The very first notes of this CD are enchanting: the delicate sounds that Kanahi Yamashita draws from the strings of her guitar immediately transport us to a world filled with sounds and songs that illuminate the various facets between night and dream. In the songs by John Dowland and the variations by Segei Rudnev, the darkness and depth of the night allude to death and it's eternal silence. Frank Martin's composition, Quatre pieces breves, reflects both the tranquility and the restlessness of the darkness, much like Benjamin Britten's Nocturnal after John Dowland. The journey through the night concludes with the 1953 piece Alba by Swiss composer Hans Haug, whose gentle string sounds herald the dawn - the night ends and a new day begins. Full of hope, tenderness, and melancholy, qualities so characteristic of Kanahi Yamashita's playing. Kanahi Yamashita was born in Nagasaki in 1997 and received her musical training from her parents, the renowned - and recently deceased - guitarist Kazuhito Yamashita and composer Keiko Fujiie. From a young age, she performed worldwide in a duo with her father. At the age of 13, she made her solo debut in Turin. She has lived in Berlin since 2015, where she studied at the Berlin University of the Arts with Prof. Thomas Muller-Pering and at the Nuremberg University of Music with Prof. Bjorn Colell, graduating with honors in 2026.

Also available on Blu-ray

Adapted from Thomas Mann’s 1912 novella, Death in Venice was Benjamin Britten’s last opera, the composer insisting on its completion while delaying badly needed heart surgery. The starkly simple narrative of a famous but failing novelist travelling to Venice to seek inspiration only to find unhealthy infatuation and deadly cholera, is given a chamber-like precision and clarity through Britten’s score, becoming a haunting drama filled with musical symbols, disquieting mystery and richly evocative atmospheres of Venice and its strange characters. Willy Decker’s Teatro Real production was described as ‘one of his most brilliant stage works… a remarkable technical feat.’

Benjamin Britten's three Cello Suites rank among the most important solo works for the instrument since Bach. Written for Mstislav Rostropovich, they unite references to early music traditions with a distinctly modern voice, combining formal mastery, dramatic imagination and profound emotional depth. In this recording, Pieter Wispelwey brings his new reading of a 45 year long engagement with these remarkable works for cello solo.

Leif Ove Andsnes is a leading pianist of his time, known for his exceptional musicianship and subtil touch, his considerable technical flair being unfailingly put at the service of his interpretations. He was a pioneer for being the first home-trained superstar pianist to have emerged from Norway. This box is the story of a 20-year partnership that has yielded a rich seam of recorded treasures, first for Virgin and then for EMI. Running through this cornucopia of 34 albums (36 CDs), we find recurring themes: Grieg (Andsnes even recorded some Lyric Pieces on the composer's own piano at Troldhaugen), Nordic music in general, Schumann, Rachmaninov, Schubert.

The Washington National Cathedral Choir (comprised of the Choir of Men and Boys, and the Choir of Men and Girls) is one of the few cathedral choirs in the United States with an affiliated school in the English Tradition—and this is their first recording on Gothic with their new director, Michael McCarthy. Appointed in 2003, McCarthy was the founding director of the London Oratory School Schola. The Schola recorded for the film scores of both The Lord of the Rings film trilogy and the Harry Potter film series. McCarthy brings a fresh approach to Benjamin Britten's Ceremony of Carols, and delightful readings of many other Christmas carols. One of America's finest Anglican choirs! - Gothic Records

Benjamin Britten: A Ceremony of Carols, Op. 28
Britten: A Hymn to the Virgin
Richard Rodney Bennett: Suanni
arr. Robert Lucas de Pearsall: In dulci jubilo
arr. John Stainer: What child is this
Kenneth Leighton: Lully lulla
arr. Sandys, Bramley & Stainer: I saw three ships
Morten Lauridsen: O magnum mysterium
John Rutter: There is a flower
Peter Warlock: Bethlehem Down
Peter Wishart: Alleluya! A new work is come on hand

A strikingly alert, fresh-faced reading of the Young Person's Guide, but the major attraction is the Sinfonia da Requiem, which immediately impresses with the focus and sheen of the orchestral playing.

I haven't enjoyed Britten's endlessly resourceful Young Person's Guide so much in ages... [A] strikingly alert, fresh-faced reading... When it comes to the Grimes Interludes, [Slatkin] concentrates on meticulous refinement, with radiantly airy textures throughout: the results are more coolly detached than we are used to hearing and often strikingly beautiful... [W]hat's more, [he] offers a notable bonus in the shape of a lucid and (once again) strikingly refined account of the ''Passacaglia'' from the same opera.

