From Canvas to Concert Hall - Music inspired by Art
Centaur Records
CD
$15.99Jan 03, 2025
This album features four great orchestral works that are inspired by works of art. The Saint-Saens, Rachmaninoff, and Liszt works are well-known. Also included is a work by contemporary composer William Popp, who is also well-known as an accordionist.
Riccardo Chailly, Lucerne Festival Orchestra - The First Years
Accentus Music
DVD
$82.99May 26, 2023
This box set documents Riccardo Chailly's first years as principal conductor of the Lucerne Festival Orchestra. In summer 2016, he steps into the office as Claudio Abbado's successor with Mahler's 8th Symphony. In a colorful, fresh and stirring performance of the overture and incidental music to William Shakespeare's "A Midsummer Night's Dream" and Tchaikovsky's "Manfred" Symphony, Chailly and the Lucerne Festival Orchestra bring the musical imagery of both works to life. In summer 2018, the performers transport us to Ravel's musical universes full of colors, scents and flavors: from the pulsating three-four time of the waltzes to the ancient love story of Daphnis and Chloé and the relentless rhythm of the Boléro. A recording from summer 2019 of Rachmaninoff's Third Symphony and Third Piano Concerto with Denis Matsuev marks the various stages in the composer's life and demonstrates once again the close bond between the orchestra and their new principal conductor.
Rachmaninoff: Piano Concerto No. 1; Piano Sonata No. 2; Core
Piano Classics
CD
$19.99Mar 21, 2025
Back in 2015, Fanfare singled out Ekaterina Litvintseva's first solo album of Rachmaninoff, including the Moments musicaux Op.16, as an 'impressive outing. Her playing is tonally rich and extremely thoughtful.' Since then, she has assembled an impressive and critically acclaimed catalogue on Piano Classics, including most recently the great Trio elegiaque which Rachmaninoff wrote in memory of Tchaikovsky: 'an attractive and valuable disc' (Fanfare). Litvintseva now turns to a trio of uncontested masterpieces by the Russian composer, demonstrating within a single album the range of his stylistic evolution over the course of 40 years. He was still a teenager, studying at the Moscow Conservatoire, when he wrote his First Piano Concerto in 1891. On the instruction of his teachers, he took the Grieg Concerto as a model, and poured his own invention into it: a remarkably successful strategy, as it turned out, because the finished work is both strong and personal, touched with many of those fingerprints of gesture and harmony which we have come to think of as quintessentially Rachmaninoff. These include flights of lyric fantasy and equally sudden, unexpected turns towards melancholy introspection. Rachmaninoff had become an international celebrity by 1913, when he took his family to live the high life with him in Rome, at a home which Tchaikovsky had once used. In the Italian capital he began work on the imposing Second Piano Sonata, though the work had to be completed back at the family estate, Ivanovka, when his daughters came down with typhus. Rachmaninoff overhauled the Sonata in 1931, cutting and in some places simplifying it's form, and it is this version which Litvintseva plays: a stylistic bridge between mid-period and late-style in a composer whose capacity for reinvention has often been underestimated. By 1941 he was an exile living in the US and Switzerland, where he wrote his Variations on a theme of Corelli - the 'La folia' theme adopted by countless of his predecessors. Informed by decades of pianistic and creative mastery, Rachmaninoff makes the theme his own with a neoclassical severity and haunting economy of expression. Thus, taken as a whole, Ekaterina Litvintseva's new album pays a wide-ranging and personal tribute to a composer who has inspired her playing since her formation in Siberia. - Ekaterina Litvintseva is one of the most remarkable pianists of her generation. Her recordings won her enthusiastic acclaim in the international press: "a notable moment in the history of Chopin interpretation" (Fanfare); "a sense of spontaneous invention" in Mozart's K.271 (Gramophone) and "an expressive depth" in Brahms's 1st Piano Concerto (BBC Music Magazine). She previously recorded for Piano Classics an album with piano works by Dora Pejacevic (PCL10226), as well as the Works for Piano and Orchestra by Chopin (PCL10142 and 10274), which was a CD Of The Week at Classic FM. - In this new release Litvintseva displays her innate feeling for the idiom in works by Sergei Rachmaninoff (1873-1943): the youthfully exuberant First Piano Concerto, the monumental Second Piano Sonata and the innovative Corelli variations Op. 42, cornerstones of the piano repertoire nowadays, and played with vigour, drama and a deep sense of poetry. The concerto is accompanied by the Nordwestdeutsche Philharmonie, conducted by Vahan Mardirossian.
