Bruckner’s Fourth Symphony occupies a special position in Anton Bruckner's symphonic cycle. It heralds the cycle of his "mature" symphonies and with it the composer addressed his audience directly and wanted to be understood by them. He succeeded in this - today the “Romantic” is one of Bruckner's most popular symphonies. Still, he revised it time and again and today there are three versions of it. With the Bamberg Symphony, which can draw on many years of Bruckner interpretation, Jakub Hrusa has now recorded all versions of the Fourth Symphony. For a conductor, it is a unique opportunity to be able to record all versions of a symphony. In addition, as Hrusa says, the project enables the interested audience to form their own opinion of the quality and tailoring of the respective version. In this way, listeners can decide for themselves whether the composer was right in his doubts, and whether it makes any sense at all to “pit” one version against the other.

In August 2020, Herbert Blomstedt made his debut with the Lucerne Festival Orchestra. You could hardly tell that the maestro had celebrated his 93rd birthday only a month prior for he continuously exudes vitality, awareness, and curiosity. “I’m in love with music,” says Blomstedt, who views his profession as a kind of joie de vivre. Together with the Lucerne Festival Orchestra and Martha Argerich he revealed just what this joy sounds like with Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 1 – the work that marked Argerich’s stage debut in 1949 - and Symphonies Nos. 2 and 3, the famous Eroica. Recorded live at the Concert Hall of KKL Luzern, August 2020.

Ludwig van Beethoven wrote his 10 Violin Sonatas between 1797 and 1812. The Sonatas 1 to 9 were written between 1797 and 1803 before almost ten years passed until his opus 96. The composer premiered all his early piano works himself, which might be why he called them "Sonatas for Pianoforte and Violin." In the spirit of W. A. Mozart's redefinition of the genre, who elevated the violin from its previously only accompanying role, and in spite of today's common designation as "violin sonatas," both instrumental parts in Beethoven's sonatas are on an equal musical footing. In 2020 - the anniversary year surrounding Beethoven's 250th birthday - the Korean violinist Clara-Jumi Kang and her partner on the piano, Sunwook Kim, took on this special cycle of chamber music works. Kang first worked on one of Beethoven's sonatas, the Fifth, at the tender age of eight and can already look back on an extremely successful international career. With Sunwook Kim, she has an exceptionally experienced Beethoven interpreter at her side, whose recordings of the piano sonatas, among others, have received high accolades around the globe. Together they have developed an inspiring and very personal reading of Beethoven's sonatas, of which this complete recording bears impressive witness.

After his first album with Beethoven's Piano Sonatas Nos. 21 and 29, Sunwook Kim's third solo release with Accentus Music presents an impressive interpretation of Ludwig van Beethoven's three most well-known piano sonatas: Pathetique, Moonlight Sonata, and Appassionata. Sunwook Kim, who won the first prize at the Leeds International Piano Competition in 2006, has matured to become a subtle and accomplished Beethoven specialist, not least thanks to his partnership with the Beethoven House in Bonn, whose unique collection he often consults in his preparation of Beethoven's works. Kim stays close to the original score, yet nevertheless provides a very personal interpretation, which reveals a new and exceptional reading that stands out from the abundance of existing recordings of these three piano sonatas.

In August 2020, Herbert Blomstedt made his debut with the Lucerne Festival Orchestra. You could hardly tell that the maestro had celebrated his 93rd birthday only a month prior for he continuously exudes vitality, awareness, and curiosity. “I’m in love with music,” says Blomstedt, who views his profession as a kind of joie de vivre. Together with the Lucerne Festival Orchestra and Martha Argerich he revealed just what this joy sounds like with Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 1 – the work that marked Argerich’s stage debut in 1949 - and Symphonies Nos. 2 and 3, the famous Eroica. Recorded live at the Concert Hall of KKL Luzern, August 2020.

Ludwig van Beethoven’s piano works occupy a special place in Margarita Höhenrieder's artistic work. In a certain sense, this is almost "logical", since she herself is part of a very special Beethoven lineage: her teacher Leon Fleisher was a student of Arthur Schnabel, who in turn studied with Theodor Leschetizky, who had learned his piano playing from Carl Czerny. And Czerny was a student of Beethoven! For the recordings of all five of Beethoven's piano concertos, Margarita Höhenrieder has top-class orchestras and conductors at her side, including the Staatskapelle Dresden under Fabio Luisi and the Bamberg Symphony under Martin Haselböck. The recordings are complemented by extensive bonus material: a portrait of the pianist and conversations between Höhenrieder and the conductors provide an insight into the life and work of an artist for whom her own concert activities are just as important as the education of the next generation.

In celebration of Herbert Blomstedt’s 90th Birthday in July 2017, Accentus Music releases a new Beethoven cycle that captures the spirit of the long-standing partnership between the legendary conductor laureate and the Gewandhausorchester Leipzig. All nine symphonies, released in a box set containing five CDs, are live recordings made at the Leipzig Gewandhaus between May 2014 and March 2017. Blomstedt's interpretations of Beethoven are based on a highly responsible handling of the scores and this conductor’s deep love of the truth, in which everything that is superimposed and overtly effective is fundamentally removed. At the same time however, the performances embrace the ethical conscience of the artist with his deep, almost seismographic musical sensibility and a high expressivity. Herbert Blomstedt is currently Conductor Laureate of the San Francisco Symphony and Honorary Conductor of the Bamberg Symphony, Danish National Symphony Orchestra, NHK Symphony, Swedish Radio Symphony, Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra and Staatskapelle Dresden.

