This album presents two major orchestral works by Claude Debussy – Images and La Mer – alongside the delightful Danses for harp and orchestra. The French conductor Sylvain Cambreling highlights all the charm of these colorful scores. French-born conductor Sylvain Cambreling is a musician with big ideas. A thought-provoking, colorful and dramatic artist, he has a flair for grabbing the attention of audiences, yet his originality is rooted in thorough knowledge of musicology. As the Chief Conductor of the SWR Sinfonieorchester Baden-Baden und Freiburg, and Principal Guest Conductor of Klangforum Wien, he has offered ample proof of his gifts for imaginative programme-planning and persuasive championship of contemporary music.

Kirill Kondrashin was one of the most prominent Russian conductors in the generation following Mravinsky. He was born in Moscow in 1914 into a family of musicians, studied at the Moscow conservatory under Boris Khaikin, went to Leningrad in 1936 to be the conductor of the Maly Theater and to the Bolshoi Theater in Moscow in 1943. At the same time, he was conducting various Russian concert orchestras. In 1956 he left the Bolshoi Theater to devote himself entirely to the concert podium. He became the preferred partner of such great soloists as Emil Gilels, Leonid Kogan, David Oistrach, Sviatoslav Richter, and Mstislav Rostropovich. Tully Potter called him “probably the best concert accompanist of the twentieth century.” After Kondrashin’s work had increasingly shifted out of the country, he emigrated to the Netherlands in 1978 and became permanent conductor of the Amsterdam Concertgebouw Orchestra along with Bernard Haitink. From his home in Amsterdam, he kept up with his duties as guest conductor, including many at various West German radio stations. His concerts left a deep impression in Munich, and Kondrashin succeeded Rafael Kubelik as new Chief Conductor of the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra in 1982. Before he was able to take over his new position, however, Kondrashin died of a heart attach shortly after a concert in Amsterdam in March 1981.

The present release contains Hector Berlioz's complete concert overtures, including the one written for his early opera Les francs-juges, superbly performed by the SWR Sinfonieorchester Baden-Baden und Freiburg directed by the French conductor Sylvain Cambreling. French composer Hector Berlioz wrote a number of overtures, many of which remain concert staples. They include not only overtures intended to introduce operas, but also independent concert overtures. The album opens with one of the most popular overtures, Waverly, Op. 1. Composed in 1828, it was inspired by Sir Walter Scott’s Waverly novels. Also included are Le Carnaval romain, Op. 9, a standalone overture intended for concert performance made up of material from the opera Benvenuto Cellini, Le Corsaire, Op. 21, and others. This album is part of a new re-release series (Century Classics) consisting of SWR music bestsellers. The series is competitively priced, optically highly attractive and contains acclaimed SWR recordings mostly of the SWR orchestras and their chief conductors.

This is the only available official recording of Karel Ancerl conducting Josef Suk’s Asrael. Asrael is central to Josef Suk’s oeuvre and an outstanding work in the Czech music repertoire. The prominent standing of the conductor Karel Ancerl is due mainly to his success in establishing the Czech Philharmonic as one of the world’s most eminent and successful orchestras in only a few years’ time. Under his great predecessor Vaclav Talich, the most significant Czech conductor of the twentieth century, the orchestra was able to flourish primarily in its home country, yet under Ancerl it became, despite the restrictions of the Cold War, an orchestra that was celebrated everywhere, whose 1959 world tour went down in history as the longest and most extensive ever up to that time. A stirring intepretation of the Südwestfunk-Orchestra of Baden-Baden, digitally remastered from the SWR original tapes!

REVIEW:

Firstly, it is doubtful the orchestra was familiar with either score prior to this recording. Secondly, it appears that this was the conductor’s first engagement with them—though, unsurprisingly, he was invited back in 1969. To achieve such committed, marvellously played and eloquent performances of unfamiliar repertoire when conductor and orchestra had no prior relationship is a remarkable achievement.

The sound is pretty impressive, wearing its five decades lightly. It presents a very realistic aural picture of Ančerl’s interpretations. N,o one buying this disc will be disappointed on sonic grounds. What you will definitely get if you buy this disc is a memorable performance of a great Czech symphony. This an important release and a major addition to the Ančerl discography.

This release contains a great cross-section of American music: from ragtime pioneer Scott Jopin to Richard Rodgers, the legendary composer of musicals, together with works by Leonard Bernstein, George Gershwin and Aaron Copland. The musicians of the SWR Rundfunkorchester Kaiserslautern play with zest and flamboyance, led by celebrated conductors Klaus Arp, Saul Schechtmann, Ernst Wedam, and Caspar Richter. The Rundfunkorchester Kaiserslautern was founded in 1951 by Emmerich Smola for the Southwest Radio. In 2007 the ensemble merged with the Rundfunk-Sinfonieorchester Saarbrucken, and the combined group is still performing and recording to this day. This album is part of a new re-release series (Century Classics) consisting of SWR music bestsellers. The series is competitively priced, optically highly attractive and contains acclaimed SWR recordings mostly of the SWR orchestras and their chief conductors.