Lukáš Vondráček and Sergei Rachmaninoff. Scarcely do we encounter a connection between a musician and a composer so close, strong and energizing. When, at the age of 15, Vondráček was invited by Vladimir Ashkenazy and the Czech Philharmonic to perform Rachmaninoff’s Concerto No. 1, he had garnered international acclaim at numerous concerts and competitions. Just a year later, the pianist toured the USA and appeared at Carnegie Hall. At the age of 29, he triumphed at the Queen Elisabeth Competition in Brussels (2016), performing Rachmaninoff’s Concerto No. 3, conducted by Marin Alsop. Love at first listen, Rachmaninoff has become his flagship composer: “Besides affording the opportunity to showcase one’s technique, his music impresses by being contrastive and having an immense dynamic range ... What more could a person keen on tone color wish? It’s sheer beauty!”
Lukáš Vondráček has been invited to perform Rachmaninoff’s concertos by the most prominent orchestras and conductors worldwide. The present album is one of the few sweet fruits of the Covid pandemic, which cleared the soloist’s otherwise jam-packed diary and afforded him peaceful time for recording. The booklet contains an interview with Lukáš Vondráček, within which he provides an account of his ample experience of and great affinity to Rachmaninoff. Yet the most powerful confession is the recording itself, made with the superb Prague Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Tomáš Brauner, capturing performances rendering every detail, teeming with emotion, colour and contrast. Sheer beauty indeed! Rachmaninoff in Lukáš Vondráček’s hands. A lavish musical feast.
The pianist, composer, producer and renaissance musician Jeroen van Veen has played many concerts with both his wife Sandra and his brother Maarten, and has recorded with both of them for Brilliant Classics. The present compilation brings together a unique sequence of masterpieces for the genre in live and studio performances, made between 1992 and 2008, and given by the brothers as Piano Duo Van Veen.
This pocket history of the piano duo opens – as it must – with the F minor Fantasy of Schubert. All elements of Schubert's art can be found in the Fantasy: his gift for a sublime, gently unfolding melody; melancholy harmonic turns from major to minor; high drama within a spacious symphonic design; intricate counterpoint in the finale. Less well known but no less accomplished in its way is the set of Beethoven variations by Camille Saint-Saëns, a polished transformation of a minuet theme. This 1992 studio recording concludes with a pair of 20th-century pieces which capitalize on the energy and momentum of the piano duo genre as a whole: La valse of Ravel and the Paganini Variations of Lutoslawski, which never fail to raise the pulse and receive here barnstorming performances. The adrenaline level increases further with a sequence of live performances on album 2, opening with Rachmaninov’s gorgeous Russian Rhapsody and continuing with The Rite of Spring in the version which Stravinsky first performed with his friends in Paris prior to the ballet’s notorious public premiere in 1911. In his Monologue of 1964, Zimmermann developed the thread of his Dialogue for two pianos and orchestra with a collage technique which quotes from Bach, Mozart and Beethoven in which the two pianists muse almost to themselves at times. Rounding off this collection in epic style is the apotheosis of Messiaen’s Visions de l’Amen.
