This is a hybrid Super Audio CD playable on both regular and Super Audio CD players.

Anton Bruckner's Symphony No. 5 is the work Bruckner scholar and composer Robert Simpson considered to be the greatest of all Bruckner symphonies. Here is a recent live concert performance led by Bruckner expert Bernard Haitink. There are people who collect Bruckner 5ths; a lyrical, fascinating masterpiece and one of the few pieces by Bruckner that employs contrapuntal development as well as fascinating harmonic sophistication. The piece is also graced with arrestingly beautiful melodies.

On November 8, 2019, at Carnegie Hall, New York, during a tour with the Symphonieorchester des Bayerischen Rundfunks and only a few weeks before his unexpected death, Mariss Jansons conducted his final concert. On the programme was Johannes Brahms’ Fourth Symphony and the latter’s famous Hungarian Dance No. 5 was played as an encore. The live recording in Carnegie Hall, released here for the first time on Vinyl by BR-KLASSIK, is the great conductor’s musical legacy. For the last seventeen years of his life – from 2003 to 2019 – Mariss Jansons was chief conductor of the Symphonieorchester des Bayerischen Rundfunks and the Bavarian Radio Chorus. Both ensembles and their conductor appreciated each other deeply on an artistic as well as a human level, and this resulted in numerous unforgettable concerts. Jansons’ unrelenting demands on himself and his musicians, his always respectful treatment of his colleagues, and his great devotion to music all played a lead role in their work together. Mariss Jansons occupies a place of honor in the orchestra’s history, and its players will always revere and cherish his memory. With the death of Mariss Jansons one year ago, the music world lost one of its greatest artistic personalities.

Increasingly, Shostakovich's music is captivating people all over the world and appealing to their deepest emotions. Almost like no other, it bears witness to a traumatic political epoch while remaining a timeless expression of existential human feeling and experience. For me personally, said conductor Mariss Jansons, who died two years ago, "Shostakovich is one of the most serious and sincere composers of them all." Shostakovich's (first) piano concerto features impressive pianistic virtuosity, bold experimentation, satire, and caricatures of different musical styles. The composer wrote it in the summer of 1933, only a few weeks after the completion of his opera " Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk". He himself called it a "mocking challenge to the conservative-serious character of the classical concert attitude". This concerto in particular demonstrates the immense versatility and magnificent talent of the still carefree 26-year-old Shostakovich. He blends a wealth of musical thoughts and ideas into a colorful and fascinating kaleidoscope. Despite the wealth of different stimuli, the concerto does not seem chaotic or overloaded: the young composer effortlessly maintains the balance.

Shostakovich performed a similar balancing act between creative work and conformity to the state in his Ninth Symphony, which premiered on November 3, 1945. Instead of the expected heroic, regime-conformist orchestral thunder along the lines of his Seventh Symphony, the "Leningrad”, the music heard here was playful, without pathos, somewhat witty, full of allusions – yet something did not seem quite right. This musical conundrum, full of ironic refractions and caricatures of melodramatic and triumphant music, was recognized by the censors as a masquerade, yet one that was not easily decipherable. Shostakovich had mocked Stalin without the latter noticing.

These Bavarian Radio recordings, first released in 2005, constitute Rudolf Serkin's third and final edition of the Complete Beethoven Piano Concertos, and were the only performances to be recorded in the concert hall, not in the studio. As such, they fittingly complete both his discography and his artistic legacy as one of the 20th century’s indisputably great pianists. This jewel case presentation, complete with booklet notes in German and English, is a re-release of the original 3-album box set that went out of stock following healthy sales.

REVIEWS:

For at least a half century Beethoven’s piano concertos played a central role in Rudolf Serkin’s repertoire. Yet out of all the Serkin Beethoven concerto cycles on disc, the present one, recorded over the course of three concerts in October and November of 1977, offers the most consistent artistic and sonic satisfaction.

The slightly distant yet attractively robust engineering conveys a cogent sense of concert hall-realism, and not just to the benefit of Rafael Kubelik’s superb Bavarian musicians. It also reveals Serkin’s elusive, difficult-to-record sonority in more flattering, three-dimensional light than the gaunt, often monochrome impression one gleans from his Columbia Masterworks sessions. As a result, the concentration and inner tension Serkin brings to the slow movements comes off with more warmth and sustaining power.

