Edgar Moreau, WDR Sinfonieorchester Köln, Andris Poga – Weinberg, Dutilleux: Cello Concertos (2023)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 01:01:39 minutes | 1,02 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Warner Classics
Lyricism and Confidence – Cellist Edgar Moreau with Works by Weinberg and Dutilleux.
“His sound is superb, his phrasing delightful, and the intensity of his performance is enhanced by the immediacy of his presence in the soundstage,” Grammophone Magazine already wrote about Edgar Moreau’s previous album on Erato. Now the cellist, together with the WDR Sinfonieorchester conducted by Andris Poga, releases a recording of works by the Pole Mieczysław Weinberg and his contemporary Henri Dutilleux.
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WDR Sinfonieorchester Köln, Heinz Holliger – Schumann: Complete Symphonic Works, Vol. VI (2016)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/48 kHz | Time – 01:16:00 minutes | 750 MB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © audite Musikproduktion
Concluding audite’s Schumann edition, this CD combines the first symphony with the late overtures, whose compactness displays the composer’s symphonic mastery.
The overtures, all written after 1847, represent an essential complement to the symphonies: seen in relation to the symphonies, they take a similar position as do the Konzertstücke relative to the concertos. Schumann conceived them partly as preludes to operas, oratorios or incidental works, partly as independent pieces. On the one hand, they were intended to provide “an image of the whole”; on the other, their purpose was to introduce, leading into the drama. Beside larger- and smaller-scale vocal works, and alongside the poetic renewal of the symphony, they bear testimony to the great significance of literature in Schumann’s musical thought and style.
The overtures are supplemented with Schumann’s first symphony, the so-called “Zwickau”. It was the composer’s first attempt in the symphonic form to be performed publicly, even though the work remained incomplete.
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WDR Sinfonieorchester Köln, Heinz Holliger – Schumann: Complete Symphonic Works, Vol. III (2014)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/44,1 kHz | Time – 52:56 minutes | 485 MB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © audite Musikproduktion
Featuring the Cello Concerto and the second version of the D minor Symphony, this CD presents two major works that Schumann composed and revised during his time as music director in Düsseldorf. In both works, the movements of the classical model merge into one another without interruption. By transforming themes and musical codes he creates a stream of thought and coherence akin to the course of a narration or abstract theatre. His original version of the D minor Symphony of 1841 was pioneering in its literarisation of musical form. When he began revising it in 1851, the first Symphonic Poems of Franz Liszt had been performed: they aspired to a greater fusion of music and literature. In his revision of the D minor Symphony, Schumann discreetly reinforced the traditional symphonic elements of the work. The obvious references to Mendelssohn in his Cello Concerto suggest that he regarded multi-part forms as “narrations without words”, or as “bigger siblings” of the “songs without words”. According to Schumann, neither genre required explanation via a literary programme.
The original version of the D minor Symphony is included in the first volume of this series. Both versions, whose relationship remains an object of divisive discussion to the present day, can therefore be compared to one another.
Holliger’s interpretations draw on a life-long study of Schumann’s oeuvre, thought, personality and fate. Holliger’s approach imparts lightness and lucidity to these opulent scores thanks to a hierarchical balance of parts, delicately graded dynamics and invigorating tempi. The widespread image of this romantic composer as a weak orchestrator is thus refreshingly rectified.
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WDR Sinfonieorchester Köln, Heinz Holliger – Schumann: Complete Symphonic Works, Vol. II (2014)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/48 kHz | Time – 01:06:48 minutes | 674 MB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © audite Musikproduktion
With this CD, audite is presenting the second volume of the complete recording of Robert Schumann’s orchestral works. The series includes all the symphonies (with both versions of the Fourth) as well as all the overtures and concertos.
The Second and Third Symphonies, according to the usual numbering, passed through contrasting histories of reception. Whereas the ‘Rhenish’ remained relatively popular, the C major Symphony was received by contemporaries as trend-setting, but receded into the background from the late nineteenth century onwards. At this time, criticism was primarily levelled at its instrumentation, which had still been praised after its premiere. Heinz Holliger and the WDR Symphony Orchestra have recorded the works with an orchestra of the same size that was available to Schumann. In so doing, they not only uncover the sonic ideal of the composer, but also its consistent and convincing realisation.
Holliger’s performances draw on a lifetime study of Schumann’s music, thought, personality and fate. His approach imparts lightness and lucidity to these opulent scores through a hierarchical balance of parts, delicately gradated dynamics and invigorating tempos. The widespread image of this romantic composer as a weak orchestrator receives a refreshing and well-grounded correction.