REVIEW:
This is a spectacular piano duo release. Of the 2 discs one was recorded in the studio (one piano) and the other in concert (two pianos). The repertoire here is mostly “famous works”, but the Zimmermann falls outside of the title’s range. There are a lot of brilliant, virtuosic pieces here, and the Ravel and Stravinsky are best known in their orchestral guises. Among people who listen to a lot of 4-hand repertoire, everything here, except perhaps the Zimmermann, will be in our libraries. This is a release I’ll keep on my active listening stack for quite some time.
Francesco Piemontesi, a BBC Music Magazine award-winning pianist and lauded as a 'wonderful Mozartian', has an intense curiosity about his fellow artists - their pianos, the sonorities they cultivate, the secret elements that animate their playing, and what drives them. In this documentary by Jan Schmidt-Garre, filmed over one year, Piemontesi talks with some of the world's leading performers, including his mentor Alfred Brendel, Maria Joao Pires, Stephen Kovacevich and Antonio Pappano, in a series of revealing encounters that illuminate their individual approaches to the instrument, it's colour and form. The film is complemented by a bonus 60-minute recital by Yulianna Avdeeva, Zlata Chochieva and Francesco Piemontesi, played on Rachmaninoff's Steinway piano at Villa Senar, his home in Switzerland during the 1930s.
The hour-long emotional tour-de-force with cellist Mark Prihodko and pianist Viktoria Korolionok evokes a soul-searching journey that spans a century of romantic repertoire following the music-making traditions of Ysaye, Gershwin, and Rachmaninov. Cerdanyenca takes its title from the eponymous sonata, written by Catalan composer Marc Migo Cortes, who dedicated this masterwork to Prihodko, his great friend. Conceived at the Juilliard School in New York, where Prihodko held the prestigious Kovner Fellowship while completing his Bachelor’s Degree in the studio of Richard Aaron, and Migo Cortes was completing his Ph.D. in the studio of John Corigliano, Sonata Cerdanyenca continues the tradition of the grandiose twentieth-century masterworks for cello and piano. Cultivating the lifetime synergy between composer and cellist, Prihodko and Migo specifically drew inspiration from the artistic collaborations between Rostropovich and Britten, and Piatigorsky and Strauss. The newly commissioned and internationally premiered Sonata has won the prestigious Pau Casals Festival International Award in 2019. In this extremely demanding monumental piece, the composer portrays the legends of his home region of La Cerdanya, from the tales of La dona d’aigua (the seducing water-woman) to the echoing Sardana Dances of Catalonia. His use of folkloric elements contextualizes hundreds of years of storytelling in an engaging acoustical play, expertly guided by Korolionok and Prihodko.
Concertos for Piano, Trumpet & Strings / Ott, Radutu, Kaftan, ORF VRSO
Orfeo
CD
$20.99Mar 04, 2022
After the great success of her debut album (OPUS KLASSIK award 2021) and her duo album with pianist En-Chia Lin, Selina Ott for her third recording teams up with renowned pianist Maria Radutu, conductor Dirk Kaftan and the ORF RSO to present selected works by Dmitri Shostakovich, André Jolivet and Mieczyslaw Weinberg. Shostakovich’s Concerto for piano, trumpet and string orchestra (1933) is notable for a prevailing parodistic tone, which scarcely occurs in this form in any of his other works. Many of the themes that lend the music the distorted face of the grotesque are heard in the trumpet. The choice of instruments of André Jolivet’s Concertino for trumpet, piano and strings is exactly the same as that of Shostakovich’s work, but the latter is more of a piano concerto, while Jolivet’s is more of a trumpet concerto. Like Shostakovich, Mieczyslaw Weinberg also incorporates several quotations into the final movement of his Trumpet Concerto (1967), for example the fanfare from Mendelssohn’s Wedding March. Referred to by Shostakovich as “symphony for trumpet and orchestra”, the Concerto presents music of a taut inner structure and logical consistency.
