Howard Shelley, BBC Philharmonic Orchestra & Martyn Brabbins – Scott: Piano Concerto, Symphony No. 4 & Early One Morning (2006/2022)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/48 kHz | Time – 01:13:06 minutes | 653 MB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Chandos
Cyril Scott’s music inhabits a sound-world that is very much its own, despite the inevitable comparisons to composers such as Scriabin, Sorabji, and even the French impressionists. This new recording of the First Piano Concerto – the first one in over 30 years – takes a fresher, lighter approach that is absolutely thrilling in the outer movements.
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Jack Liebeck, BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra, Martyn Brabbins – The Romantic Violin Concerto Vol. 17 – Bruch: Violin Concerto No 3 & Scottish Fantasy (2014)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 01:09:35 minutes | 1,20 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Hyperion Records
Award-winning violinist Jack Liebeck brings his impassioned tones, fulsome emotional display and formidable technique to the first of three albums of music by Max Bruch.
This programme presents one of Bruch’s most popular pieces for violin and orchestra, the Scottish Fantasy, alongside one of his least known, the Violin Concerto No 3 in D minor, Op 58. Anyone hearing Jack Liebeck’s performance may well wonder why this concerto has languished in the lumber room for so long—it has never been heard at the BBC Proms, for example. It was written for Joseph Joachim who gave the premiere in Düsseldorf and subsequently played the concerto in Hamburg, Berlin, Frankfurt, Strasbourg, Breslau, Leipzig, Cologne and London (for the Philharmonic Society).
The Scottish Fantasy in E flat major, Op 46 (or more correctly ‘Fantasia for the violin with orchestra and harp, freely using Scottish folk melodies’), was written in Berlin during the winter of 1879–80 for Sarasate and reflected the Spaniard’s more colourful personality. Although Bruch never visited Scotland, he was typical of German Romantics in having a fascination with the picture of the country painted by such writers as Walter Scott. For the Scottish Fantasy he drew on James Johnson’s voluminous folk-song collection The Scots Musical Museum.
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Jack Liebeck, BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra, Martyn Brabbins – Bruch: Violin Concerto No. 2 & other works (2017)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 01:08:19 minutes | 1,20 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Digital Booklet, Front Cover | © Hyperion Records
The ‘justly celebrated’ Jack Liebeck (as described by The Strad) follows in the footsteps of Heifetz and Perlman in championing Bruch’s now neglected Violin Concerto No 2, originally written for Sarasate. Three shorter concertante works for violin and orchestra complete the album (Bruch thought the Adagio appassionato one of his best works) which marks volume 21 in our highly regarded Romantic Violin Concerto series.
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Jack Liebeck, BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra, Martyn Brabbins – Bruch: Violin Concerto No. 1 & other works (2016)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 01:12:12 minutes | 1,28 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Hyperion Records
Max Bruch’s Violin Concerto No 1 is the daddy—the most popular ever written. Much recorded, Jack Liebeck turns in a dazzling performance of youthful vigour, prefacing the Concerto with the gorgeous Serenade and a Romance.
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BBC Symphony Orchestra, Martyn Brabbins – Vaughan Williams: A London Symphony & other works (2016)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 01:12:25 minutes | 1,18 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Hyperion Records
Vaughan Williams’s London Symphony (the composer’s favourite of the nine) makes a rare appearance in its 1920 first publication. Three lesser-known works complete a highly desirable programme, while Martyn Brabbins and the BBC Symphony Orchestra understand how this music should be played like few others. This is mandatory listening.
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BBC Symphony Orchestra, Martyn Brabbins – Vaughan Williams: Symphonies Nos 3 & 4 (2018)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 01:20:57 minutes | 1,38 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Hyperion Records
Compelling performances of two very different symphonies, the complex visionary pantheism of the ‘Pastoral’ an ideal foil for the unbridled ferocity of No 4. An added incentive, Martyn Brabbins’s idiomatic realization of Vaughan Williams’s choral Saraband ‘Helen’ (a first recording) is a real discovery.