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WDR Sinfonieorchester Köln, Heinz Holliger – Schumann: Complete Symphonic Works, Vol. I (2013)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/48 kHz | Time – 01:12:07 minutes | 704 MB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © audite Musikproduktion
This CD launches a complete series of recordings of Robert Schumann’s orchestral works, performed by the WDR Symphony Orchestra under the baton of Heinz Holliger. The series will contain all the symphonies (including both versions of the Fourth) as well as all the overtures and concertos. Holliger’s performances draw on a lifetime study of Schumann’s music, thought, personality and fate. His approach imparts lightness and lucidity to these opulent scores through a hierarchical balance of parts, delicately gradated dynamics and invigorating tempos. The widespread image of this romantic composer as a weak orchestrator receives a refreshing and well-grounded correction.
Volume 1 of the series presents the First Symphony in B-flat major (Op. 38), Overture, Scherzo and Finale (Op. 52) and the original 1841 version of the Fourth Symphony in D minor (Op. 120).
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WDR Sinfonieorchester Köln, Eivind Aadland – E. Grieg: Complete Symphonic Works, Vol. V (2015)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/48 kHz | Time – 01:06:24 minutes | 599 MB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © audite Musikproduktion
Soprano Camilla Tilling plays a leading part in the fifth and final volume of audite’s complete recording of Edvard Grieg’s orchestral works: although Grieg drew on his own songs with orchestra or piano for the Six Orchestral Songs, this set forms an independent, elegiacally-hued cycle reflecting the core of Grieg’s personality. It includes not only two songs from the incidental music to Peer Gynt (Solveig’s Song and Solveig’s Lullaby) but also transcriptions of solemn piano songs such as the Roman ballad From Monte Pincio, or the memory of the short-lived Norwegian patriot Henrik Wergeland, to whom the final song (sung by Tom Erik Lie) is dedicated. This recording gathers several important examples of the less familiar Edvard Grieg as composer of songs with orchestra.
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WDR Sinfonieorchester Köln, Eivind Aadland – E. Grieg: Complete Symphonic Works, Vol. IV (2014)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/44,1 kHz | Time – 01:02:38 minutes | 517 MB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © audite Musikproduktion
The fourth volume of audite’s complete recording of Edvard Grieg’s orchestral works with the WDR Sinfonieorchester Köln and the conductor Eivind Aadland combines the most popular work by the Norwegian national composer with his least known: the Piano Concerto in A minor, performed here by Herbert Schuch, represented the 25-year-old Grieg’s breakthrough to international fame and is one of a handful of great piano concertos on which every pianist is judged. In the concerto, the influence of Schumann, his great model (Grieg had, after all, studied in Leipzig), is combined with that of Norwegian folk music – for the first time in a work by Grieg these national elements can be detected, which enthused not only his compatriots but also his wider European audience.
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Ernesto Molinari, Thomas Demenga, Marino Formenti, Peter Rundel, WDR Sinfonieorchester Köln – Jarrell: …mais les images restent… (2017)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/48 kHz | Time – 01:02:33 minutes | 559 MB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Aeon
Michael Jarrell claims for himself the status of a craftsman. Well aware that mastery of his art is acquired in the long term, he has often felt the need to return to the same object, considered from a different angle, when he judges that he now possesses more efficient tools and can express his musical ideas with greater precision. Although he says he is fascinated by artists who constantly work at the same idea, he does not seek a reduction of this kind for himself, but rather moves from one work to another through a process of reactions. That attitude is illustrated by this new album in which works and performers intersect; and the artists here are the composer’s most loyal supporters. The arborescences and ruptures, the profundity of the multiple levels of interpretation we can perceive in the pieces on the programme of this disc, make us conscious of the multiplicity of the levels of meaning present in his music. Michael Jarrell’s training as a visual artist has probably honed his sensitivity to forms still further. The impact on him of Paul Klee’s ideas, notably concerning the relationships between forms and movements, is doubtless not foreign to the way he animates the materials with which he composes.
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WDR Sinfonieorchester Köln, Hans Knappertsbusch – Bruckner: Symphony No. 7 in E Major, WAB 107 (Remastered 2022) [Live] (2022)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/48 kHz | Time – 01:06:19 minutes | 374 MB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Archipel
The WDR Symphony Orchestra Cologne (German: WDR Sinfonieorchester Köln) is a German radio orchestra based in Cologne, where the orchestra mainly performs at two concert halls: the WDR Funkhaus Wallrafplatz and the Kölner Philharmonie.