So what is left on the RCA collection? Well, there's a most eloquent, beautifully poised rendering of the Purcell Chaconne—Britten's loving realization can rarely have sounded more beguiling. But the major attraction here is the Sinfonia da Requiem. This could hardly start more promisingly, with fearsome ff timpani blows and balefully growling tuba. Again, what immediately impresses is the focus and sheen of the orchestral playing, but there's a price to pay, perhaps, in the shape of some lack of emotional thrust. It's the Dies irae centrepiece which bears this observation out most clearly: the demons certainly don't scamper quite as malevolently as they do on the composer's own 1964 Decca recording (which still, by the way, sounds absolutely stunning three decades on!)... Of course, this movement's shattering disintegration is as hair-raising as ever, and in the concluding ''Requiem aeternam'' Slatkin transmits a soothing, consolatory glow that many will find deeply moving.

In sum, [a] superior, finely engineered [addition] to the Britten discography; indeed, I can't imagine the majority of collectors will find much to disappoint them here.

-- Andrew Achenbach, Gramophone [3/1994]

Peter Pears gives the words their full due and sings with sensitive mastery, while Julian Bream plays with unfailing affection. The enthralling music and superb performances makes this out-of-the-way record a joy.

To a very considerable extent this record is a tribute to Julian Bream's playing; had he not been around, the two song cycles and the Britten folk-song arrangements (and for all I know, other items too) would never have been written. And very enjoyable it all is. The two song-cycles are, I think, near each other in quality, but some way apart in effect, for the Britten is obviously written to suit Peter Pears and Julian Bream, whereas the Walton seems at times to be written, as it were, against them. Thus the second song needs to be sung (I apologize for the word) saucily, the fifth with a degree of inebriations, and they are not really within Pears's emotional range. You might think the last one beyond the powers of most singers, so difficult is it, but in fact Pears makes a very good shot at it, and it is surprisingly effective. But Lady, when I behold the roses seems better suited to the performers' style and, a lovely song, it comes off without any sense of strain. The words of these songs ("chosen by Christopher Hassall"—why didn't Walton choose them?) all date from the sixteenth or seventeenth centuries, and their charm is among the cycle's chief attractions.

The Britten Songs from the Chinese date from 1958, two years before the Walton, and they are settings of some of Arthur Waley's exquisite translations. Peter Pears gives the words their full due, and sings with sensitive mastery, while Julian Bream plays the marvellous guitar part with unfailing affection. I'm told that Britten himself did a good deal of guitar practice when writing these songs, and it would be interesting to hear him attempt them. His recent folk-song arrangements are delightful, and at least one of them has a guitar part of formidable difficulty. The Seiber arrangements of French folk-songs are simpler in style, but lovely to hear, and the Fricker setting of 0 Mistress mine, is delightful... [T]he enthralling music and superb performances and splendid quality makes this out-of-the-way record a joy.

-- R.F., Gramophone [7/1965, reviewing the original LP release]

This Chandos production must now be first choice for this work.

Welcome to John Gay’s and Benjamin Britten’s romp through some seamy but also colourful and vibrant elements of 18 ^th century London. This work established the ballad opera in which spoken dialogue alternated with musical items. Gay’s satirical words were set to well-known traditional and popular tunes. Two hundred and twenty years later Britten added 20 ^th century accompaniments.

What’s entirely Britten here is the fresh caterwauling Overture (tr. 2) in which the various characters are given brief sound-portraits. There’s an oboe of sinuous sweetness for Polly (0:40), a cavorting clarinet for Macheath (1:29), suave strings and a jocular bassoon for the highwaymen (2:35) and a bantering circus-like master of ceremonies style for Mr Peachum (3:25). It’s all terrifically realized by the City of London Sinfonia who play marvellously throughout.

But what of the songs? Filch’s ‘’Tis woman that seduces all Mankind’ (tr. 5) is a good example of Britten allowing an original tune free rein while giving it modern dress with balmy woodwind and harp. The heroine Polly comes in (tr.12) to strains of her first song over which there are snatches of dialogue. This, like the melodrama which shortly follows (tr. 20), is Britten’s neat way of subverting the claim in the opening dialogue that this opera will have no “unnatural” recitative. Polly’s first song, ‘Virgins are like the fair flower in its lustre’ has as its tune Purcell’s ‘What shall I do to show how much I love him?’ from Dioclesian. Like its original, it is shown by Leah-Marian Jones to be at once wistful and coy. Her duet with Susan Bickley’s Mrs Peachum, ’O Polly, you might have toyed and kissed’ (tr. 15) catches well a cosy lullaby make-believe, aided by the gently rocking strings’ accompaniment. It’s lovely but only fleeting. Another notable accompaniment is the flutter-tonguing flute illustrating Polly’s ‘The Turtle thus with plaintive crying’ (tr. 19).

