A couple of years ago this release would have made an easy reference recording. Bavouzet’s Haydn thus far has been excellent, and his playing on this disc is extremely fine: tasteful in its sustained lyricism in the adagios, and brilliant in the outer movements. Indeed the finales are, if anything, perhaps too quick to permit the fullest characterization of the music, but there’s no questioning their dazzling virtuosity.

Unfortunately for Bavouzet, this repertoire is now very well covered both on period instruments (for BIS and Harmonia Mundi) and above all by Marc-André Hamelin and Les Violons du Roy on Hyperion, which gives you the best of both worlds. Make no mistake, the Manchester Camerata under Gábor Takács-Nagy plays very well, and they are of one mind with Bavouzet. It’s just that the competition is better, however marginally. In the slow movement of the Concerto in F Major, the use of solo strings to open and close the movement strikes me as unnecessarily mannered, and Bavouzet’s cadenza, intended as a tribute to Friedrich Gulda in jazz mode, comes across almost as a weird paraphrase of the theme song from “The Young and the Restless”.

This is the only questionable moment in what is otherwise a wholly enjoyable release, and if you’ve been collecting Bavouzet’s Haydn (and you should be) then I can recommend this latest installment warmly. But as I said, there are several alternatives, Hamelin above all, that you might prefer if you have limited shelf space.

-- David Hurwitz, ClassicsToday.com

The All-Star Orchestra gives you a front row seat to the world’s greatest music, performed by top players chosen from over 30 great American orchestras, and conducted by Gerard Schwarz. The programs feature complete performances of popular masterpieces and world premieres of new works by leading American composers. Filmed in High-Definition with multiple cameras in and around the orchestra, the All-Star Orchestra celebrates the symphonic experience in the 21st century. The first work on this release is Edward Elgar’s Enigma Variations. The score is dedicated to “my friends pictured within,” and each Variation represents a real person. As he was finishing the work, Elgar wrote: “The enigma I will not explain- it’s ‘dark saying’ must be left unguessed, and I warn you that the apparent connection between the Variations and the Theme is often of the slightest texture.” A musical mystery of great beauty and endless fascination. The next piece is Benjamin Britten’s Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra. The perennial family favorite showcases- one by one- all the instruments of the orchestra. Next is Alan Hovhaness’ Symphony No. 2, opus 132 “Mysterious Mountain.” The composer wrote: “Mountains are symbols, like pyramids, of man’s attempt to know God. Mountains are symbolic meeting places between the mundane and spiritual world.” Finally is Eugene Goossens’ Jubilee Variations. This is a world premiere video recording of this unpublished 1944 work created by Eugene Goossens with contributions from ten composer friends, including Aaron Copland, Howard Hanson, William Schumann, and more.

Philip Glass has made an immense and stylistically wide-ranging contribution to piano repertoire. The Orphée Suite, a transcription of excerpts from the first opera in Glass’ Cocteau Trilogy, is one of his most distinctive piano pieces, blending virtuosity and melodic richness. In contrast, the hypnotic How Now is structurally influenced by Indian ragas and gamelan music, whilst Dreaming Awake contains one of the most powerful climaxes in all Glass’ works. Performed by Nicolas Horvath, a Scriabin Competition first prizewinner, this is the first release in the complete Glass solo piano edition which will include many premières.

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Reviews:

This disc is important because it demonstrates that Glass’s music works quite nicely alongside other composers of the past and alongside quite traditional approaches to performance generally.

– American Record Guide

Somehow, the objectivity of the sound of a piano suits the music of Philip Glass perfectly. Certainly that’s how it seems in Nicolas Horvath’s expert performances.

– International Piano

This recording of recorder sonatas by Handel and an 18th c. transcription of the Royal Fireworks Suite is the work of three Melbournians who have made important contributions to early music performance in Australia for over thirty years. Published By John Walsh c. 1750, this is the only recording of the adaptation of the Fireworks Music (originally for flute, violin or harpsichord) in this arrangement. All instruments are faithful reproductions of authentic originals, historically accurate, carefully researched and tuned to a version of period temperament, giving each key its own character.