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WDR Sinfonieorchester Köln – Beethoven: Complete Symphonies (2020)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/48 kHz | Time – 05:41:09 minutes | 3,23 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © PentaTone
Eine einzigartige Sinneserfahrung: Marek Janowski dirigiert Beethoven: Es ist schon etwas Besonderes, selbst im übervollen Beethoven-Sinfonien-Katalog, wenn Marek Janowski und das WDR Sinfonieorchester eine Gesamteinspielung der Sinfonien Beethovens vorlegen: Einer der meist gefeierten Dirigenten unserer Tage und eines der renommiertesten deutschen Rundfunkorchester sind gerade gut genug, für Beethovens unerreichte Sinfonien. So kühn sie für unsere Ohren immer noch klingen, kann man sich leicht vorstellen, wie Beethovens Zeitgenossen vom Umfang, der schieren Kraft und dem abenteuerlichen Charakter seiner Sinfonien völlig überwältigt waren.
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Anna Malikova, WDR-Sinfonieorchester Köln, Thomas Sanderling – Camille Saint-Saëns – Piano Concertos Nos. 3 & 5 (2007)
SACD ISO (2.0/MCH): 2,75 GB | 24B/88,2kHz Stereo FLAC: 941 MB | Full Artwork
Label/Cat#: Audite # aud 10.012 | Country/Year: Germany 2007 | Genre: Classical | Style: Romantic
The five piano concertos of St.-Saens are not frequently heard and that is a shame in view of the endless repeats of the Tchaikovsky, Grieg and Schumann warhorses. They are all well-composed examples of the best of French instrumental music of the later 19th century and full of lovely melodies that would appeal greatly to concert audiences. I hadn’t enjoyed any of them for some time and it was a pleasure to have these two concertos in enveloping hi-res surround. I don’t know how we missed out on Vol. I but plan to check into that.
Brian Bloom talks in his Denon receiver review this issue about the people who often prefer the stereo mix on SACDs to the multichannel. I admit I seldom check either the CD or stereo options anymore because I always hear about the same thing in comparison. I really can’t imagine why anyone with five properly matched and located speakers would prefer the stereo mix to the multichannel mix! On these concertos the two-channel option is excellent and there is little one would miss. However, when switching to the multichannel option the soundstage takes on a depth and breadth it didn’t have, and the piano is better separated from the sound of the orchestra. There’s much more “air” around everything. The piano still sounds too wide but that’s a given.
The first movement of the Third Concerto is so bombastic one might almost think the composer was humorously depicting a lion or elephant from his Carnival of the Animals. It’s slow movement is rather brooding, but the finale is a colorful showpiece for the soloist. The Fifth Concerto is sometimes subtitled “Egyptian Concerto” because that is where it was composed. St.-Saens frequently spent time in North Africa, which had started when he was a child with a medical problems. He indicated the middle movement was a sort of tour of the Orient. One theme in it is a Nubian love song which the composer had heard boatmen on the Nile sing. The opening and closing movements are however thoroughly French. Orchestration is very colorful, with solos originating in the winds and strings. 4/5 ~audiophile-audition
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WDR Sinfonieorchester Köln, Marek Janowski – Hindemith: Symphonic Metamorphosis, Nobilissima visione Suite & Konzertmusik (2018)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/48 kHz | Time – 58:24 minutes | 573 MB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © PentaTone
No, this is not a re-edit, but really a brand new recording – January 2017 – made by the WDR Symphony Orchestra Cologne and Marek Janowski. In addition to the vigorous and explosive Symphonic Metamorphosis of Themes by Carl Maria von Weber, the theme in question stemming from Schiller’s version of Gozzi’s Turandot, the recording also features the rarer – and much less “fun” – Nobilissima visione suite. In the initial eponymous ballet from which the suite is derived, Hindemith depicted in musical tones a few episodes of the life of Giovanni di Pietro di Bernardone, better known as Saint Francis of Assisi. The last movement depicts, provided such a text can even be depicted, the Canticle of the Sun; Hindemith turns it into an immense and intense passacaglia that instead of actually “telling” the Canticle, manages to convey its sheer grandeur. The album closes on another splendour, Konzertmusik for Brass and String Orchestra, Op. 50 from 1930, as ordered by Serge Koussevitzky and the Boston Orchestra. In the great polyphonic tradition, the composer “opposes” groups, in this case the brass – 4 trumpets, 4 horns, 3 trombones, 1 tuba – and the strings (for which the partition requires the largest possible headcount), resulting in a fantastic musical, contrapuntal and architectural richness, not to mention a touch of humour in the race between both ensembles in the second part, as the brass play a rather quirky waltz with jazzy accents and the strings a much more “serious” style is adopted. For anyone barely familiar with Hindemith, these two latest works are a must-have, and more than likely a true revelation!
