Warner Classics' final release for Beethoven's 250th anniversary year is a charming programme of chamber music with flute. The four works, all dating from the earlier years of the composer's career, were recorded in June 2020 in Berlin's Pierre Boulez Saal by a distinguished group of musicians led by Daniel Barenboim, here in his role as pianist, and flautist Emmanuel Pahud. Joining them are two of Pahud's colleagues from the Berliner Philharmoniker, the orchestra's First Concertmaster Daishin Kashimoto and it's Principal Viola, Amihai Grosz, and two players with links to the Wiener Philharmoniker, it's Principal Bassoon Sophie Dervaux, and Silvia Careddu, formerly it's Principal Flute.
Dmitri Shostakovich was one of the most prominent musical figures of the 20th century. He is renowned not only as a groundbreaking composer but also as an outstanding performer. In honor of the 40th anniversary of his passing in 2015, Warner Classics is releasing this 2-CD set of the composer playing his own music, which includes material previously unreleased on CD.
2014 Maria Callas remastered series reissue. With this Abbey Road 24-bit 96 kHz remaster, engineers returned to the original master tapes, bringing new clarity & brilliance to her legendary studio recordings. Tosca was the role in which - in 1965, the year this recording was made - Callas gave her last complete performances at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, the Metropolitan Opera and the Paris Opera. This was her final complete recording of an opera, and, 12 years after her first version of Tosca, it reunited her with the Scarpia of Tito Gobbi. They were joined by Carlo Bergonzi as Cavaradossi. Gramophone praised 'a thrilling and very complete interpretation, with scene after scene, bar after bar, brought to life by sheer intelligence and dramatic insight'.
2014 Maria Callas remastered series reissue. With this Abbey Road 24-bit 96kHz remaster, engineers returned to the original master tapes, bringing new clarity & brilliance to her legendary studio recordings. Towards the end of Callas's career, there were many rumours that she was planning to perform Carmen on stage. This was never to be, but Carmen became her penultimate complete recording of an opera - and her only complete recording of a French opera. With Georges Pretre, one of her favored conductors, and the ever-stylish Nicolai Gedda as her Don Jose', she captured every facet of the role. As Gramophone said when the set was first released: 'Hers is a Carmen to haunt you. '
Early in his career, Claudio Abbado gained attention as both a pianist and conductor in his native Milan. In these rediscovered recordings, dating from the years between 1954 and 1962, he interprets concertos by J.S. Bach (as a harpsichordist), Giuseppe Tartini, and, in a first-time CD release, Giuseppe Cambini. The 'Piano Concerto No 3' by the Paris-based Italian composer is conducted by Abbado's father, Michelangelo, a noted Tartini scholar and founder of the Orchestra D'archi di Milano.
Written over a some two decades, Beethoven's five piano concertos exemplify the constantly astonishing scope of his creativity. In Andras Schiff's words, 'Beethoven's music is cosmic and metaphysical. Each of the concertos has a unique character. Every note has to be played with responsibility and spiritual gravity.' Schiff and Haitink here perform with the Staatskapelle Dresden, an orchestra whose great tradition extends over more than four centuries.
Trumpeter Lucienne Renaudin Vary makes a musical transatlantic crossing with her second album for Warner Classics. 'Mademoiselle in New York' majors on American and French composers and songwriters - Bernstein, Gershwin, Ravel and Aznavour among them - featuring music from 'West Side Story', 'An American in Paris' and 'Candide'. Lucienne is joined by the BBC Concert Orchestra and Tony Award-winning music director Bill Elliott, and, in Bobby Hebb's song 'Sunny', by her brothers Philemon (on double bass) and Bartholome (on guitar).
The talented sisters return with an album of enjoyable classics, containing songs popular in France over the last 25 years: it Includes Halliday's Sang pour sang and Que je t'aime, Gainsbourg's La javanaise, Brel's Vesoul and Coldplay's Viva la Vida. Star guests are Madame Monsieur, Nicolas Fraissinet, and Insa Sane.
Since his 2014 victory in BBC Young Musician of the Year competition, Martin James Bartlett has built a considerable international reputation. "Love and Death", with it's imaginatively conceived programme, gives proof of his artistic range. In creating the programme, Bartlett's starting point was Liszt's transcription of Schumann's passionate song 'Widmung' ('Dedication'), set to a poem by Friedrich Ruckert. "It is a love song that also speaks of death," he explains, "and it concludes with a quote from Schubert's 'Ave Maria', introducing the idea of heavenly love." These themes are explored throughout the album.
Composed over a period of nearly 50 years, Dmitri Shostakovich's 15 symphonies are astonishingly diverse in conception and expression, reflecting the composer's personal experiences, the history of the 20th century and the tensions and struggles of an artist under the Soviet regime. These recordings fulfil a promise that Mstislav Rostropovich made to the composer, a close and long-standing friend, before he left Russia as an exile in 1974. 'These symphonies mark fifteen stages in our lives,' he said. 'The emotional history of our country, my history, his history, our history.'
Martin Kohlstedt creates dazzling musical pieces, tapestries of sound that grow organically from the keyboards of his piano and synthesizers. Such is the reputation that he has built in his native Germany that his latest album, 'Strome' (currents), has been created in collaboration with the chorus of one of the country's most revered musical institutions, Leipzig's Gewandhaus. 70 voices blend and intertwine to mesmerising effect with the sounds created by Kohlstedt himself.
Separated by 7,800 kilometres, connected by culture - this is the motto of 2019, a year full of anniversaries. It is the 30th anniversary of establishing diplomatic relations between Poland and South Korea. And Sinfonia Varsovia Orchestra is also celebrating it's 35th anniversary. For this occasion, we proudly present the Mo¨bius album, containing works by Penderecki, Lee and Ryu, performed by piano virtuoso Mackenzie Melemed (1-3), and Sinfonia Varsovia directed by Ralf Gothoni (1-4) and Grzegorz Nowak (5).
He painted the Mona Lisa and The Last Supper, observed nature with scientific understanding and helped mankind with his visionary ideas to advance towards a number of innovative technologies. Leonardo da Vinci was one of the most important polymaths of all time - and a man who lived at a time of tremendous upheaval. That is apparent from the music that surrounded him: on 39 tracks the double album The Da Vinci Sound captures the sound of the Renaissance - with masses and motets, with songs, dances and madrigals.
At the heart of this program of Beethoven songs performed by Ian Bostridge and Sir Antonio Pappano is the song cycle An die ferne Geliebte (To the distant beloved). Bostridge describes it as "the distillation of Beethoven as lover". Among the other items are the rapturously lyrical 'Adelaide', the sombre 'In questa tomba oscura' and a selection of Beethoven's settings of folksongs from the British Isles, which elicit the participation of violinist Vilde Frang and cellist Nicolas Altstaedt. "When we all play together," says Pappano, "it's like a family making music at home."
'Dreamtime' is a spellbinding collection of works for flute and orchestra which, in Emmanuel Pahud's words 'expresses and gives form to the composers' most personal, spiritual or dreamlike visions'. The album ranges wide both culturally and chronologically, embracing works by Mozart, Reinecke, Busoni, Takemitsu and Penderecki, and inhabits a dimension populated by incantations and prayers, in which imagination is woven together and then unravels, and where desire is roused by fantasy. Pahud is partnered by the Munich Radio Orchestra and it's principal conductor, Ivan Repusic.
