New Release Round-up,
New Release Round-Up - 19th April 2024
This programme of music for the Feast of the Ascension comprises JS Bach's Lobet Gott in seinen Reichen (the 'Ascension Oratorio') & Auf Christi Himmelfahrt allein and Telemann's Ich fahre auf zu meinem Vater. Telemann composed more than thirty cantatas for Ascension Day over the course of his career; this particular example was written in 1721, and receives its world premiere recording here.
Available Formats: CD, MP3, FLAC, Hi-Res FLAC
Britten: Spring Symphony, Sinfonia da Requiem, the Young Person's Guide To the Orchestra
Elizabeth Watts (soprano), Alice Coote (mezzo), Allan Clayton (tenor), London Symphony Orchestra, Sir Simon Rattle
Premiered in 1949, Britten's Spring Symphony sets texts by poets including Edmund Spenser, Robert Herrick, John Clare and WH Auden; this performance was recorded at the Barbican in 2018, when BachTrack noted that Rattle 'was in his element throughout: smiling, encouraging and robust with artistic certainty.' The Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra was captured in May 2021 (at the LSO's first concert with audience in over a year), whilst the 'brilliantly marshalled' performance of the Sinfonia da Requiem took place in May 2019.
Available Formats: SACD, MP3, FLAC, Hi-Res FLAC
Delius: Hassan - Complete Incidental Music
Zeb Soanes, Britten Sinfonia Voices, Britten Sinfonia, Jamie Phillips
First performed at His Majesty's Theatre in London in 1923, Delius's incidental music for James Elroy Flecker's drama includes preludes & interludes, a serenade, and a four-act ballet; based on Flecker's 1913 poem 'The Golden Journey to Samarkand' (which was itself inspired by One Thousand and One Nights), the play centres on the twin stories of a sharp-witted court confectioner and two young lovers facing execution in the aftermath of an unsuccessful uprising.
Available Formats: CD, MP3, FLAC, Hi-Res FLAC
The American coloratura soprano's debut recital album received four stars in The Guardian last week thanks to her 'seemingly artless precision' and 'crystalline sound'; taking its title from a character in Sullivan's The Rose of Persia (whose showpiece 'Neath my Lattice' is featured), the programme includes Saint-Saëns's La libellule, Berg's Die Nachtigall, Rachmaninoff's Daisies and Lilacs, the world premiere recording of Ricky Ian Gordon's Huit Chansons de Fleurs, and Ivor Novello's We'll Gather Lilacs (in which Morley accompanies herself at the piano).
Available Formats: CD, MP3, FLAC, Hi-Res FLAC
Dutilleux: Tout un monde lointain and other works
Jean-Guihen Queyras (cello), Orchestre Philharmonique Du Luxembourg, Gustavo Gimeno
This triptych of works from the first phase of Dutilleux's career comprises Tout un monde lointain... (inspired by the poetry of Baudelaire and composed for Mstislav Rostropovich between 1967 and 1970), Symphony No. 1 (his first purely orchestral work) from 1951, and one of his most-performed pieces: Métaboles from the mid-1960s, which explores the idea of metamorphosis and was commissioned by George Szell to mark the Cleveland Orchestra's fortieth birthday.
Available Formats: CD, MP3, FLAC, Hi-Res FLAC, Hi-Res+ FLAC
The Carduccis continue their acclaimed Shostakovich cycle with accounts of the String Quartet No. 9 (written in 1964 and dedicated to his third wife Irina) and the composer's final work in the genre (premiered in Leningrad a year before his death in 1975). Previous instalments have been described as 'athletic, upfront performances, clear in texture, forthright in tone and bold in articulation' (Gramophone on Quartets Nos. 1, 2 & 7) and 'a fine achievement, boasting excellent ensemble, musical insight and sensitive attention to detail' (BBC Music Magazine on Quartets Nos. 4, 8 & 11).