Rachmaninoff: Liturgy of St John Chrysostom / Putninš, Estonian Philharmonic Chamber Choir
BIS
SACD
$21.99Feb 04, 2022
The music of the Russian Orthodox Church was an essential part of Sergei Rachmaninoff’s musical background. As a boy he was deeply moved by the sound of St Petersburg’s cathedral choirs, and phrases reminiscent of liturgical chant permeate his music. His Vespers has long been admired as a summit of Russian liturgical music. It has unfortunately tended to overshadow the Liturgy of St John Chrysostom, his earlier large-scale sacred composition. Named after the fourth-century Archbishop of Constantinople and Church Father, the Liturgy consists of a sequence of prayers, psalms and hymns, which are sung or chanted by the different participants in the service. Rachmaninoff did not make use of any existing chants (as he would later do in his Vespers), but chose to reflect their style and spirit with music entirely of his own. The sonorities he creates is rarely achieved by plain four-part writing: instead the voices are frequently divided, solos emerge from the choir, and the range of textures shows great imagination. The Liturgy is here performed in the warm acoustics of the Niguliste Church in Tallinn by the Estonian Philharmonic Chamber Choir – listed among the ten best choirs in the world by the BBC Music Magazine in 2020 – conducted by Kaspars Putninš.
REVIEW:
Rachmaninoff himself esteemed this work highly, and when it receives the careful performance it gets here, it is indeed lovely. Choral music in the Baltic countries maintains a very high level of quality, and this small choir is arguably the jewel in the crown. Note that some online sources designate this as a reading of "excerpts," but it is not; Putniņš omits only some short responsorial sections, including one short movement, in accordance with the preference of modern editors. A wonderful performance of this Rachmaninoff masterwork.
Simon-Pierre Bestion writes: “I discovered Rachmaninoff’s ‘Vespers’ singing in a choir, and the work made a genuine emotional impact on me! This music gives off an impression of naturalness and ‘simplicity’, yet in fact its architecture is complex and innovative for its time in the quasi-orchestral treatment of the voices. I wanted to place the work in a liturgical context that I conceived by drawing my inspiration from the Orthodox ceremonies I have been lucky enough to attend in Russia and Romania. The special characteristic and the beauty of this Vigil service (which in the Orthodox churches includes both Vespers and Matins) is that it accompanies the prayers of the faithful from dusk until sunrise.”
John Wilson and Sinfoina of London complete their set of Rachmaninoff symphonies with this recording of the First Symphony and the Symphonic Dances. Rachmaninoff hoped that the First Symphony, composed in 1895, would build on the reputation of his graduation opera Aleko, which had proved a great success. The premiere, in St Petersburg in March 1897, was, however, a disaster. Rumour had it that the conductor, Alexander Glazunov, was drunk: true or false, it seems clear that he had little interest in the piece, leading to a raft of scathing reviews. This setback hit Rachmaninoff very deeply, and is considered by many to be the reason for the following three-year creative block only lifted by a course of hypnotherapy. Rachmaninoff left the score in Russia when he fled the revolution in 1917, and it was subsequently lost. Two years after his death it was reconstructed from a set of orchestral parts in the Leningrad Conservatory, and given it's second performance, in Moscow, in October 1945, since when it has gained it's place as standard orchestral repertoire around the world. The Symphonic Dances were written towards the very end of the composer's life, and started out in a version for two pianos, which Rachmaninoff performed with Vladimir Horowitz. He then set about orchestrating the work, which was first performed by the Philadelphia Orchestra and Eugene Ormandy in January 1941. Set in three movements, the Symphonic Dances reference the theme from the final movement of the First Symphony. In this recording, Sinfonia of London plays from John Wilson's own performing edition of the work.
