangements of works by other composers. This disc brings together works from these three genres. The Guitar Concerto, dedicated to Ismo Eskelinen, posed many challenges for Aho, who is not a guitarist himself. It is a seven-movement work exploring the different ways the guitar can be used – sometimes with far from traditional techniques –and exploring its sonic possibilities. The Quintet for Horn and String Quartet was commissioned by Ilkka Puputti, who had previously premièred Aho’s Solo X for horn. Particularly demanding for the soloist, the quintet explores various atmospheres, in turns mysterious, whimsical, dramatic and dance-like. Contrapunctus XIV from Johann Sebastian Bach’s Art of the Fugue was left unfinished owing to the composer’s declining health. As he was dissatisfied with previous attempts to complete it, Aho decided to write his own, aiming to remain true to Bach’s style. This completion exists in several versions, including the one for string orchestra heard here, expertly performed by the Lapland Chamber Orchestra conducted by John Storgårds.
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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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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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Bergen Philharmonic Orchestra & John Storgårds – Per Nørgård: Orchestral Works (2015)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 54:00 minutes | 939 MB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © BIS
Celebrating his 90th birthday in 2022, Per Nørgård is undoubtedly one of the most important Danish composers since Nielsen. His important production that covers all genres is a highly personal travel document based on his endless incursions through the sonic labyrinths of this world.
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Helsinki Philharmonic Orchestra, John Storgårds – Rasmussen: Symphony No. 2 ‘The Earth Anew’ (2016)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/48 kHz | Time – 53:03 minutes | 554 MB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Dacapo Records
In many ways Sunleif Rasmussen is a pan-Nordic composer. Born in the Faroe Islands in 1961, he has lived in Norway for a period, and today he shuttles between Copenhagen and his native islands. He also has a close association with Finland and Finnish musical life, among other ways through a close friendship of many years with the conductor and violinist John Storgårds; a musical friendship of which the present recording and the CDs Strings against Strings (2007) and Motion/Emotion (2013) are shining examples. Rasmussen speaks more than a handful of the related Nordic languages, and is a great believer in the shared Nordic identity nourished by the common linguistic basis.
His youth did not in fact point in the direction of a life as the absolutely most prominent Faroese composer. There was no musical training on the island of Sandoy when Sunleif Rasmussen was growing up. So he learned to read music from his grandmother. At the end of the 1970s he went to Norway to attend a music college outside Oslo, and it was there that he first heard a symphony orchestra play live – an overwhelming experience, among other reasons because the programme consisted of striking masterworks from the twentieth century: Le Sacre du printemps by Igor Stravinsky and Romeo and Juliet by Sergei Prokofiev. At the same time he drew great inspiration from the great jazz pianist of the time, Keith Jarrett, and the tenor saxophonist Jan Garbarek, and in fact it was as a jazz pianist – with a single CD on his conscience – that Sunleif Rasmussen developed musically in the 1980s. At that time he was back in the Faroe Islands, before moving to Copenhagen in 1988; the next year he began studying composition at the Royal Danish Academy of Music in the capital with Professor Ib Nørholm – and later electroacoustic music with Ivar Frounberg.
Shortly after his studies, in 1995-97, Sunleif Rasmussen wrote his best known work, the first symphony, Oceanic Days, for which he received the Nordic Council’s Music Prize as the first and so far the only Faroese to do so. Over the years he has also received grants from the Léonie Sonning Music Foundation and the Danish Arts Foundation, and in 2011, as the youngest recipient ever, he won the biggest culture prize of the Faroes, the Mentanarheiðursløn landsins. His music is played in most parts of the world.
In the works in the 1990s as today, Rasmussen found his inspiration in natural phenomena and Faroese melodies. In the 1990s these melodies were only present in the hidden composition work as a basis for serial and spectral principles – where notes and sounds are thoroughly and systematically organized. During the last decade, suggestions or imitations of Faroese folk melodies and rhythms have been far more dominant in his music.