The highwayman hero Macheath enters and Tom Randle proves courteous enough to Jones’ simpering. The duet between Macheath and Polly, ’Were I laid on Greenland’s coast’ (tr. 22) is sweetly done but I felt the singers were over-conscious of the need to match the flowing orchestration and then the addition of chorus and drum. Some of the natural freshness is lost that’s present in the 1963 Aldeburgh Festival staging on DVD (Decca 074 3329). In this Chandos CD ‘The Miser thus a shilling sees’ (tr. 24) responds better to the typical careful attention of conductor Christian Curnyn’s approach. The disciplined emphasis of rhythm in its thorny progression matches the text’s poetic expression of loss. A pity, however, the second appearance of “Till home and friends are lost at last” (1:54) isn’t, as marked in the score ‘(in the distance)’ as the lovers go their separate ways. It’s an effect achieved in the BBC broadcast recording of the original 1948 production conducted by Britten (Pearl GEM 0225).

The highwaymen’s ’Fill ev’ry glass’ (tr. 26) is a drinking song of the sturdy, resolute variety in 2009 where a lustier abandon was shown in 1948. ‘Let us take the road’ (tr. 28) is infused with eagerness because of the excitement Britten and Curnyn convey in sketching the approach of the coach. Tom Randle’s Macheath has a too cultivated spoken voice but his singing is virile enough. You can hear this in ‘If the heart of a man is depressed with cares’ (tr. 29), marked as a caressing Andante backed by sweetly musing violin solo and rocking clarinet. Again I felt the line was held back a little in deference to the detail of the accompaniment. At this point Macheath is visited by a parade of prostitutes and what’s entertaining in the Decca DVD is rather curious here. With no sounds incorporated of women moving around, squealing and the like , you might think Macheath is imagining it all. I guess this is so as not to detract from Britten’s own variety parade of instruments, a kind of ‘Young Person’s Guide to Women’. There’s a superb tambourine to enliven the headiness of ‘Youth’s the season made for joys’. Randle sings with sunny freedom the ad libitum ‘Ah’s above the chorus repeat, though the top C final phrase is left to a soprano. Now betrayed by the women, his ‘At the Tree I shall suffer with pleasure’ has a disciplined testiness but less venom than Decca’s Kenneth McKellar.

Again more telling in this Chandos production is the more meditative material. The opening song of Act 2, ‘Man may escape from rope and gun’ (CD2, tr. 2), where Randle shows how transfixed Macheath is in his repetition of ‘woman’, savours past joys even while aware they’re the cause of present pain. Sarah Fox, as Lucy Lockit, is scarily efficient in her spite in ‘Thus when a good Housewife sees a rat’ (tr. 3). Polly’s response is the more sensitively elegiac ‘Thus when the Swallow seeking prey’ (tr. 10) and here Leah-Marian Jones is rich, smooth and eloquent. For me, however, Macheath’s ‘How happy could I be with either’ (tr. 11) is taken so fast it becomes too much a tongue-twister virtuoso piece losing some of its whimsy. In 1948 Peter Pears’ lighter touch was more effective. Polly has the easier task of rising above all this with ‘Cease your funning’ (tr.12), whose merging into the chorus and distancing of perspective are successfully achieved before we’re brought back to earth with a vengeance by Lucy’s crisp, snappy ‘Why how now, Madam Flirt!’ (tr. 13). The finale begins with Lucy and Polly showing great resolve. ‘No power on earth can e’er divide’ (tr. 14) is well progressed by Curnyn to an exciting ‘Horay’ trio response from Macheath, Lockit and Peachum. The there’s then increasing speed with a backing chorus in Sullivanesque abandon.

