New Release Round-up,
New Release Round-up - 22nd June 2018
A great week for baroque music from Italian conductors, as Rinaldo Alessandrini celebrates the year 1700, Fabio Biondi resurrects an oratorio by the Neapolitan composer Francesco Feo, and Ottavio Dantone continues Naïve’s Vivaldi Edition with a collection of concerti for strings and viola d’amore; elsewhere, Joshua Bell returns to Bruch's Violin Concerto No. 1 thirty years after his breakthrough recording with the Academy of St Martin in the Fields, and Kent Nagano gives the chamber version of Bernstein’s final stage work its recording premiere.
Mendelssohn: A Midsummer Night's Dream
Budapest Festival Orchestra & Pro Musica (women's choir), Iván Fischer
It's almost three decades since Fischer and his Budapest orchestra recorded any Mendelssohn, but this Dream more than holds its own against the recent fine accounts from John Eliot Gardiner and the late Claudio Abbado, and has the advantage of including several sections which are often omitted, such as the tiny parodic funeral-march from Act Five.
Available Formats: SACD, MP3, FLAC, Hi-Res FLAC, Hi-Res+ FLAC
Following their debut disc on Rubicon, which coupled Beethoven’s Eroica with Méhul’s Symphony No. 1, König and his Luxembourg band offer another illuminating pairing: Schubert’s Great Symphony with Berio’s 1989/90 work based on the fragments of Schubert’s other ‘unfinished’ symphony, D936a.
Available Formats: CD, MP3, FLAC, Hi-Res FLAC
Heras-Casado’s account of La mer with the Philharmonia at the Royal Festival Hall at the beginning of the year was described by The Guardian as ‘immaculately judged…by turns thrillingly turbulent and majestic’; it’s preceded here by the symphonic fragments from the mystery-play Le Martyre de Saint Sébastien from 1911 and Prélude à l'après-midi d'un faune.
Available Formats: CD, MP3, FLAC, Hi-Res FLAC
Bell’s first recording of Bruch’s evergreen Violin Concerto No. 1 (coupled with the Mendelssohn) with the ASMF under Sir Neville Marriner in 1988 announced the then 21-year-old American violinist as a major talent; three decades on, he directs the ensemble (of which he became Music Director in 2011) from the violin in the same work, paired with the Scottish Fantasy.
Available Formats: MP3, FLAC, Hi-Res FLAC
Six years after their 1600 album (‘a superb release in every way’ - MusicWeb International), Alessandrini and his Italian period band jump forward a century with a collection of sinfonie and concerti grossi by composers including Vivaldi, Caldara, Geminiani, Galuppi, Locatelli and Pugnani (perhaps best known today via Fritz Kreisler, who published some of his own baroque pastiches under his name!)
Available Formats: CD, MP3, FLAC, Hi-Res FLAC
The Ukrainian pianist (who won the gold medal at the Fourteenth Van Cliburn International Piano Competition in 2013) has been performing Scriabin’s music in recital on a regular basis over the past couple of years; reviewing a recent recital in May 2016, BachTrack praised his ‘sad poetry and casual virtuosity’ in the preludes.
Available Formats: MP3, FLAC, Hi-Res FLAC
Feo: San Francesco di Sales
Monica Piccinini, Roberta Mameli, Delphine Galou, Luca Tittoto; Stuttgarter Kammerorchester, Fabio Biondi
A friend of Pergolesi and colleague of the prolific librettist Metastasio, Feo lived and worked in Naples and had enormous success as an opera composer before turning his talents to sacred music in the early 1720s; this oratorio from around 1734 is a series of reflections on the life of a Catholic saint and Bishop of Geneva who lived roughly a century earlier.
Available Formats: 2 CDs, MP3, FLAC, Hi-Res FLAC
Nagano (who studied with Bernstein towards the end of his life) conducts the first-ever recording of the chamber version of his last work for the stage (a postscript to his better-known 1951 opera Trouble in Tahiti), adapted by Garth Edwin Sunderland and premiered by Nagano in 2013. Sutherland works closely with the Bernstein estate and has also prepared new editions of works including Peter Pan, Trouble in Tahiti and On the Waterfront.
Available Formats: MP3, FLAC, Hi-Res FLAC
Katherine Cooper - Head of Editorial