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BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra, Martyn Brabbins – Tippett: Symphonies Nos 1 & 2 (2017)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 01:14:44 minutes | 1,33 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Hyperion Records
Tippett’s first two published symphonies are mature and confident works dating from the middle of the last century. Coruscating accounts from Martyn Brabbins and the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra are sure to win new friends for this marvellous music.
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Artur Pizarro, BBC National Orchestra of Wales, Martyn Brabbins – Romantic Piano Concerto 64 – Oswald & Napoleão dos Santos: Piano Concertos (2014)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 01:07:06 minutes | 1,13 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Hyperion Records
Portuguese virtuoso Artur Pizarro makes a welcome return to the Romantic Piano Concerto series with the outpourings of two brilliant pianist-composers. Their names may not be familiar to listeners today. The Brazilian Henrique Oswald and the Portuguese Alfredo Napoleão were born in the same year, less than three months apart, when Schumann, Brahms and Liszt were alive and Chopin recently deceased. Both were of mixed European heritage: Oswald with a Swiss-German father and Italian mother, Napoleão with an Italian father and Portuguese mother. Both were child prodigies who became widely travelled concert pianists, pedagogues and composers. In 1868 Oswald gave his ‘farewell recital’ and left Rio de Janeiro to study in Europe; Napoleão went to Brazil.
Oswald’s Piano Concerto in G minor, Op 10, dates from about 1886, the year he met Liszt. Although influences of Fauré can be detected in the second theme, the overall character of the first movement owes more to the late Romantic German style. The orchestration is rich and full, but the Tchaikovskian athleticism and virtuosity of the piano-writing keep the soloist to the fore.
Napoleão’s Piano Concerto No 2 in E flat minor, Op 31, is undated but was probably composed around the same time as Oswald’s Piano Concerto. Although Napoleão performed the concerto in a solo piano version, the first performance with orchestra had to wait until 12 February 1941. This was given by Evaristo de Campos Coelho (1903–1988)—with whom Artur Pizarro, the pianist on the present recording, studied as a young child. He played the work numerous times, and performed it for Portuguese radio. Dinorah Leitão (who was Ivo Cruz’s daughter in law, and also a student of Campos Coelho) then played it, and Artur Pizarro is only the third pianist to champion this work.
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Antwerp Symphony Orchestra, Martyn Brabbins – Kalevi Aho: Trombone & Trumpet Concertos (2019)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 01:04:18 minutes | 1,04 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © BIS
Concertos for cor anglais are few and far between, and harp concertos aren’t very common either. In combining the two, Kalevi Aho has come up with a true rarity – possibly the only double concerto in existence for these two instruments. Composed in 2014, the work was commissioned by the Antwerp Symphony Orchestra for two of its solo players: Anneleen Lenaerts and Dimitri Mestdag, who also perform it here. The work is characteristically eclectic, making the most of the sonic possibilities of the solo instruments, but also of the orchestral palette.
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Melani Mestre, Martyn Brabbins, BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra – Albéniz & Granados: Piano Concertos (2015)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 01:16:56 minutes | 1,27 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Hyperion Records
Volume 65 (have you got them all?) of Hyperion’s Romantic Piano Concerto series journeys to Spain and the heart-on-sleeve world there to be found. The Albéniz Concierto fantástico owes much to Schumann and Chopin, albeit with an added drizzle of the Iberian peninsula; the perennially popular Rapsodia española, on the other hand, throws all such classical models to the wind.
Granados never actually got round to writing his piano concerto, so our pianist here—Hyperion debutant Melani Mestre—has done it for him. And it’s a romp. The first movement is pretty much ‘echt’, from Granados’ sketches for a putative piano concerto, but thereafter it’s a hugely enjoyable what-if …
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