Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra & Andrew Manze – Vaughan Williams: A Pastoral Symphony & Symphony No.4 (2017)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 01:08:45 minutes | 1,11 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Onyx
Andrew Manze’s interpretations of Vaughan Williams’ Symphonies have met with acclaim from audiences and critics alike. This second volume in the cycle from the RLPO and Andrew Manze feature Nos 3 & 4: two works heavily influenced by the Great War and its aftermath. A repressed seething rage and sorrow at the futility of the war pervades No.3, “It is really wartime music – a great deal of it originated when I used to go up night after night in the ambulance wagon at Ecoivres” said the composer. The 3rd has been called RVW’s ‘War Requiem’. The 4th is a violent and turbulent work, reflecting the post Great War world and the political turmoil of the 1930s. The audience was perplexed by the nature of the music “I don’t know if I like it, but it’s what I meant” he said after the premiere.
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Domingo Hindoyan, Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra – Roberto Sierra (2023)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 01:05:52 minutes | 1,16 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Onyx Classics
The works included on this album span 25 years of creative activity. While current projects are always my focus, looking back is not something I often do; however, this recording confronted me with compositions representing a good part of my creative life. Most interesting was to notice that, although my music has changed through the years, there are traits common to all these pieces. These are elements that encompass aspects ranging from the expressive to the technical. A penchant for certain types of melodic constructions, harmonies, and orchestration choices is always present in these works. Another common element is the use of idioms that stem out of Afro-Caribbean and, more specifically, from the folk and popular music of Puerto Rico’ Composer, Roberto Sierra.
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James Ehnes, Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra, Andrew Manze – Beethoven: Violin Concerto, Romance – Schubert: Romance (2017)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 01:11:19 minutes | 1,19 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Digital Booklet, Front Cover | © Onyx Classics
Beethoven’s Violin Concerto represents the supreme challenge for violinists. Far from being a virtuoso display piece, this is chamber music on a large scale, the last and greatest ‘classical’ violin concerto, giving the soloist no place to hide with a solo part that is often very exposed against sparse orchestral accompaniment. A lukewarm reception at the concerto’s premiere in 1806 led to it being forgotten until Joseph Joachim resurrected it in the 1850s and restored to its rightful position as one of the greatest and most popular concertos for the instrument. This is James Ehnes’ first recording of this concerto, and he is supported sensitively by the award winning RLPO and fellow violinist-turned-conductor, Andrew Manze. The combination of soloist, orchestra and conductor on this recording is a dream team.
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Boris Giltburg, Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra, Vasily Petrenko – Beethoven: Piano Concertos Nos. 3 & 4, Opp. 37 & 58 (2023)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 01:09:56 minutes | 1,19 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Digital Booklet, Front Cover | © Naxos
For 19th-century audiences Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 3 was the most loved of all his piano concertos, a work in which the balancing of high drama, tenderness, lyricism and humour is most pronounced and in which a coda resolves inner tensions with brilliance and triumphant grandeur. Piano Concerto No. 4 is the most introspective and poetic of the concertos. The simplicity of its opening piano statement gives way to an unprecedented dialogue in the central movement between a heartfelt piano and an austere unison string orchestra, before the infectious energy of the dramatic finale.
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Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra – Symphonie n°10 (2010)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/44,1 kHz | Time – 52:09 minutes | 492 MB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Naxos
These two hugely contrasting symphonies come from the opposite ends of Shostakovich’s life and career. The Second Symphony was written to commemorate the 10th anniversary of the Bolshevik October Revolution. Its advanced idiom of experimental textures and abstract effects can perhaps be best described as organised musical chaos. The Fifteenth was Shostakovich’s last symphony and is filled with remarkable contrasts, from the rollicking quotes from Rossini’s William Tell Overture and eerie references to Wagner’s Götterdämmerung and Tristan und Isolde, to the last and perhaps most imaginative of the composer’s symphonic passacaglias.