Sammy Nestico, the composer-arranger known for his contributions to the Count Basie Orchestra library and whose name is familiar to anyone who’s played in a big band since the 1960s, recently has gone through a highly creative and productive phase. The rise of Nestico’s international profile has been sparked by a period of collaboration with the SWR Big Band of Germany that has produced several masterful albums, including No Time Like The Present (2004), Basie-Cally Sammy (2005), Fun Time (2009) and Fun Time And More (2011). The productive streak continues with this year’s A Cool Breeze, which finds the perpetually developing, 93-year-old orchestrator combining swing, soul, funk, fusion and symphonic expressions in a stylistic manner that’s distinctly modern yet undeniably Nestico. Unlike his previous SWR collaborations, Nestico (who’s based in San Diego) wasn’t able to travel to Germany for these recording sessions, but digital technology allowed him to participate via Skype and high-speed audio file transfer. His signature syncopations, volleying counterpoint passages, tensely stacked fourths, dramatic dynamics and tasteful manner of combining instrumental timbres are all manifest in the SWR Big Band’s impeccable, inspired performance. These dedicated musicians have become so adept at finessing and interpreting Nestico’s work that they actually transcend what’s on the printed page. They turn his carefully crafted charts into memorable works of art that will have toes tappin’ and fingers snappin’ for decades to come. - DownBeat Magazine Editors' Pick

The first attempt went awry. When Nat and his older brother Julian 'Cannonball' Adderley tried to start a quintet in the mid-fifties, hardly anyone was interested in the newcomers from Florida. And that, in retrospect, was good. Because the trumpeter Nat landed in this way in the bands of Jay Jay Johnson and George Shearing, and there refined, under expert guidance, his art of elegant blues-bopping ensemble playing. The alto saxophonist Cannonball in turn became Miles Davis' counterpart to tenor saxophonist John Coltrane for a good four years, a time he later described as the most artistically important of his life. When the brothers came together again in 1959, they had both matured and were ready to lead one of the most successful jazz bands of the 1960s. Unlike experimental colleagues who tested the limits of music, but more and more lost their audience, the Cannonball Adderley Quintet managed to reach a large audience with hits like "This Here", "Work Song", "Jive Samba" and above all "Mercy, Mercy, Mercy". No wonder, then, that a wave of applause greeted the Cannonball Adderley Quintet in the Liederhalle Stuttgart in 1969. Completed by bassist Victor Gaskin and drummer Roy McCurdy, they had brought with them just the right repertoire.

Paul Hindemith was an all-round musician. He had a near-professional command of most orchestral instruments, which naturally served as an excellent prerequisite for both composing and conducting. His prominence as a composer meant that the best and most famous orchestras were happy to have him as a conductor, which is why he regularly took to the podium with outstanding ensembles. In the studio, he always conducted his own works, recording them for labels such as Deutsche Grammophon, EMI, CBS and Decca. His work as a conductor in the concert hall and his occasional radio studio performances were much more varied, as with the present recording. When we hear Hindemith conducting Bruckner in 1958, we should bear in mind that a grand master is at work, unsurpassed in contrapuntal expertise and musical invention, the product of a vibrant tradition extending from Schütz and Bach to Mozart and Beethoven, and on to Brahms and Reger. Bruckner was a high point on this route from the Baroque to his own contemporary output.

This is a re-release of an SWRmusic-Bestseller. It contains Bruckner‘s most famous symphony heard in an outstanding interpretation. Kurt Sanderling, at that moment already 83 years old, fully demonstrates the experience gained from his long career, at his side an SWR Radio-Sinfonieorchester Stuttgart performing at the highest level. More than just a resident of Berlin, Kurt Sanderling has always been very closely connected with the city. It was here that he began his artistic career as voice coach at the Stadtische Oper at the age of eighteen, when Otto Klemperer, Erich Kleiber, Leo Blech and Wilhelm Furtwangler were conducting. Sanderlings guest tours took him almost everywhere in Eastern and Western Europe, to Japan, and the USA, where he conducted the world’s leading ensembles.

The Seven Deadly Sins is a satirical parable and the last co-operation between Kurt Weill and Bertold Brecht. The present album is a re-release of the SWRmusic bestseller 93.109 having the outstanding Anja Silja as Anna. The ‘sung ballet’ is in nine movements, and was written in 1933 as Weill watched the Nazis seize power following the Reichstag fire of February 1933. Both Brecht and Weill knew that as Jewish men, Berlin could no longer be their home. He obtained the commission for Seven Deadly Sins while in Paris. The scenario of the libretto mirrors Brecht’s own travels after fleeing Germany, expanded to one-year sojourns in each of seven cities.