The opening song of Act 3, Lucy’s ‘When young at the bar’ (tr. 16) should be familiar as the tune is Purcell’s ‘If love’s a sweet passion’ from The Fairy Queen. Fox invests it with its original sad yearning while Curnyn points the claustrophobic cloying nature of Britten’s rich scoring of the wry accompaniment. Of a different order and part of the score’s kaleidoscopic variety is the relished archness of Frances McCafferty as Mrs Trapes delivering ‘In the days of my youth I could bill like a dove’ (tr. 21) with relished archness. To this is added the raucous carousing of Lockit and Peachum. Shortly there’s also the poignancy of Lucy and Polly’s ‘A curse attends a woman’s love’ (tr. 25). The paradox that these two candidates for Macheath’s affection can at one moment be united in their shared sense of rejection and understanding of the impossibility of their situation and at the next daggers drawn as rivals and eager still to court Macheath with warm affection at ‘Hither, dear husband, turn your eyes’ (tr. 28) is exploited dramatically. Fox’s pleading for Macheath’s life with ‘When he holds up his hand’ (tr. 31) ought to be the more persuasive, aided by Britten’s obbligato oboe accompaniment. ‘The Charge is prepared’ is a stock, formal chorus considerably pepped up by Mrs Peachum’s triumphant ‘Ah’s and glissando shrieks over its orchestral postlude.

Britten creates a closing scena (tr. 34) with Macheath in the condemned cell at first extolling the virtues of drink when about to die, then recalling pretty women. This gives way to the questioning protest ‘must I die?’. This is well sung by Randle but doesn’t quite have Pears’ grasp of the torment of ever-fluctuating contrasts of mood. Polly and Lucy offer a moving show of support, ‘Would I might be hanged’ to the heavily insistent backdrop of the funeral knell. In 1948 Britten’s knell is less weighty but more searing. Macheath realistically confesses ‘my courage is out’. The spoken dialogue wipes this all away. The highwaymen begin an address directly to the audience to demand the playwright provides a reprieve and all the players join in so the work can end with a dance. This bit of trickery and the rejection of the moral that vice must be punished works better in sound alone than the quicker and tamer removal of justice in the DVD. So you finish the Chandos sound recording remembering the company’s lusty tra-las and Fox’s top C.

This Chandos is the fullest version of the three currently available in the UK, playing at 117:52 in comparison with Decca’s 93:50 and Pearl’s 79:03. The differences are largely down to the Chandos including more of Gay’s spoken dialogue with alterations and additions by Tyrone Guthrie though even here I’d guess about a quarter of the dialogue published in the full and vocal scores has been cut. I don’t think this is a disadvantage because there’s a good deal of repetition in the text anyway. However, some musical numbers are also cut in the other recordings: Mrs Peachum’s ‘If Love the Virgin’s Heart invade’ (CD1 tr. 9) can only be heard here. To see the piece staged is a benefit. On the DVD the dialogue generally has a touch more pace and life, being less self-conscious in delivery. In the same vein the switch from dialogue to music flows more seamlessly and the folksong origins of many of the tunes are delivered with a more disarmingly innocent directness. The feeling between the characters is clearer in the ensemble numbers. The 1948 recording is striking for the verve of Britten’s direction, the charm of Pears’ light heroic manner and the lovely unforced upper register of Nancy Evans as Polly. Listen to her in ‘The Miser thus a shilling sees’. On the other hand it also at times adopts an over-romantic style, as in ‘O Polly, you might have toyed and kissed’ or is too patrician as in ‘Virgins are like the fair flower’.

To conclude, then, although sometimes more studied and deliberate than it might be, including careful points of emphasis within the dialogue, this Chandos production must now be first choice for this work. It also offers you in most luxuriant detail the colour and density of Britten’s orchestration.

-- Michael Greenhalgh, MusicWeb International

"One of the most unlikely of mystics, Benjamin Britten penned his Hymn to the Virgin when he was just sweet 17. In its antiphonal responses between eight-part choir hymning the Virgin’s virtues in English and four-strong semi-chorus echoing their phrases back at them in Latin, it’s a gift to the Choir of Westminster Abbey, singing on its home ground, under Martin Neary. This all-Britten collection surrounds the familiar Ceremony of Carols – surely the most affecting anthology of its kind ever composed – with less familiar items like the Wedding Anthem for Lord Harewood and Marion Stein (now Thorpe) and the Christopher Smart setting Rejoice in the Lamb, plus a guest performance, as it were, of Canticle II: Abraham and Isaac with its other-worldly opening for unison alto and tenor (Michael Chance and Ian Bostridge) as the Voice of God – worth a million dollars, as BB himself confided to Tippett...This disc is one of the best things [Neary and the Westminster Choir] have done."

-- BBC Music Magazine