This third volume in the series from the electrifying combination of Jean-Efflam Bavouzet and Manchester Camerata under Gabor Takacs-Nagy explores the final two of the six piano concertos of the year 1784, on which Mozart staked his reputation as both a performer and composer. Alongside these works features the pioneering Quintet for Piano and Winds, also from 1784, the first written for this combination of instruments and a work which Mozart regarded as his finest to date. The consecutive Kochel numbers of the three piano works hint at a remarkable story: not only were they all written in the same extraordinarily productive year, but all were completed in the same month, March, when Mozart was just twenty-eight years old. The two concertos form a pair, and in letters to his father Mozart makes it clear that he wrote them for his own performance: “Nobody but I owns these new concertos in B flat and D,” adding in another letter, two weeks later, “I consider them both to be concertos which make one sweat.” Heard in this context, Bavouzet’s playing is all the more astonishing.

REVIEWS:

Jean-Efflam Bavouzet has joined forces with Gábor Takács-Nagy and the Manchester Camerata to record the complete Mozart piano concertos. This is the third volume in the series. Bavouzet has won awards for his recordings of Haydn, Debussy, Prokofiev and Grieg. This recording shows that he is also a born Mozartian.

The three works on this recording all date from 1784 when Mozart was newly married and beginning to forge a freelance career for himself. The Piano Concerto in D Major K451 uses trumpets with timpani and has a distinctive military character. Takács-Nagy’s tempo is spot on in the opening movement marked Allegro assai. He and the Manchester Camerata open the movement with vibrancy and dynamism, and bring an infectious enthusiasm to Mozart’s springy dotted rhythms. Bavouzet’s phrasing and passagework are a model of classical decorum, and he uses subtle rubato to superb effect. There is excellent interplay between piano and orchestra, with phrases passing seamlessly between the players. The music is beautifully characterised. The militaristic opening theme gives way to the camp, whimsical second subject. The Manchester Camerata’s woodwind section are enchanting at the start of the slow movement. Bavouzet brings charm and restraint to the movement before giving us a moment of heart-stopping poetry in the interlude before the return of the opening them. The finale has enormous fizz and sparkle. There is tight, spirited interplay between soloist and orchestra. Bavouzet brings enormous energy to the increasingly elaborate passagework. It is impossible not to be swept along with the joys of music-making.

This is an outstanding recording and is worthy to sit alongside the great Mozart concerto recordings such as those by Perahia and Uchida.

-- MusicWeb International

The acclaimed violinist Jennifer Pike returns to Chandos to explore her heritage through the repertoire of a group of composers fundamental to the history of Polish music for the violin. From Janiewicz in the late eighteenth century right through to Bacewicz in the middle of the twentieth, Poland produced a number of composer-violinists well known across Europe. All of them were talented musicians as well as composers, their compositions technically demanding. Jennifer Pike here plays music by Karlowicz, Szymanowski, Wieniawski, and Moszkowski with complete control and deep feeling, sympathetically accompanied by Petr Limonov, winner of the Nikolai Rubinstein International Piano Competition.

Making his debut on Chandos, Sakari Oramo, who with the BBC Symphony Orchestra this year has championed new and rarely performed works, presents in surround sound the extravagant musical world of Florent Schmitt. The recording follows two exceptional Barbican performances with the same forces, a ‘sensuous and exotic’ Antoine et Cleopatre, according to the Financial Times (2016), and the first performance for nearly a dozen years of Symphony No. 2 (2017). The Second Symphony, the last major work by Schmitt, has nothing valedictory about it: as lavish and rhythmically sophisticated as his earlier music, emphatically bounding in fast passages and supple in slow, it also encompasses all the different musical expressions and styles that he had used over almost eight decades of composing. On the other hand, it is far from being an ‘old man’s piece.’ ‘It is really exuberant- very, very inventive, and incredibly busy for everyone,’ as Sakari Oramo explained in a BBC Radio 3 interview. The symphony is paired with the two orchestral suites from Antoine et Cleopatre, music written for Shakespeare’s play, premiered in 1920 at the Paris Opera, and very rarely recorded since then.