This recording should be seen in that manner: as a beginning, a solo recording debut by Alejandro Algarra in which he confronts two colossi of the instrument. It is quite a recording milestone to tackle these two essentials. A real challenge both for him as a performer and for IBS Classical as a record label. So please do not be deceived by the apparent simplicity and unpretentiousness of the term prelude. Quite the opposite, in fact. Nor should a prelude be understood in this case as a prolegomenon to a major piece (“Preludes to what?”, as André Gide wondered in his famous Notes sur Chopin), but as individual works which, taken as a whole, represent a major technical and interpretative challenge; undoubtedly one of the all-time highs of piano literature.
This 7-SACD collection includes recordings made by Brazilian-born conductor John Neschling of the orchestral works of Ottorino Respighi, alongside Puccini the best-known Italian composer of the first half of the twentieth century. Widely praised by the press, including BBC Music Magazine, which described them as ‘the finest-ever survey of the composer’s orchestral output undertaken by a single conductor’, these recordings reveal Respighi’s extraordinary range.
His transcriptions of works from the baroque period bear witness to his great musical refinement and are an example of the way in which people dared to adapt to current tastes at the beginning of the 20th century. His original compositions, whether symphonic poems, ballets or symphonic works, often call for a large orchestra, sometimes with the addition of numerous percussion instruments, piano, organ and even, in Pines of Rome, a phonograph, present a synthesis of the musical traditions of his native Italy and contemporary romantic, impressionist and neo-classical trends while remaining resolutely closed to modernist developments and atonality. Respighi’s lavish sound palette and the spirit that fills his scores were to find an echo in Hollywood film music, and John Williams considers him to be one of his most important influences.
Past praise of the previously released recordings included in this set:
Respighi: The Birds; Ancient Airs & Dances
These performances are uncommonly airy. Much of this music is suffused with an autumnal melancholy, and Neschling and his orchestra capture that very well.
-- Fanfare
Respighi: Metamorphoseon, etc.
All of the performances here are expert, but conductor John Neschling deserves particular credit for keeping things movement purposefully forward in the first two long, and mostly slowish, movements of the Belkis suite. The same work’s vulgar (let’s not kid ourselves) concluding Danza orgiastica also sounds more musical than usual–less like a back-alley gang bang–but with no loss of energy. The Liège orchestra plays with great bravura, and BIS’s SACD sonics, typically, are just terrific. In short, a very worthy entry in this ongoing series.
-- ClassicsToday.com
Respighi: Roman Trilogy / Neschling, Sao Paulo Symphony
The São Paulo Symphony Orchestra is a superb ensemble by any standards, and displays their virtuosity in the three Respighi symphonic poems.
Rachmaninoff: Morceaux de Fantaisie; Morceaux de Salon; 3 No
Naxos
CD
$19.99Feb 13, 2026
Composed at the age of 19, Rachmaninov's earliest published cycle of piano pieces, the Morceaux de Fantaisie, contains the Prélude in C-sharp minor, destined to become his signature work, and the Mélodie in E major, much loved by Tchaikovsky. The expressive Morceaux de Salon show Tchaikovsky's influence and some of the grief felt by Rachmaninov after his mentor's death. With the inclusion of the melodically rich Nocturnes and the Four Pieces, the earliest to survive in his hand, this collection shows both the young composer finding his voice and the timeless Rachmaninov we recognise today.
The great Yevgeny Svetlanov frequently conducted Debussy. His interpretation of Debussy's Prelude a l'apres-midi d'un faune in the Philharmonia concert recorded here in 2001 has an almost operatically vocal style, coupled with spacious tempo. He achieves a most remarkable response from the Philharmonia both in this piece and La Mer, in which the dramatically assertive style of brass playing contributes to a particularly powerful approach to the French composer's music. Svetlanov's conducting of Respighi's orchestration of two of Rachmaninov's Etudes-Tableaux, with the BBC Symphony Orchestra in October 1999, is typically atmospheric in the first tableaux - La Mer et les Mouettes (The Sea and the Gulls) following Debussy's La Mer, while the second, La Foire (The Fair) demonstrates the conductor's wonderful ear for colour. Prokofiev's Overture on Hebrew Themes was composed for sextet in 1919 while in the USA, but was re-scored for orchestra in 1934. Svetlanov's concert with the LSO from October 1979 is a rarity since his only recording dates back to an early Melodiya account.