Although Serkin at 74 may not have been the impetuous, fiery virtuoso in the first three concertos’ finales that he was in his 40s, when he recorded them for CBS Masterworks, his technique nevertheless is still assured, alert, and responsive, and far more energized than in his relatively careful and labored collaborations with Ozawa.

However, Serkin must have drunk from the fountain of youth before hitting the stage for the Choral Fantasy (Kubelik, too, for that matter). The performance radiates inspiration from start to finish, highlighted by Serkin’s ardent yet cannily structured opening cadenza, the chamber episodes’ zestful give and take, plus massed choral and orchestral tuttis that at once communicate elemental power and textural clarity. Let’s hope this major addition to Serkin’s discography will encourage Sony not to leave its own complete Serkin edition hanging.

For all fans of the pianist and/or the conductor, this release is a must.

--ClassicsToday.com (Jed Distler)

This recording of Serkin from 1977 highlights a 20th-century great who brought musical purpose and intellectual rigour to every detail. Serkin ranks among the greatest of 20th-century pianists; his repertoire ranged from Bach to Reger, but Beethoven was always at its very heart. In the autumn of 1977, in the Herkulessaal in Munich, he played all five Beethoven concertos as well as the Choral Fantasy in a series of concerts with the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra under Rafael Kubelík, another musician who, like Serkin, always put himself at the service of the music. Recordings of those performances were first released on disc in 2005...their reissue now makes available again what is in every respect a historic musical document.

Serkin was never interested in ingratiating himself through honeyed phrases or silken tone. Instead in these interpretations there is musical purpose and intellectual rigor in every detail. Whether it’s the almost combative muscularity he brings to the piano’s first entry in the third concerto, or the instant authority of his torrential opening to the Emperor, it sets the tone for all that follows, constantly drawing equally intense responses from Kubelík and his superb orchestra. The accounts of the slow movements are just as remarkable; there’s a hymn-like calm to the Largo of the third, a consoling sweetness to the fourth’s exchanges between the soloist and the orchestra. All are in short, remarkable performances, not only among the finest available on disc, but further reminders of just how peerless a Beethoven interpreter Serkin was.

--The Guardian (Andrew Clements)

To mark the 75th anniversary of the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra (BRSO) in 2024, the BR-KLASSIK label is now making previously unreleased recordings of concerts available on CD and as a stream. The six-part composition My Melodies for eight horns and orchestra was composed between 2016 and 2018, revised for the first time in 2019, and then again in 2023 as the musica viva Munich version. It was commissioned by Bavarian Radio’s musica viva with the support of the Friends of the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra e.V. This is a live recording of the premiere of the Munich 2023 version on June 23, 2023, from the Herkulessaal, again as part of BR's musica viva concert series, with the horn section and the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra under the direction of Matthias Hermann.

Helmut Lachenmann, born in Stuttgart in 1935, is one of the most renowned German composers of contemporary music. He studied piano, music theory, and counterpoint in Stuttgart and composition with Luigi Nono in Venice. The first public performances of his works took place in 1962 at the Venice Biennale and at the Darmstadt Summer Courses for New Music. He taught composition in Hanover (1976-1981) and in Stuttgart (1981-1999), and gave numerous master classes in Germany and abroad. His works are performed by internationally renowned players and orchestras all over the world. Helmut Lachenmann has received numerous awards, most recently the GEMA German Music Authors' Prize for his life's work (2015).

The phenomenon of melody has long preoccupied Helmut Lachenmann. He went to study in Venice at the end of the 1950s with Luigi Nono, a teacher who strictly insisted on a critically reflective approach to musical material. Nono had objected to any trace of linear progression in Lachenmann's compositional sketches as a "tonal cell" – a melodic object that was seen as a recourse to a romanticizing tonal language that had to be overcome. The impetus for the scoring of My Melodies came from a rehearsal of Lachenmann's opera The Little Match Girl in Madrid in 2008: eight horns forming a homogeneous yet at the same time complex instrument. The premiere took place ten years later. In 2023, My Melodies was extended by 77 additional bars since that first performance, with Lachenmann drawing on further sketch material. It is rare for the composer to alter his own works after their premiere - but the sound ideas for the eight horns seem to have retained a special fascination for him. The bonus tracks offer short excerpts from this concert recording of My Melodies. They present characteristic passages of the work, inviting listeners to detect specific noises or sequences and to familiarize themselves with Lachenmann's world of sound.