New Release Round-up,
New Release Round-Up - 16th April 2021
Today's new releases include a crepuscular recital of Wagner, Pfitzner and Strauss from Matthias Goerne and Seong-Jin Cho, a thrillingly-sung debut album from the young British-Italian tenor Freddie de Tommaso, Schoenberg's Pierrot Lunaire from Patricia Kopatchinskaja and friends, and a fifth volume of Vivaldi bassoon concertos from Sergio Azzolini.
A year on from his award-winning Beethoven album with Jan Lisiecki, Goerne teams up with another young Deutsche Grammophon artist for a recital exploring the idea of twilight: the programme includes Wagner’s Wesendonck-Lieder, Pfitzner’s ‘Stimme der Sehnsucht’, ‘Abendrot’, ‘Wasserfahrt’ and ‘Nacht’, and Strauss’s ‘Traum durch die Dämmerung’, ‘Ruhe, meine Seele!’ and ‘Im Abendrot’ (from the Four Last Songs).
Available Formats: CD, MP3, FLAC, Hi-Res FLAC
This debut recording from the 27-year-old British-Italian spinto tenor (whose credits to date include Cassio in the Royal Opera House's Otello and Pinkerton at the Wiener Staatsoper) pays homage to four of his heroes: Mario Lanza, Enrico Caruso, Giuseppe di Stefano, and Franco Corelli. The programme includes songs by Bellini, Tosti, Cardillo, Leoncavallo and Puccini, and a new orchestration of Respighi’s Nebbie.
Available Formats: CD, MP3, FLAC, Hi-Res FLAC
Schoenberg: Pierrot lunaire
Patricia Kopatchinskaja, Meesun Hong, Julia Gallego, Reto Bieri, Thomas Kaufmann, Joonas Ahonen, Marko Milenkovic
Kopatchinskaja lays aside her violin to take on the role of the reciter in Schoenberg's set of twenty-one short melodramas, a piece she's performed regularly in concert over the past six years; it's followed by the same composer's Sechs kleine Klavierstücke Op. 19, Phantasy Op. 47 and arrangement of Johann Strauss’s Kaiser-Walzer, plus Webern's Four Pieces for Violin & Piano Op. 7 and Kreisler's Little Viennese March.
Available Formats: CD, MP3, FLAC, Hi-Res FLAC
The Notos Quartett explore the common ground between Brahms’s chamber and orchestral music by coupling the Piano Quartet No. 1 (which Schoenberg arranged for orchestra at the behest of Otto Klemperer in 1937) with a new chamber version of the Symphony No. 3 by Andreas N. Tarkmann. The quartet won an ECHO Klassik Award in 2017 for their world premiere recording of Bartók’s Piano Quartet in C minor alongside works by Kodály and Dohnányi.
Available Formats: CD, MP3, FLAC, Hi-Res FLAC
Released individually between 2016 and 2018, Manacorda’s historically-aware, modern-instrument recordings of the Mendelssohn symphonies have won praise from Gramophone for their ‘vivid wind detailing and clearly etched textures’ (No. 5), and from MusicWeb International for the Italian conductor’s ‘inspiration and unforced intent’ in No. 1. Johanna Winkel, Maria Bengtsson and Pavol Breslik are the soloists in Lobgesang.
Available Formats: 3 CDs, MP3, FLAC
Azzolini embarked on his Vivaldi odyssey back in 2010, scooping a Diapason d’Or de l’Année for the first instalment; subsequent volumes prompted Early Music Review to hail him as ‘the utter master of the instrument’, and Gramophone to describe the project as ‘music-making to cherish’. This fifth release in the series features Concertos RV 497, 476, 481, 467, 489, 479 and 486, with cadenzas borrowed from Vivaldi’s violin concertos in the latter two works.
Available Formats: CD, MP3, FLAC, Hi-Res FLAC
Described by Diapason as ‘one of the leading cellists of his generation’, Tchaikovsky Competition prize-winner Pablo Ferrández teams up with Kozhukhin to explore the connections between Rachmaninov and his Spanish contemporaries; Rachmaninov’s Cello Sonata sits at the heart of a programme which also includes his Vocalise, Élégie and How fair this spot as well as Falla’s Nana and Asturiana, Granados’s Oriental, and Pablo Casals’s arrangement of El cant dels ocells.
Available Formats: MP3, FLAC, Hi-Res FLAC
This second instalment of Evening Canticles from St John’s features settings by Herbert Howells, Lennox Berkeley, Giles Swayne, Herbert Sumsion, William Walton, Sydney Watson, Francis Jackson, Arvo Pärt and Julian Anderson, the latter commissioned to mark the Chapel’s 150th anniversary in 2019.