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Truls Mørk, Helsinki Philharmonic Orchestra, John Storgårds – Rautavaara: Modificata, Towards the Horizon & Incantations (2012)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 01:02:17 minutes | 1,06 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Ondine
This new recording couples Finnish composer Einojuhani Rautavaara’s latest concerto works with an orchestral piece from his early Modernist period (Modificata; 1957/2003). The virtuoso Percussion Concerto Incantations (2008) features the Scottish percussion soloist Colin Currie, who is the dedicatee and première performer of this work. Currie wrote himself the virtuoso cadenza to the final movement. Rautavaara’s Second Cello Concerto Towards the Horizon (2009) was written for cellist Truls Mørk and plays continuously in one 20-minute movement. Reviewing the premiere the Star Tribune noted that the composer “acknowledges a ‘taste for eternity’ and a vain of mysticsm runs through his work.” Einojuhani Rautavaara is recognized as one of the most notable Finnish composers after Jean Sibelius. His recordings on Ondine have been bestsellers and garnered numerous awards (including a recent GRAMMY nomination for his opera Kaivos). Under their chief conductor John Storgårds, the Helsinki Philharmonic Orchestra builds on long-time pedigrees of performing their compatriot’s music.
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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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Oslo Philharmonic Orchestra, John Storgårds – Nørgård: Symphonies Nos. 2 & 6 (2016)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/88,2 kHz | Time – 54:22 minutes | 834 MB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Dacapo
“I feel each of my symphonies is a whole continent in itself,” the Danish composer Per Nørgård (b. 1932) has said. His music stems from an insatiable urge to explore the phe no mena of the world and the possibilities of music, and his eight symphonies stand as milestones along the course of six decades. This recording with the Oslo Philharmonic conducted by John Storgårds presents Per Nørgård’s Second Symphony, in which the composer unfolds his famous ‘infinity principle’ euphorically and almost psychedelically, and his Sixth Symphony, in which the mature composer proves more exploratory and playful than ever.
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Marko Ylonen, Tampere Philharmonic Orchestra & John Storgårds – Vasks: Symphony No. 3 – Cello Concerto (2015)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 01:16:56 minutes | 1,48 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © 2xHD – Ondine
The Tampere Philharmonic, one of Scandinavia’s foremost symphony orchestras, is led by John Storgårds on this album dedicated to Pēteris Vasks, spotlighting the Third Symphony, a one-movement piece of spiritually deep and emotionally compelling music. Also included here is the Latvian composer’s Cello Concerto, a highly personal and moving work that reflects suffering under the Soviet regime and the strength required to survive. It features soloist Marko Ylönen, who specializes in contemporary repertoire.
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Lapland Chamber Orchestra & John Storgårds – Mahler: Symphony No. 10 (Arr. M. Castelletti for Chamber Orchestra) (2019)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 01:17:04 minutes | 1,22 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © BIS
Left unfinished at the death of the composer, Gustav Mahler’s Tenth Symphony has exerted an enormous fascination on musicologists as well as musicians. Whether fully orchestrated in specific passages, or a sole melody in others, there is one continuous line throughout the surviving manuscript pages and over the years a number of different completions or performing versions have seen the light of day. One of the latest is this ‘recreation’ of the work for chamber orchestra by composer and conductor Michelle Castelletti. In her liner notes to the recording, Castelletti describes the symphony as ‘possibly one of Mahler’s most passionate emotional outbursts and autobiographical creations’. The decision to make an orchestration for chamber forces was inspired by the example of the Viennese Society for Private Musical Performance, established by Arnold Schönberg in 1918 with the goal of performing newly composed music. Among the works performed by the Society were chamber orchestra versions of Mahler’s Symphony No. 4 and Das Lied von der Erde – the latter made by Schoenberg himself – and in her version of Symphony No. 10, Castelletti uses a similar instrumentation. This new completion appears on album for the first time, in a performance by the acclaimed Lapland Chamber Orchestra under John Storgårds, the ensemble’s artistic director since 1996.
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Tapiola Sinfonietta & John Storgårds – Terral, Strings to the Bone, Chamber Symphony (2023)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 01:08:12 minutes | 1,09 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © BIS
Sebastian Fagerlund’s orchestral music, which has held a central position in his work, is known for its pounding rhythmic energy and the quiet, gripping intensity of the more static passages.
The flute concerto ‘Terral’ was written in close collaboration with Sharon Bezaly. Referring to a land breeze in Spain, ‘Terral’ is like a constant variation in a transparent and airy soundscape reminiscent of the soil taking on a new appearance when blown by the wind. Strings to the Bone for string orchestra features Fagerlund’s typically intense and virtuosic writing as well as elements of the musical heritage of Ostrobothnia. Finally, the Chamber Symphony came to existence thanks to his collaboration with the Tapiola Sinfonietta and the Ottawa-based National Arts Centre Orchestra, where John Storgårds has been principal guest conductor since 2015. According to the Finnish daily Hufvudstadsbladet, this work shows “a thematically consistent symphonic construction with an authentic symphonic tension integrated into the dramaturgical gesture”.