Available Formats: CD, MP3, FLAC, Hi-Res FLAC
This programme of seventeenth-century music includes works by Pedro de Araujo, Francisco Correa de Arauxo, Antonio Correa Braga, Pablo Bruna, Juan Bautista Cabanilles, and Sebastián Aguilera de Heredia. The project began life when Moderlak came across a volume of sheet-music entitled L’orgue baroque espagnol; struck by the similarities between the writing for the special clarino stop of Spanish organs and trumpet literature of the time, he set about adapting various pieces for his instrument.
Available Formats: CD, MP3, FLAC, Hi-Res FLAC
La Belle Dame
Roderick Williams (baritone), Rupert Marshall-Luck (violin), BBC Concert Orchestra, John Andrews
This fascinating anthology of works in the English Romantic tradition includes Holst's Ornulf's Drapa (a 1898 scena for baritone and orchestra on text by Ibsen), Delius's Petite Suite No. 1, Norman O'Neill's setting of Keats's La Belle Dame sans Merci, Quilter's Ballad of Fair Helen of Kirkconnel, and Alexander Campbell Mackenzie's Colomba; Havergal Brian's Legend (originally for violin and piano) is presented in a new orchestration by Marshall-Luck.
Available Formats: CD, MP3, FLAC
Vaughan Williams: The Future, The Steersman & other works
Lucy Crowe (soprano), Jacques Imbrailo (baritone), Andrew von Oeyen (piano), BBC Symphony Chorus, BBC Symphony Orchestra, Martin Yates
The unfinished drafts for The Future (1908) and The Steersman (a setting of Walt Whitman’s poem Aboard at a Ship’s Helm from 1906) were both included in the collection of manuscripts which Ursula Vaughan Williams presented to the British Museum in 1971; both works are given here in the completed editions by Yates. The album also includes the Fantasia for Piano and Orchestra from 1896 and the Flourish for Glorious John (written for Sir John Barbirolli to celebrate the 100th season of the Hallé Orchestra).
Available Format: 2 SACDs
Kozłowski: Requiem
Olga Peretyatko, Olesya Petrova, Boris Stepanov, Christoph Seidl, Singapore Symphony Orchestra, Hans Graf
Composed in 1798, Józef Kozłowski's Requiem was commissioned by the abdicated King Stanislaw of Poland, shortly before his death in St Petersburg (where he spent the last years of his life in captivity at the Marble Palace). The piece was also performed at the funeral of Tsar Alexander I of Russia in 1825, in a revised version with more dramatic orchestration; it is performed here in a new edition by Hans Graf which seeks to re-create the more intimate quality of the original version.
Available Formats: CD, MP3, FLAC, Hi-Res FLAC
Alexander Zemlinsky: Eine florentinische Tragödie
Christopher Maltman (Simone), Rachael Wilson (Bianca), Benjamin Bruns (Guido), Münchner Rundfunkorchester, Patrick Hahn
Based on a poem by Oscar Wilde, Zemlinsky's one-act opera centres on a love-triangle involving the cloth-merchant Simone, his wife Bianca and her lover (the Florentine prince Guido Bardi); the work was premiered in 1917, five years before Zemlinsky's other one-acter Der Zwerg, and although largely forgotten after the composer's death it has enjoyed something of a Renaissance in recent years. This performance was recorded live at Munich's Prinzregententheater in 2022.
Available Formats: CD, MP3, FLAC, Hi-Res FLAC
Donizetti: L'aio nell'imbarazzo
Alessandro Corbelli (Il marchese Giulio Antiquati), Alex Esposito (Gregorio Cordebono), Francesco Lucii (Enrico), Marilena Ruta, Lorenzo Martelli (Pippetto), Caterina Dellaere (Leonarda), Lorenzo Liberali (Simone); Orchestra e Coro Donizetti Opera, Vincenzo Milletarì, Francesco Micheli
One of Donizetti's first big successes, L'aio nell'imbarazzo ('A Tutor in a Jam!') was premiered at the Teatro Valle in Rome in 1824; tasked with keeping his charges ignorant of the facts of life until they reach middle age, the titular tutor Gregorio finds himself in a pickle when one secretly marries and fathers a child and the other falls in love with a much older housemaid. This production was filmed at the Bergamo Donizetti Festival in 2022.
Available Format: Blu-ray
Katherine Cooper - Head of Editorial