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Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra – Concerto pour piano (2009)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/44,1 kHz | Time – 01:09:32 minutes | 609 MB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Naxos
These accounts of four diverse works by Ralph Vaughan Williams are in every way splendid. James Judd clearly knows his way around these scores, and his conducting is as precise and propulsive as it is richly colored and deeply affectionate. His Wasps overture has plenty of snap and bite, while his English Folk Song Suite and The Running Set (another folk song suite in all but name) are bright and colorful. The Royal Liverpool Philharmonic responds to the conductor and the music with energy, enthusiasm, and plenty of power, and its playing compares favorably to that of the orchestras of that nation’s capital. Pianist Ashley Wass covers himself with glory in his robustly virtuosic but warmly nuanced reading of the English composer’s relatively rarely recorded Piano Concerto, particularly in the work’s lyrical central Romanza. For dedicated Vaughan Williams aficionados, this disc may not erase memories of Adrian Boult’s witty Wasps and muscular English Folk Song Suite, nor Howard Shelley and Vernon Handley’s revelatory Piano Concerto, but there is much to savor in Judd and Wass’ sleek and insightful performances. Naxos’ digital sound is too reserved and recessed to be wholly effective.
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Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra & Domingo Hindoyan – Debussy, Dukas, Roussel (2022)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 01:08:12 minutes | 1,17 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © PM Classics Ltd.
Since the 2021 / 22 season, the Armenian-Venezuelan conductor Domingo Hindoyan is the chief conductor of the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra. His first recording with the orchestra in this position is dedicated to early and late masterpieces by Claude Debussy, Albert Roussel and Paul Dukas. Dukas’ ballet score is one of the most unjustly neglected masterpieces of the genre.
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Simon Trpčeski, Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra, Vasily Petrenko – Prokofiev: Piano Concertos Nos. 1 & 3 (2017)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 52:29 minutes | 910 MB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © PM Classics Ltd.
The chief draw on this release by Simon Trpceski is the Piano Concerto No. 1 in D flat major, Op. 10, composed while Sergey Prokofiev was still a student in St. Petersburg. Prokofiev thought highly enough of the work to premiere it in Moscow himself, and indeed it’s a student work of the best kind, brash and overflowing with confidence. Consider and sample the broad opening and, after about a minute, the angular music, a kind of second theme, seems as though it comes from an entirely different composition and dares you to imagine how it can be integrated with the opening. Prokofiev goes on to do just that, of course, and it was music like this that antagonized conservative listeners and, in an age when such antagonism was box office gold, did much to propel Prokofiev’s early career. In its broader outlines the work is not so dissimilar to the better-known Piano Concerto No. 3 in C major, Op. 26, one of the peaks of Prokofiev’s neoclassic output. The performances by Trpceski and the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra under Vasily Petrenko are very strong, capturing the exuberance of the Piano Concerto No. 1 and delivering a crowd-pleasing, sparkling Third with no hint of the mordant quality many attach to the work. The Overture on Hebrew Themes, Op. 34bis, is a fine, little-known entr-acte. A crowd-pleasing Prokofiev release.
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Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra & Andrew Manze – Vaughan Williams: The Lark Ascending, Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis and Other Works (2019)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 01:09:31 minutes | 1,20 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Onyx
Following their hugely successful cycle of Vaughan Williams’ nine symphonies, the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra is led by Andrew Manze in this album of the composer’s most popular shorter orchestral works.
This disc features Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis, Fantasia on Greensleeves, The Lark Ascending and The Five Variants of Dives and Lazarus, as well as the rarely performed orchestral version of The Serenade to Music.
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Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra, Vasily Petrenko – Shostakovich: Symphony No. 7 ‘Leningrad’ (2013)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 01:19:07 minutes | 1,59 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Naxos
Three weeks after the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941, Shostakovich volunteered with the Home Guard in Leningrad. As the siege of the city intensified, he worked on his Seventh Symphony, completing three movements before being forced to leave Leningrad and travel east by train. The work was completed in December that year. Initially he gave each movement a programmatic title, but later withdrew them, leaving this epic work as an emblem of heroic defiance in the face of conflict and crisis: ‘I dedicate my Seventh Symphony to our struggle against fascism, to our coming victory over the enemy, to my native city, Leningrad.’
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Benjamin Grosvenor, Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra, James Judd – Rhapsody in Blue: Saint-Säens, Ravel, Gershwin (2013)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 01:05:42 minutes | 1,10 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Digital Booklet, Front Cover | © Decca Music Group Ltd.
The three principal works that Benjamin Grosvenor has chosen for his first concerto album complement each other perfectly. The urbane charm and dazzling virtuosity of Saint-Saëns lead naturally on to the brittle brilliance and dry wit of his fellow Frenchman Ravel. Ravel’s distinctly jazzy G major Concerto was written soon after he’d met Gershwin, and just a few years after the great Broadway songsmith had so spectacularly gatecrashed his way into the classical world with his syncopated, note-bending Rhapsody in Blue.
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