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John Storgårds, Lapland Chamber Orchestra – Karlsson: 7 Songs & Clarinet Concerto (2018)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 54:44 minutes | 913 MB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © BIS
Lars Karlsson was born in 1953 on Åland, an archipelago in the Baltic Sea which forms part of Finland although its population is Swedish-speaking. He soon moved to Helsinki, however, in order to study at the Sibelius Academy, where his teachers included Einar Englund and Einojuhani Rautavaara. Since 1976, he has himself been teaching at the Academy. Following his own distinctive route on the Finnish contemporary music scene, Karlsson composes in a neotonal vein and has been called a ‘romantic modernist’ – as well as a ‘modern romanticist’. His work list includes all genres from chamber music and solo works to orchestral works, and he has also composed extensively for voices. Two of his later works are recorded here, in performances conducted by John Storgårds with whom Karlsson has collaborated extensively, both as conductor and violinist. Storgårds and his Lapland Chamber Orchestra have previously recorded four discs with music by Kalevi Aho for BIS – discs which have received critical acclaim and international distinctions such as the prestigious German ECHO Klassik award. Here they are joined by Gabriel Suovanen and Christoffer Sundqvist, the soloists for whom Lars Karlsson composed his Songs to texts by Lagerkvist and Clarinet Concerto. The song cycle charts what the composer calls ‘a life-journey’, setting texts by the Swedish poet and Nobel Prize laureate Pär Lagerkvist. In the Concerto, Karlsson instead revisits his own production, exploring an interest for fourths and fifths which was particularly strong during the early part of his career, but also reusing themes from other works, for instance in the folksong-like second movement.
Read more![Lapland Chamber Orchestra, John Storgårds - Abrahamsen: Schnee (2022) [Official Digital Download 24bit/192kHz] Download](https://imghd.xyz/images/2022/03/13/ney71himwmidb_600.jpg)
Lapland Chamber Orchestra, John Storgårds – Abrahamsen: Schnee (2022)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/192 kHz | Time – 54:15 minutes | 1,58 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Digital Booklet, Front Cover | © Dacapo
Hans Abrahamsen’s feelings for snow are reflected in the titles of his works, for example in Winternacht, in the opera The Snow Queen and more straightforwardly in Schnee. In his music, the snow has many different states, and the colours are graduated with finely felt accuracy: snow white, cool blue white, blinding white, crystal clear.
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Lapland Chamber Orchestra, John Storgårds – Vagn Holmboe: Chamber Symphonies (2012)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/192 kHz | Time – 01:09:03 minutes | 2,43 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Digital Booklet, Front Cover | © Dacapo
Vagn Holmboe’s three chamber symphonies span the period when the Danish com poser immersed himself in symphonic works; they are a fine demonstration of his preoccupation with the processes of nature and the idea of musical metamorphosis. Lapland Chamber Orchestra and its conductor John Storgårds focus on Vagn Holmboe’s clear musical expression in three major works that have never previously been recorded.
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![Johan Dalene, Royal Stockholm Philharmonic Orchestra, John Storgårds - Nielsen & Sibelius: Violin Concertos (2022) [Official Digital Download 24bit/96kHz] Download](https://imghd.xyz/images/2022/03/31/wl7kdaszcb5ba_600.jpg)
Johan Dalene, Royal Stockholm Philharmonic Orchestra, John Storgårds – Nielsen & Sibelius: Violin Concertos (2022)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 01:13:13 minutes | 1,22 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Digital Booklet, Front Cover | © BIS
Carl Nielsen and Jean Sibelius, alongside Grieg the two giants in Nordic classical music, were both born in 1865. Both also received their first musical training on the violin, earning valuable insights when it came to writing for the instrument. Their respective Violin Concertos were composed some six years apart – Sibelius’ in 1904-05 and Nielsen’s in 1911 – and belong to the most performed works of either composer. They are nevertheless as different from each other as are the artistic temperaments of their makers. While retaining the traditional three-movement concerto form, Sibelius composed something closer to a Late-Romantic orchestral tone poem giving the orchestra unusual prominence. Nielsen on the other hand opted for an unconventional form, reminiscent of the Baroque concerto grosso: the spiky, neoclassical work is nominally in two movements, but with each movement having a slow and a fast section.
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