Read David's interview with Andrew Nethsingha about the project here.
Available Formats: CD, MP3, FLAC, Hi-Res FLAC
Couperin: Leçons de Ténèbres
Sophie Junker, Florie Valiquette (sopranos), Orchestre de l'Opéra Royal, Stéphane Fuget
Composed for Holy Week services at the Abbaye royale de Longchamp in 1714, François Couperin's three surviving Leçons de Ténèbres set Latin text from the Book of Lamentations, in which the prophet Jeremiah bewails the Babylonians' destruction of Jerusalem. They are followed here by Michel-Richard de Lalande's Cantique Quatrième and Motet pour le jour de Pâques.
Available Formats: CD, MP3, FLAC, Hi-Res FLAC
The Belarusian mezzo's first solo album on Delos features arias from Gounod’s Sapho, Massenet’s Werther and Le Cid, Saint-Saëns’s Samson et Dalila, Thomas’s Mignon, Rimsky Korsakov’s Sadko, Tchaikovsky’s Jeanne d’Arc, Mascagni’s Cavalleria rusticana, Cilea’s Adriana Lecouvreur and Mussorgsky’s Khovanschina, as well as an extract from her compatriot Dmitri Smolsky’s 1978 opera Hoary Legend, virtually unknown in the West.
Available Formats: CD, MP3, FLAC, Hi-Res FLAC
This charming recital of ‘Fairy Tales, Adventures, Nursery Rhymes and Lullabies’ takes its title from Charles Ives’s setting of a poem by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, which opens proceedings; the programme also includes the same composer’s ‘Tom Sails Away’, ‘The Circus Band’ and ‘Cradle Song’, Richard Rodney Bennett’s cycle Songs before Sleep, and songs by Schubert, Mahler, Britten, Fauré, Howells, Mendelssohn, Warlock, Loewe, and Stanford.
Available Formats: CD, MP3, FLAC, Hi-Res FLAC
Giordano: Andrea Chénier (DVD)
Yusif Eyvazov (Andrea Chénier), Anna Netrebko (Maddalena de Coigny), Luca Salsi (Carlo Gérard), Annalisa Stroppa (Bersi), Mariana Pentcheva (La comtesse de Coigny); Teatro alla Scala, Riccardo Chailly, Mario Martone
Filmed at La Scala in 2017, this Chénier saw the role-debuts of husband-and-wife Eyvazov and Netrebko as the eponymous poet and his aristocratic lover; the Financial Times observed that the Azerbaijani tenor’s ‘clarion voice and declamatory style sounded authentically veristic’, and described Martone’s staging as ‘beautifully crafted and full of grim period detail’.
Available Format: DVD Video
Giordano: Andrea Chénier (Blu-ray)
Yusif Eyvazov (Andrea Chénier), Anna Netrebko (Maddalena de Coigny), Luca Salsi (Carlo Gérard), Annalisa Stroppa (Bersi), Mariana Pentcheva (La comtesse de Coigny); Teatro alla Scala, Riccardo Chailly, Mario Martone
Picture format: 1080i / 16:9
Sound Format: PCM Stereo / DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1
Available Format: Blu-ray
Mozart: Don Giovanni (DVD)
Andrè Schuen (Don Giovanni), Ruben Drole (Leporello), Christine Schäfer (Donna Anna), Mauro Peter (Don Ottavio), Maite Beaumont (Donna Elvira), Mari Eriksmoen (Zerlina); Concentus musicus Wien, Arnold Schoenberg Chor, Nikolaus Harnoncourt
This is the second DVD instalment of Harnoncourt's semi-staged Mozart/Da Ponte Trilogy, filmed at Theater an der Wien in 2014; reviewing the live performance, Der Standard observed that ‘[Harnoncourt’s] concentration – perceptible minute by minute – proved rewarding for the singers: the Concentus followed them like a silver shadow, and [they] must have felt singularly elated to have been carried along like that’. Così fan tutte, also starring Andrè Schuen and Mauro Peter, will follow next month.
Available Format: 2 DVD Videos
Mozart: Don Giovanni (Blu-ray)
Andrè Schuen (Don Giovanni), Ruben Drole (Leporello), Christine Schäfer (Donna Anna), Mauro Peter (Don Ottavio), Maite Beaumont (Donna Elvira), Mari Eriksmoen (Zerlina); Concentus musicus Wien, Arnold Schoenberg Chor, Nikolaus Harnoncourt
Picture format: NTSC / 16:9
Sound Format: PCM Stereo / DTS-HD 5.1
Available Format: Blu-ray
Katherine Cooper - Head of Editorial