Classical Music

Eugene Zador's long and productive career brought him success on both sides of the Atlantic, his music admired for its assured orchestration, confident mastery of form and unstoppable flow of melodic invention. The Christmas Overture captures both the festivity and solemnity of the season, while the iconic portraits of the Biblical Triptych form one of Zador's most ambitious and colorful orchestral works. The Rhapsody is filled with distinctive Hungarian flavors, and the Fugue Fantasia concludes this program with majestic triumph.

Immensely influential, the remarkable Symphonie fantastique was composed while Hector Berlioz was suffering an intense and unreciprocated passion for the Irish actress Harriet Smithson. Its autobiographical tale describes a young musician’s opium-poisoned nightmares of jealous despair and fatal justice following the murder of his beloved. Berlioz wrote a second movement cornet solo into a subsequent revision of the score, here included as an optional extra. He wed his sweetheart actress but, recuperating in Nice, wrote Le corsaire after the final break-up of their marriage.

"Berlioz, to me, in terms of sheer orchestral invention, anticipates Mahler. If anything, he even surpasses him. So these are some of the things that characterise Berlioz: the extremes, the dynamics, the sound, the colours of the orchestra. Ravel was more about homogenisation. And I mean that in an entirely positive sense, because he’s taking the orchestral palette and really thinking very carefully about the essence of instrumental sonorities and how they go together." – Leonard Slatkin

This is a program of great choral works, including one work from the 1500s, works from the 20th Century, and one work, Black Pierrot that was commissioned by R. Paul Crabb for the ensembles on this album. R. Paul Crabb, University of Missouri's Director of Choral Activities, earned degrees in Music Education, Vocal Performance and Choral Music Education. His ensembles have performed at state, regional and national conventions and have traveled extensively in Mexico, Germany, Austria, Italy, Hungary, Slovakia, Czech Republic, Russia, Bulgaria and Australia. Crabb served as assistant conductor at the Russian/American Choral Symposium for two years where his choir was invited as the resident American choir at the Moscow Conservatory. He served for one year as a visiting professor in Salzburg, Austria, where he taught and worked with the choir of the Salzburg Cathedral. He has taught conducting in Taiwan, eighteenth-century music in England, and studied sixteenth century polyphony in Italy with the renowned Peter Phillips. More recently he served as Guest Visiting Choral Professor at the Liszt Academy of Music in Budapest, Hungary - the first American selected for that position.

An album of soulful compositions with heartfelt melodies, each piece highlighting a particular Egyptian instrument. Following Hossam Ramzy's high standard in dance pieces it washes onto the shores of world music with a hypnotic and exotic flavor. Includes four bonus practice tracks for dancers, and explanations to each of the songs.

"• Kurdish singer and composer Sakîna presents passionate and captivating songs from Kurdistan portraying life of the people in the Kurdish regions of Turkey, Iran and Iraq. • Sakina combines regional singing styles with traditional and experimental interpretative techniques. • Traditional and modern instrumental accompaniment. • Booklet contains information about the artist and each of the pieces in English and German."

The pieces recorded in this release stem from an all-pervading performance practice that deeply marked out the musical taste of the nineteenth century: that of “transcription”. This practice enabled a widespread dissemination of the most popular opera passages, well beyond the official circuits of the great theatres, and above all into the sphere of holy rites. Arias, cavatinas, cabalettas and symphonies were plentiful everywhere: in many cases they were transcriptions of pieces by well-known composers (it was sufficient to give them a “liturgical” title); more often they were homely elaborations. Almost all these pieces are being performed here for the first time in the modern age; the composers are practically unknown; in their music, famous opera themes are freely mixed with fanciful variations on those themes. The purpose was to reproduce this atmosphere, at once theatrical and sacred, in its entirety, by means of period instruments: a wonderful nineteenth-century organ and a series of precious original brass instruments. In fact Marco Arlotti is sitting the Adeodato Bossi Urbani 1874 organ, and Michele Santi, a specialist in nineteenth-century trumpets, is playing seven different period instruments delivering the best and most characteristic sound to each track.

This album, featuring violinist Tianwa Yang and the Virginia Arts Festival Chamber Players, contains one of Igor Stravinsky’s small-scale theatrical works, The Soldier’s Tale (1918). Stravinsky wrote this work in collaboration with author Charles-Ferdinand Ramuz, and artist Rene-Victor Auberjonois. The work is based in a Russian folk tale by Alexander Afanasyev, and is scored for two speakers, a narrator, and a septet, as well as a non-speaking dance role. Pamela Berlin directs this production, and Joann Falletta is the conductor of the instrumentalists.

