New Release Round-up,
New Release Round-Up - 31st August 2018
Today’s new releases include Mahler’s Das Lied von der Erde from Simon Rattle, Magdalena Kožená, Stuart Skelton and the Symphonieorchester des Bayerischen Rundfunks, a second volume of Dussek from Howard Shelley and the Ulster Orchestra, and Matthias Goerne’s first Wozzeck on record – filmed at the Salzburg Festival last summer and directed by William Kentridge.
Mahler: Das Lied von der Erde
Magdalena Kožená (mezzo), Stuart Skelton (tenor), Symphonieorchester des Bayerischen Rundfunks, Simon Rattle
Rattle’s CBSO recording of Mahler’s ‘Song of the Earth’ back in the 1990s used the version for tenor and baritone (and indeed he’s been performing the work with Skelton and baritone Christian Gerhaher this season) - but this live recording from Munich’s Herkulessaal reverts to Mahler’s original conception, with Rattle’s wife Magdalena Kožená joining Skelton for Mahler's meditations on springtime, beauty, loneliness and loss.
Available Formats: CD, MP3, FLAC, Hi-Res FLAC
Järvi Senior presides over only the second complete recording of the Swedish composer’s mammoth symphonic cantata ‘The Song’, setting text by the composer and music-critic Ture Rangström and first performed in 1921. The album also includes the Two Sentimental Romances for violin and orchestra, the suite from Romeo och Julia, and Reverenza (originally part of the Serenade for Orchestra).
Available Formats: SACD, MP3, FLAC, Hi-Res FLAC
Schubert: Symphony No. 5 and Brahms Serenade No. 2
Orchestre Révolutionnaire et Romantique, Sir John Eliot Gardiner
Recorded live at the Concertgebouw in November 2016, this is Gardiner’s first Schubert symphony on disc since his account of the Great with the Wiener Philharmoniker twenty years ago. It’s paired with Brahms’s early Serenade No. 2, scored without violins and dedicated to Clara Schumann.
Available Formats: CD, MP3, FLAC, Hi-Res FLAC
Following their 2017 collaboration on Saint-Saëns’s Piano Concerto No. 2 (described by The Sunday Times as ‘barnstorming’), Von Oeyen and Villaume join forces once more for Debussy’s early Fantasie - the premiere was originally scheduled for 1890 but the work was never performed during the composer’s lifetime. Also includes Bizet’s youthful Symphony in C and Ravel’s Ma Mère l'Oye.
Available Formats: MP3, FLAC, Hi-Res FLAC
It was with Dussek that Hyperion and Shelley launched their Classical Piano Concerto series back in 2014 (‘a real find’ - BBC Music Magazine); four years on, they present three works written between 1787 and 1801, tracing the Czech composer’s journey from Mozartian Classicism to the darker, Beethovenian sound-world of the Piano Concerto in G minor Op. 49 (composed around the same time as Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 3).
Available Formats: CD, MP3, FLAC, Hi-Res FLAC
American Concertos
Baiba Skride (violin), Gothenburg Symphony Orchestra, Tampere Philharmonic Orchestra, Santtu-Matias Rouvali
Skride performs two pieces by composers associated with Hollywood, both of which were premiered by Jascha Heifetz – Korngold’s evergreen 1947 concerto and Miklós Rózsa’s less well-known but equally captivating work from 1953. Bernstein’s Serenade after Plato’s Symposium and the Symphonic Dances from West Side Story complete the programme.
Available Formats: 2 CDs, MP3, FLAC, Hi-Res FLAC
Harmonia Mundi’s Stradivari Collection (showcasing the remarkable instruments housed at the Philharmonie de Paris’s Musée de la musique) gets off to a superb start with Rousset performing eleven of Couperin’s suites on a harpsichord by Ioannes Couchet (part of a distinguished dynasty of instrument-makers from Antwerp); the instrument dates from 1652, around the time that the suites were composed.
Available Formats: 2 CDs, MP3, FLAC, Hi-Res FLAC
Rebecca Dale: REQUIEM For My Mother
Louise Alder (soprano), Trystan Griffiths (tenor), Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra, Clark Rundell
The debut album from Dale (the first female composer to sign to Decca Classics) centres on a tribute to her mother, who died in 2010; Materna Requiem uses melodies which Dale composed at a young age, and will receive its first-ever live performance at St Asaph Cathedral next month. The album also includes the choral symphony When Music Sounds, which was premiered on Radio 3 in 2014.
Available Formats: MP3, FLAC, Hi-Res FLAC
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