New Release Round-up,
New Release Round-Up 3rd July 2020
Today’s new releases including Dvořák, Suk and Janáček from violinist Augustin Hadelich, Mahler 7 from Osmo Vänskä and the Minnesota Orchestra, Schubert from Kevin John Edusei and the Münchner Symphoniker, and Debussy’s Images and Prélude à l'après-midi d'un faune from Sir Mark Elder and the Hallé.
Beginning in 2017 with Symphony No. 5, Vänskä’s Mahler cycle passes the halfway-point with this account of the ‘Song of the Night’, which was Record of the Week on last Saturday’s episode of Record Review; the series has been praised for the Finnish conductor’s ‘admirably unhistrionic approach’ (The Guardian) and the ‘virtuosity in all sections’ of the Minnesota orchestra (The Sunday Times).
Available Formats: SACD, MP3, FLAC, Hi-Res FLAC
This is the fifth instalment in the Hallé’s acclaimed Debussy series, conceived around Colin Matthews’s orchestrations of the Préludes and praised in the Gramophone Guide for the level of ‘diaphanous atmospheric detail’ on display; Matthews’s arrangement of Et la lune descend sur le temple qui fût from the second book of Images pour piano features alongside the main works. Look out for Katherine’s interview with Sir Mark about his relationship with Debussy’s music next week.
Available Formats: CD, MP3, FLAC, Hi-Res FLAC
Bohemian Tales
Augustin Hadelich (violin), Charles Owen (piano), Symphonie-Orchester des Bayerischen Rundfunks, Jakub Hruša
Dvořák’s Violin Concerto is the main event on this all-Czech programme, which also includes the composer’s evergreen Humoresque, Songs my Mother Taught Me and the last of the Four Romantic Pieces as well as Janáček’s Violin Sonata and Suk’s Four Pieces for Violin and Piano Op. 17.
Available Formats: CD, MP3, FLAC, Hi-Res FLAC
In his eighth appearance in this venerable series, the Australian pianist champions two very different concertos from the mid-twentieth century: Rubbra’s pastoral work from 1955/6 and Bliss’s exuberant concerto from the late 1930s, premiered by Solomon and Sir Adrian Boult at Carnegie Hall. Sandwiched between them is Arnold Bax’s Morning Song: Maytime in Sussex from 1946.
Available Formats: CD, MP3, FLAC, Hi-Res FLAC
This is the third instalment of the Munich orchestra’s Schubert series with their Music Director, who’s confirmed his reputation as a superb Schubertian further afield since the series began in 2017: The Scotsman applauded his ‘tasteful precision’ when he stepped in at short notice to conduct the Unfinished with the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra earlier this year, and he’s scheduled to perform the Great with the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic next season.
Available Formats: CD, MP3, FLAC, Hi-Res FLAC, Hi-Res+ FLAC
On this first volume of a new series of Bach’s keyboard concertos, Masato Suzuki directs Bach Collegium Japan from the harpsichord in BWV1052, 1053, 1056 and 1059; reviewing his accounts of the composer’s double concertos with his father Masaaki in 2014, Gramophone observed that both musicians ‘rejoice in the simple elegance and devotional belonging which these pieces afford’.
Available Formats: SACD, MP3, FLAC, Hi-Res FLAC
Following the success of his Bach toccatas last year, the Iranian-American harpsichordist presents a programme of twentieth-century and twenty-first-century works comprising Takemitsu’s Rain Dreaming, Henry Cowell’s Set of Four, Kaija Saariaho’s Jardin secret II, Gavin Bryars’s After Handel’s Vesper, Anahita Abbasi’s Intertwined distances, and Luc Ferrari’s Programme commun 'Musique socialiste?'.
Available Formats: CD, MP3, FLAC, Hi-Res FLAC, Hi-Res+ FLAC
This timely recital of songs exploring both positive and negative perspectives on isolation opens with Britten’s arrangement of Purcell’s O solitude, my sweetest choice, and also includes Schubert’s Einsamkeit, Samuel Barber’s Hermit Songs, and Jonathan Dove’s song-cycle Under Alter'd Skies, which sets sections of Tennyson’s great 1849 elegy In Memoriam A.H.H. and was premiered by these artists in 2017.
Available Formats: CD, MP3, FLAC, Hi-Res FLAC
The Vienna-based vocal quintet have made something of a speciality of Franco-Flemish repertoire over the past few years, with Gramophone describing their 2017 album of works by Jean Guyot as ‘absolutely flawless’, and here they turn to the music of his contemporaries Johannes de Cleve and Jacobus Vaet; Cleve’s mass is based on Vaet’s motet Rex Babylonis (depicting Daniel in the Lion’s den), which closes the album.
Available Formats: CD, MP3, FLAC, Hi-Res FLAC
Dallapiccola: Il Prigioniero
Anna Maria Chiuri (La Madre), Michael Nagy (Il Prigioniero), Stephan Rugamer (Il Carceriere/Il Grande Inquisitore), Danish National Symphony Orchestra, Gianandrea Noseda
Following two volumes of Dallapiccola’s orchestral works on Chandos (‘Noseda's affection for the music is evident throughout’ - BBC Music Magazine), the Italian conductor presents his compatriot’s one-act opera from the late 1940s, originally conceived for radio and premiered in an RAI broadcast in 1949. The album also includes three choral works from the early 1930s: two mixed-voice settings of poetry by Michelangelo, and Estate (‘Summer’) for male chorus.
Available Formats: SACD, MP3, FLAC, Hi-Res FLAC
This album of music by Howells and Gurney takes its title from a line in Housman’s A Shropshire Lad which features in the penultimate song of Gurney’s The Western Playland - a cycle which has been rather eclipsed by his Ludlow & Teme. The programme also features his rarely-heard String Quartet in D minor from 1924, and Howells songs including King David, There was a Maiden, and The Mugger’s Song.
Available Formats: CD, MP3, FLAC
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