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WDR Sinfonieorchester Köln, Jukka-Pekka Saraste – Beethoven: Symphonies Nos. 4 & 5 (2018)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/48 kHz | Time – 01:06:12 minutes | 650 MB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Profil
Two of Beethoven’s most magnificent symphonies are featured on this new release from Jukka-Pekka Saraste and the WDR Sinfonieorchester. Jukka–Pekka Saraste writes of this new album: “I endeavor to disclose Beethoven’s emotions. That is the key to understanding his music. One has to constantly keep those currents of optimism and pessimism in balance. For that, you need to have access to an orchestra’s full sound spectrum in a highly flexible, dynamic manner. I believe that Beethoven’s impact is paramount because his message can be felt everywhere. Not just in Europe. A message of strength, of humanity – and one that places human culture in the forefront. There is so much destruction in the world; we need to hold on to things that enrich the spirit.” Jukka-Pekka Saraste has established himself as one of the outstanding conductors of his generation, demonstrating remarkable musical depth and integrity. Born in Heinola, Finland, he began his career as a violinist before training as a conductor with Jorma Panula at the Sibelius Academy in Helsinki. He has held positions with the Scottish Chamber Orchestra, Finnish Radio Symphony Orchestra, Toronto Symphony Orchestra, and the BBC Symphony Orchestra.
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WDR Sinfonieorchester Köln, Heinz Holliger – Schumann: Complete Symphonic Works (2018)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/48 kHz | Time – 06:39:23 minutes | 4,14 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © audite Musikproduktion
The complete edition of Robert Schumann’s symphonic works with the WDR Symphony Orchestra Cologne under Heinz Holliger is now available as a 6 album set.
Alongside the Symphonies Nos 1-4, this edition comprises the D minor Symphony in the original version, as well as the Symphony in G minor, “Zwickau”. In addition, there are the Overture, Scherzo & Finale, the overtures (Manfred / Hermann and Dorothea / Genoveva / The Bride of Messina / Julius Caesar / Scenes from Goethe’s Faust) and all solo works with orchestra: the Violin Concerto and the Fantasy for Violin and Orchestra (Patricia Kopatchinskaja), the Cello Concerto (Oren Shevlin), the Piano Concerto (Dénes Várjon), the two Konzertstücke for Piano (Alexander Lonquich) and the Konzertstück for Four Horns (horn section of the WDR Symphony Orchestra). This selection of works creates one of the most comprehensive recorded editions of Schumann’s symphonic works.
The Schumann specialist Heinz Holliger successfully proves, contrary to common preconceptions, Robert Schumann’s great art of orchestral instrumentation.
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WDR Sinfonieorchester Köln, Eivind Aadland – Grieg: Complete Symphonic Works (2019)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/48 kHz | Time – 05:27:10 minutes | 2,97 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © audite Musikproduktion
This complete edition of the symphonic works of Edvard Grieg is especially convincing thanks to the authentic approach of the Norwegian Eivind Aadland, who strongly influences the interpretations of the WDR Symphony Orchestra Cologne under his direction. The first LP of this series presents two of Grieg’s principal collections on 180g vinyl: his first Peer Gynt suite from the incidental music to Henrik Ibsen’s drama Peer Gynt, the story of the “Nordic Faust” which inspired Grieg to compose a sonic panorama of the Norwegian character – from the melancholy song Death of Åses to the furious chase in the Hall of the Mountain King – as well as his four Symphonic Dances Op. 64 of 1898, where the composer draws on his experiences as a conductor of the leading European orchestras. The second LP of this Grieg series includes the second Peer Gynt suite, the Funeral March in Memory of Rikard Nordraak as well as the famous suite From Holberg’s Time – a homage to Ludvig Holberg, the caustic “Molière of the North” – and Klokkeklang – an almost impressionist study documenting a surprisingly visionary trait of the otherwise rather conservative composer.
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