New Release Round-up,
Digital New Release Round-Up - 24th April 2020
Though our warehouse remains open as normal, we are finding that the physical release of many key new releases is being delayed at the moment due to manufacturing hold-ups, and so we’ve put together a selection of some of the most exciting upcoming titles which are already available digitally or are being issued as download-only. Highlights include the world premiere recording of John Adam’s Must the Devil Have All the Good Tunes (with Yuja Wang as soloist), Teodor Currentzis’s Beethoven Five with MusicAeterna, and Kammerorchester Wien-Berlin’s debut recording on Deutsche Grammophon.
John Adams: Must the Devil Have All the Good Tunes?
Yuja Wang (piano), Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra, Gustavo Dudamel
Commissioned by the Los Angeles Philharmonic and premiered by the artists here several months before this studio recording was made last year, Adams’s 25-minute score was inspired by an article which appeared in The New Yorker about radical Catholic convert and activist Dorothy Day (1897-1980), and was described by the Washington Post as ‘very much the modern-day equivalent of a Lisztian “Totentanz”’.
Available Formats: MP3, FLAC, Hi-Res FLAC
Fauré: Requiem
Katja Stuber (soprano), Benjamin Appl (baritone), Sinfonieorchester Basel, Balthasar-Neumann-Chor, Ivor Bolton
Released early in its own right for Easter, this account of the Requiem will be the final work on the upcoming third volume of Sony’s lovely Secret Fauré series, which will also include the Cantique de Jean Racine, Super flumina Babylonis and the Messe des pêcheurs de Villerville, which Fauré composed in collaboration with his former pupil André Messager in aid of a fishermen’s charity in 1881.
Available Formats: MP3, FLAC, Hi-Res FLAC
Shostakovich / Schnittke / Lutosławski
Denis Matsuev (piano), Gabor Tarkövi (trumpet), Kammerorchester Wien-Berlin, Rainer Honeck
Founded in 2008, Kammerorchester Wien - Berlin make their Deutsche Grammophon debut with the world premiere recording of Schnittke’s 1979 Concerto for Piano and Strings, flanked by Shostakovich’s Piano Concerto No. 1 and Lutosławski’s Variations on a Theme by Paganini (originally scored for piano and orchestra but arranged here for piano and percussion by Alexander Warenberg).
Available Formats: MP3, FLAC, Hi-Res FLAC
‘What might Vivaldi have composed for the clarinet if it had been more fully developed?’ is the question underpinning this album, which assembles three concertos for the instrument based on music from La fida ninfa, Il Giustino, Ottone in villa, Juditha triumphans, L'Olimpiade, and Tieteberga and arranged by Andreas N. Tarkmann. The programme also includes sinfonias from L'Olimpiade and Il Giustino.
Available Formats: MP3, FLAC, Hi-Res FLAC
Taking its title from the best-known movement of Villa-Lobos’s Bachianas Brasileiras (the album’s centrepiece), this journey through Spain and South America also includes Falla’s Siete Canciones populares españolas, Montsalvatge’s Canciones Negras, Granados’s Tonadillas en un estilo antiguo, and music by Pablo Casals, Albéniz, and Piazzólla.
Available Formats: CD, MP3, FLAC, Hi-Res FLAC
Beethoven: Triple Concerto & Symphony No. 7
Daniel Barenboim (piano/conductor), Anne-Sophie Mutter (violin), Yo-Yo Ma (cello) West-Eastern Divan Orchestra
Taken from live concerts in Buenos Aires and Berlin last year, this all-star recording of the Triple marks three anniversaries: the twentieth birthday of the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra and the 250th birthday of Beethoven, and the fortieth anniversary of Mutter and Ma’s landmark recording of the piece with Herbert von Karajan. Barenboim and Ma have also recorded the work together before, with Itzhak Perlman and the Berliner Philharmoniker.
Available Formats: CD, MP3, FLAC, Hi-Res FLAC
Prokofiev: Suites from The Gambler & The Tale of the Stone Flower
Lahti Symphony Orchestra, Dima Slobodeniouk
As well as the suite from Prokofiev’s first opera The Gambler, this album features a fusion of two sets of excerpts which the composer compiled from the score of his final ballet whilst waiting for official permission to be given for the premiere, comprising The Mistress of the Copper Mountain, the Gypsy Fantasy and Wedding Suite. The programme is rounded off by the early Autumnal Sketch.
Available Formats: SACD, MP3, FLAC, Hi-Res FLAC
On his final recording, the Swiss actor (who died last February) joins Kirill Gerstein for Strauss’s setting of Tennyson’s great narrative poem of 1864, telling the story of a sailor who returns home after a long period of being missing-presumed-dead only to find his wife has remarried, and finds himself unable to disrupt her happiness by revealing his identity. Ganz’s filmography included The Boys from Brazil, Wings of Desire and Downfall, and he also features on recordings of Brahms’s Die schöne Magelone and the incidental music from Beethoven’s Egmont.
Available Formats: CD, MP3, FLAC, Hi-Res FLAC, Hi-Res+ FLAC
This is the first Beethoven recording from the maverick Greek maestro and his Perm-based orchestra, who are currently touring widely with their cycle of Beethoven symphonies; BachTrack described their performance of the Fifth at last year’s BBC Proms as ‘noisily sublime…truly electrifying’, whilst The Times observed that ‘[Currentzis's] audacity and his musicians’ virtuosity was exhilarating’.
Available Formats: MP3, FLAC, Hi-Res FLAC
David Smith - Head of Digital