The music of Estonian organist-composer Süda (1883–1920) combines contrapuntal mastery with virtuosic command of the Romantic organ. Süda’s brief life and his perfectionism meant that his output – exclusively for the organ – remained small, but it is beautifully crafted and highly expressive.

Classical Music

Still in his twenties, Pétur Sakari studied in his native Finland and in Paris and made his recording début at the age of 18. On his previous disc for BIS, he performed works by five French composers, receiving international acclaim with top marks in Diapason as well as on the Klassik-Heute website. For the present disc, Pétur has chosen to focus on César Franck, performing the composer’s Three Pieces and Three Chorales ‘pour grand orgue’ on an instrument perfectly suited to the repertoire. Completed in 1880, the great organ in the Sainte-Croix cathedral of Orléans is a major – and well-preserved – example of the art of Aristide Cavaillé-Coll, the same maker who had previously built Franck’s beloved organ in Sainte-Clotilde in Paris. (‘My new organ? It’s an orchestra!’ was Franck’s verdict.) Together the two gave the French organ tradition a new impetus with Franck laying the groundwork for a French symphonic organ style while Cavaillé-Coll constructed hundreds of organs capable of producing a sound that was full, homogeneous and modern. The Trois Pièces, which closes with the famous Pièce héroïque, were written for a Cavaillé-Coll instrument built for the 1878 World Fair in Paris. Twelve years later, and only weeks before his untimely death, Franck completed the Trois Chorals. The idea of writing organ chorales was inspired by Bach, but Franck composed them ‘with quite a different plan’: instead of traditional hymns they use an original, freely composed melody which is gradually revealed ‘with great imagination’, as Franck himself put it in a letter to his publisher. Both the Pieces and especially the Chorales have become central works in the repertoire of concert organists.

Tchaikovsky has long maintained his position as among the most popular of all composers, his unequalled gift for melody and colorful orchestration given added depth through a rich Russian soulfulness. The Second Piano Concerto has always lived under the shadow of the famous First but, played here in the composer's original version, is full of life-enhancing character and emotion. Both this and the Concert Fantasia also contain beautiful chamber music sections allowing unique interaction between soloist and orchestra.

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REVIEWS:

Nebolsin opts for a reading that is refreshingly mellow, almost intimate and, above all, profoundly lyrical. His focus is on the shape of the phrase, inflected with the most delicate rubato. Stern and the New Zealanders mirror this rhetorical flexibility with great skill and subtlety. The finale has a fleet lightness, heightening the overall golden bravura of the concerto.

– Gramophone

Nebolsin hardly puts a foot wrong, and Michael Stern secures rhythmically vibrant playing from the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra.

– BBC Music Magazine

Contemporary American music for wind band is among the most varied, colorful and brilliant to be heard anywhere, not least when performed by one of the genre’s leading young ensembles. Pulitzer Prize winner Joseph Schwantner is represented by his evocative concerto “Luminosity.” David Maslanka has helped to reshape the wind band sound and “Hosannas,” some of which are based on chorale melodies, are full of moments of self-reflection. These qualities of quiet and timelessness are shared by the first movement of Steven Bryant’s “Alchemy in Silent Spaces.”

This album is part of the 25-disc box set Un siècle de musique fracaise, which explores French music from the mid-19th to the mid-20th century. This disc profiles French composer Pierre Boulez, and includes his famous Le Marteau sans Maitre.

Rossini: Il barbiere di Siviglia

Composer Kenneth Fuchs and conductor JoAnn Falletta completed their fourth recording with the London Symphony Orchestra at Abbey Road Studios, August 30–September 1, 2013. The recording features baritone and Naxos artist Roderick Williams and is produced by Grammy Award-winner Tim Handley. The repertoire includes Falling Man (for baritone voice and orchestra); Movie House (seven poems by John Updike for baritone voice and chamber ensemble); and Songs of Innocence and of Experience (four poems by William Blake for baritone voice and chamber ensemble). Fuchs’ music continues to find its visual counterpart in the work of Abstract Expressionist artist Helen Frankenthaler, whose art adorns the cover of this disc.