Released in July 1940, 'The Sea Hawk' was Korngold's last swashbuckler, and is arguably the finest film ever made in the genre. Certainly it is one of Errol Flynn's greatest films, and had a lavish budget for its time of 1.7m. One of the most difficult assignments of Korngold's career, it required a score of extraordinary length and complexity. The music was superbly multi-layered and thematically complex, literally sweeping the film along and matching its extraordinary visuals. Composition began just two days after the filming had been completed: in a special projection room equipped with a piano, Korngold had the reels of film run for him repeatedly while he improvised his music on the piano to the running footage. Later, he would then complete a full, annotated piano score. His training in the late symphonic traditions served him well. This recording has been very much a personal project for Rumon Gamba who comments, 'as with the rest of the Chandos Film series I very much wanted to keep the music limited to a single disc, instead of being dogged reconstruction of the complete score, including every single cue - some being just a quick trumpet figure or drum roll. I felt it was more important to represent the symphonic sweep of the score which is one of this film's greatest strengths'. Gamba has created a comprehensive 'suite' of six 'movements' that follows the action chronologically and only leaves out some insignificant cues and general repetitions. He continues, 'I believe that hearing Korngold's score in this manner will make for a wonderful listening experience representative of the narrative and in keeping with the spirit of this marvellous picture'. The BBC Philharmonic performs these scores with a symphonic precision and energy familiar with the first volume of Korngold's film music, released in 2005. Reviewing Volume 1, 'Music from the Movies' observed that 'Chandos has been doing great things in the film score re-recording world over recent years...With this release, however, they break new ground...this Chandos CD is for me the crowning achievement so far of what was already an impressive addition to the Golden Age film music'.

Grammy Award Nominee 2006 'Best Classical Contemporary Composition' Composed in 2005 as a specially commissioned ballet score fo New York City Ballet, 'Piano Concerto No.2' comprises three movements: cumnock fair, shabards and shamnation. The work here receives its world premiere recording. It is a highly energetic work - a frenzy of folksong and dance; the first movement, cumnock fair, is a whirling fantasy of eighteenth-century Scottish dance melodies; shambards makes use of Burnsian folksong with fragments of the Mad Scene from Lucia di Lammermoor drifting in and out of focus; shamnation is heavily influenced by Scottish folklore, often quite devilish. 'For sheer excitement...this half-romp, half tantrum of a work is hot stuff', wrote The Times. 'A Scotch Bestiary' was commissioned by the Los Angeles Philharmonic and the BBC Philharmonic to inaugurate the new organ in the Disney Hall in Los Angeles. This is a conertante work for organ (an instrument rarely used by contemporary composers) and orchestra, in two parts, and follows in a tradition of musical portraiture to which Elgar, Saint-Saëns and Mussorgsky have made significant contributions.

When Chandos brought out this CD in the mid-1990s, it revealed Doreen Carwithen to be a substantial creative personality in her own right: she was a warmly communicative composer, the style of her work owing more to Walton than to her husband and colleague William Alwyn. Her writing is strong and purposeful, sometimes adopting syncopated rhythms and stirring melodies, and always enhanced with brilliant and inventive orchestration. We are therefore delighted to reissue these works and at mid-price for the first time.

This superb programme combines the beautiful 'Alto Rhapsody' with the much more rarely performed 'Gesang der Parzen' and the cantata 'Rinadlo' - a work which gives us some idea of how a Brahms opera world would have sounded. This is the third and final volume of Brahms's works for chorus and orchestra, performed by the Danish National Symphony Orchestra under its distinguished Principal Conductor, Gerd Albrecht.

Chandos Movies is one of the best-known film-music based labels in the industry, and has received tremendous critical acclaim. The series is especially associated with the conductor Rumon Gamba, whose understanding of and enthusiasm for the genre is famous. Vaughan Williams' film music ranks amongst the very finest ever written, and this CD includes some of his best examples. This disc is especially important as some of the material has never been recorded before. The result is a hugely important release which will be of interest to both film music buffs and fans of Vaughan Williams.

Armenian composer Avet Rubeni Terterian’s third and fourth symphonies were written in the mid-1970’s, during one of his most prolific periods as a composer. Kirill Karabits and the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra make a compelling case for these rarely performed works. Terterian is regarded in his homeland as a giant of twentieth century Armenian music, and as the founder of his nation’s progressive school of composers. The backbone of his achievement is enshrined in eight symphonies, which Terterian composed over two decades from 1969 onwards; a ninth was in progress at the time of his death. In summing them up, he wrote: “We are all living on the threshold of a terrible apocalyptic judgement. It has always seemed to me that my symphonies are a cry of the soul for salvation and for the forgiveness of sins.”