Star tenor Piotr Beczala presents a selection of romances by Rachmaninoff and Tchaikovsky, together with the acclaimed lied accompanist Helmut Deutsch.
The romance was the most popular musical genre in nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Russia, practiced by professionals as well as amateurs. Tchaikovsky and Rachmaninoff both enriched this genre with their lyricism and melodic invention.
Elevated by Deutsch’s splendid accompaniment, Beczala delivers these songs with a great sense for the Slavic idiom and meaning of the words, combined with colorful lyricism and italianità, perfectly fitting the Russian and cosmopolitan musical language of these two masters.
Piotr Beczala is one of the most sought-after tenors of his age, both on the opera and concert stage. His Pentatone debut album Vincerò! has been one of the most successful and critically acclaimed opera recital albums of the last few years. During the 2021 Opus Klassik Awards, Piotr Beczala was crowned as Singer of the Year for this exceptional recording. Pianist Helmut Deutsch is a first-class song accompanist, working together with the greatest vocalists of today. He makes his Pentatone debut.
Rachmaninoff: Symphony No. 2 / Wilson, Sinfonia of London
Chandos
SACD
$21.99Apr 07, 2023
John Wilson and Sinfonia of London release their second album of Rachmaninoff. The Second Symphony was mostly composed in Dresden – where Rachmaninoff was escaping the political and professional pressures of Russia – in 1906 – 07. An hour’s worth of music, the symphony is one of his largest works after the operas, and is widely viewed as one of his greatest works. It was possibly of some significance to the composer, following the less than auspicious début of his First Symphony (which he withdrew after the première). First performed in St Petersburg and Moscow, conducted by the composer, the Second Symphony was an immediate success with audiences and critics alike, and remains a mainstay of the orchestral repertoire to this day. Rachmaninoff dedicated the score to his teacher Sergei Taneyev, who was a pupil of Tchaikovsky. Rachmaninoff composed the Prélude in C sharp minor in 1892, originally for piano, at the beginning of his career. Stokowski’s orchestration, performed here, whilst not the only one in existence, is certainly the best known and arguably the most successful.
History of the Russian Piano Trio, Vol. 6 - Rachmaninoff: Tr
Naxos
CD
$13.99$19.99Save 30%May 09, 2025
Sergey Rachmaninoff's two Elegiac Trios became the pinnacle of Russian musical symbolism, forming an epigraph to the revolutionary upheavals that split Russian civilisation and Rachmaninoff's life in two. The moods of nostalgia and echoes of soulful longing found in these works are infused with ideas of death. The beautiful theme of the Trio elegiaque No. 1 in G minor transforms into a funeral march in the epilogue, while the complex Trio elegiaque No. 2 in D minor is a memorial to Tchaikovsky filled with powerfully prophetic symbols most notably the Dies irae motif.
Francesco Piemontesi, a BBC Music Magazine award-winning pianist and lauded as a 'wonderful Mozartian', has an intense curiosity about his fellow artists - their pianos, the sonorities they cultivate, the secret elements that animate their playing, and what drives them. In this documentary by Jan Schmidt-Garre, filmed over one year, Piemontesi talks with some of the world's leading performers, including his mentor Alfred Brendel, Maria Joao Pires, Stephen Kovacevich and Antonio Pappano, in a series of revealing encounters that illuminate their individual approaches to the instrument, it's colour and form. The film is complemented by a bonus 60-minute recital by Yulianna Avdeeva, Zlata Chochieva and Francesco Piemontesi, played on Rachmaninoff's Steinway piano at Villa Senar, his home in Switzerland during the 1930s.
