New Release Round-up,
New Release Round-Up - 14th August 2020
Today's new releases include Berlioz’s Benvenuto Cellini on DVD from Sir John Eliot Gardiner (with Michael Spyres in the title-role), Handel's concerti grossi Op. 3 from the Akademie für Alte Musik Berlin, early Beethoven keyboard works from Jos van Immerseel, and Bernard Haitink bidding farewell to Salzburg with Beethoven and Bruckner.
The first instalment of the Akademie für Alte Musik Berlin’s Handel concerti grossi trilogy (directed by Bernhard Forck) was one of our Recordings of the Week last summer, impressing David with the ‘extroverted and multi-faceted playing’ on offer; this third volume sees Forck’s colleague and co-concertmaster Georg Kallweit taking the reins for the six Op. 3 concerti, grouped together by Handel's publisher John Walsh to capitalise on the success of Corelli’s Op. 6 two decades earlier.
Available Formats: SACD, MP3, FLAC, Hi-Res FLAC
Berlioz: Benvenuto Cellini (DVD)
Michael Spyres (Cellini), Sophia Burgos (Teresa), Lionel Lhote (Fieramosca), Maurizio Muraro (Balducci), Tareq Nazmi (Pope), Adèle Charvet (Ascanio); Orchestre Révolutionnaire et Romantique, Monteverdi Choir, Sir John Eliot Gardiner
Filmed at Versailles’s Opéra Royal last September as part of an international tour commemorating the 150th anniversary of Berlioz’s death, this striking semi-staged production also visited the BBC Proms, where The Guardian praised the ‘tremendous precision and often hair-raising exuberance’ of both singing and orchestral playing as well as the ‘ferocious energy’ of Gardiner’s conducting.
Available Format: DVD Video
Silvestrov: Symphony No. 7
Inna Galatenko (soprano), Oleg Bezborodko (piano), Marija Grikevičiūtė (piano); Lithuanian National Symphony Orchestra, Christopher Lyndon-Gee
The mainstays of this collection of orchestral works by the Ukrainian composer (b. 1937) are the single-movement Seventh Symphony from 2003 and the Piano Concertino from 2015, both of which receive their world premiere recordings here; the album also includes the first recording of the orchestral version of Ode to a Nightingale, Cantata No. 4, and Moments of Poetry and Music (both scored for soprano, piano and strings).
Available Formats: CD, MP3, FLAC, Hi-Res FLAC
Fazil Say: Complete Violin Works
Friedemann Eichhorn (violin), Fazıl Say (piano), Deutsche Radio Philharmonie Saarbrücken Kaiserslautern, Christoph Eschenbach
The Turkish composer-pianist joins Friedemann Eichhorn for his two violin sonatas, the first drawing on Turkish motifs and dances and the second (subtitled ‘Mount Ida’ and premiered only last year) written in response to the despoilation of the historic mountain by a mining project. The album also includes Cleopatra for solo violin - a 2011 commission from the International Violin Competition 'Henri Marteau' - and the Violin Concerto 1001 Nights in the Harem, premiered by Patricia Kopatchinskaja in 2008.
Available Formats: CD, MP3, FLAC, Hi-Res FLAC
Playing a five-octave Viennese grand fortepiano by Christopher Clarke (built in 1988 and replicating an instrument by Anton Walter, whom Beethoven particularly admired), Immerseel explores works which Beethoven composed between 1795 and 1804, including the ‘Hunt’, ‘Pastorale’, ‘Moonlight’ and ‘Pathétique’ sonatas, Rage over a Lost Penny, and the Andante favori.
Available Formats: 3 CDs, MP3, FLAC, Hi-Res FLAC
Max Richter: Waltz With Bashir
Max Richter (piano, organ), Louisa Fuller (violin), John Metcalfe (viola), Natalia Bonner (violin), Chris Worsey (cello), Ian Burdge (cello), Philip Sheppard (cello), Tilda Swinton (speaker)
Richter’s score for Ari Folman’s autobiographical 2008 film about the aftermath of the Lebanon War was nominated for both Best Original Score for an Animated Feature and Breakout Composer of the Year at the International Film Music Critics Association Awards, and saw him named as Best Composer by the European Film Academy.
Available Formats: CD, MP3, FLAC, Hi-Res FLAC
Recorded live at the Namur Music Festival in 2018, this Samson features American tenor Matthew Newlin in the title-role, Klara Ek as Dalila, Lawrence Zazzo as Micah, Luigi Di Donato as Manoah/Harapha, and Julie Roset as the Israelitish Woman; Alarcon’s last Handel recording from the festival, Judas Maccabeus, was praised in Gramophone ten years ago, with the reviewer observing that ‘the choir scarcely puts a foot wrong’.
Available Formats: 2 CDs, MP3, FLAC
This anthology of works by the college’s composer-in-residence Michael Finnissy features pieces inspired by Tudor music from the choir’s library, including two settings of Dum transisset Sabbatum, Plebs angelica and Videte miraculum, the twenty-minute Herr Christ, der einge Gottessohn, and responses to Bach’s Fantasia and Fugue BWV 562 and Wie schön leuchtet der Morgenstern.
Available Formats: 2 CDs, MP3, FLAC, Hi-Res FLAC
Rossini: Moïse et Pharaon
Alexey Birkus (Moïse), Luca Dall'Amico (Pharaon), Elisa Balbo (Anaï), Randall Bills (Aménophis), Silvia Dalla Benetta (Sinaïde); Virtuosi Brunensis, Górecki Chamber Choir Fabrizio Maria Carminati
This complete recording of Rossini’s roaring Parisian success Moïse et Pharaon (a reworking of his 1818 Mosè in Egitto, expanded into four acts and incorporating a substantial ballet) was made at the 2018 Rossini Festival in Bad Wildbad and uses a new edition of the score prepared specially for the performances by Italian musicologist Aldo Salvagno.
Available Formats: 3 CDs, MP3, FLAC, Hi-Res FLAC
Released to commemorate the twentieth anniversary of the Belgian-born soprano’s death, this 8-CD collection features lieder by Schumann, Schubert, Brahms, Wolf and Strauss, mélodies by Debussy, Gounod and Fauré, Berlioz’s Les Nuits d’été, cantatas by Bach and Schütz, and opera arias by Mozart, Charpentier, Verdi, Gluck, Massenet, Honegger and more. Much of the material receives its first outing on CD here.
Available Formats: MP3, FLAC
The great Dutch conductor concluded his 65-year career last autumn at the age of 90 with Bruckner’s Seventh Symphony, which he performed at the BBC Proms, the Berliner Philharmonie and the Concertgebouw as well as in this concert from the Großes Festspielhaus in Salzburg (given a week before his last-ever performance, at the Lucerne Festival). Reviewing the concert, KlassikInfo declared that ‘You shouldn’t throw terms like ‘magic moments’ around easily. But what could be heard in Salzburg was certainly one’.
Available Format: DVD Video
Picture Format: 1080i / 16:9
Sound Format: PCM Stereo and DTS-MA 5.1
Available Format: Blu-ray
Chris O'Reilly - Chief Executive