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REVIEW:

The music flows continuously with vivid pulsation and admirable transparency. The fast movements are fresh, with splendid rhythmic bounce, while the slow movements have warmth and are strikingly, unfailingly, lovely. The orchestral playing is of the highest quality, and the recorded sound is excellent.

– Pizzicato

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The Daily Telegraph describes Nikolaj Znaider as "the most stimulating young musician playing today, drawing on musical intelligence, perception and dynamism to give performances of rare intensity.” This release presents one of the world's foremost violinists playing two landmark concertos, accompanied by the Leipzig Gewandhausorchester,  "one of Europe's finest orchestras" (The Guardian), under the baton of its music director Riccardo Chailly. 

It was the Gewandhausorchester that, in 1845, first performed Mendelssohn’s Concerto for Violin and Orchestra in E minor. Mendelssohn himself had conducted Beethoven's Violin Concerto in D major several times and helped this milestone in the history of music to its great breakthrough.

Picture Format: NTSC 16:9, Full HD
Sound Formats: DTS HD Master Audio, PCM Stereo
Region Code: 0 (Worldwide)
Running Time: 84 Minutes

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This box set contains three extraordinary ballet choreographies by the successful German choreographer Christian Spuck for the Ballett Zürich whose ballet director he has been since the 2012/13 season: Verdi’s Messa da Requiem conducted by Fabio Luisi, Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker and Mouse King, conducted by Paul Connelly, and Prokofiev’s Romeo and Juliet conducted by Michail Jurowski. Christian Spuck comes from Marburg and was trained at the John Cranko School in Stuttgart. He began his dance career with Jan Lauwers’ Needcompany and Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker’s Ensemble Rosas. In 1995 he became a member of the Stuttgart Ballet and served as the company’s resident choreographer from 2001 to 2012. In Stuttgart he created fifteen world premieres, including the story ballet Lulu. Eine Monstretragödie after Frank Wedekind, Der Sandmann and Das Fräulein von S. after E.T.A. Hoffmann. Since the 2012/13 season, Christian Spuck has been director of Ballett Zürich.

Zhu Xiao-Mei first recorded the Goldberg Variations two decades ago. Since then, she has performed the work several hundred times all over the world. Zhu Xiao-Mei says of the work, “In this work, Bach gave musical expression to life in all of its infinite facets. I love them above all else, each day a little more, and I have always wanted to share this love with others.” The work is cyclical, beginning and ending in the same way. “It is also about the idea that there is no ending. And so there is hope.” (Xiao-Mei)

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For many, the Christmas holiday season would be incomplete without the resounding drum roll and trumpet fanfare that opens Bach’s “Oratorium auf die Heilige Weynacht” (“Oratorio for the holy Christmas”). Ever since it was first performed by the Thomaskantor between Christmas Day in 1734 and Epiphany 1735 in Leipzig’s two main churches of St. Thomas and St. Nikolai, Bach’s six part musical masterpiece has become a cornerstone of the city’s identity and musical heritage. The performance presented here, led by Bach’s 17th successor Gotthold Schwarz together with the Thomanerchor and the Gewandhausorchester Leipzig, features a lineup of renowned soloists, enabling one to experience the festive grandeur of what many consider the epitome of Christmas music in its original setting. “Gotthold Schwarz transforms this into a Christmas Oratorio that is far more than a sum of its parts… his musical rhetoric avoids cheap gimmicks and vain showmanship.” (Peter Korfmacher, LVZ)

The remarkable biography of the Chinese pianist Zhu Xiao‐Mei, from the re‐education camps of the Chinese Cultural Revolution to Paris and her subsequent international career, gives her a unique position in the world of music. She is today one of the most significant interpreters of Bach’s music. In Leipzig, where Bach held his final professional position and composed The Art of Fugue, Zhu Xiao‐Mei recorded this contrapuntal masterpiece, which is for her “the absolute zenith of polyphonic art.”

Johann Sebastian Bach
GOLDBERG VARIATIONS, BWV 988
Zhu Xiao-Mei, piano

Recorded live at St. Thomas Church, Leipzig, June 2014 during 2014 Bachfest

THE RETURN IS THE MOVEMENT OF TAO
Zhu Xiao-mei and the Goldberg Variations
A film by Michel Mollard

Picture format: NTSC 16:9
Sound format: PCM Stereo / Dolby Digital 5.1 / DTS 5.1
Region code: 0 (worldwide)
Languages (film): English, French, German, Spanish, Traditional & Simplified Chinese
Running time: 85 mins (concert) + 52 mins (documentary)
No. of DVDs: 1 (DVD 9)

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For the first time ever, a Chinese symphony orchestra is performing at Lucerne Festival. If yet more evidence that classical music has long since become a global language were needed, it would be this appearance by the Shanghai Symphony Orchestra under music director Long Yu. These musicians from Asia have planned a program of three Russian composers. Aaron Avshalomov, who was born in 1894, served as a professor at the Shanghai Conservatory, where he taught from 1919 on; he was one of the founders of China’s Western musical tradition. His tone poem Hutongs of Peking captures the sounds and voices that once echoed through the narrow alleys of the Chinese capital. Tchaikovsky’s immortal Violin Concerto will be performed by one of the leading virtuosos of our time, Maxim Vengerov. And the orchestra will demonstrate the degree to which a composer under Stalin had to wrestle with his own identity with Shostakovich’s Fifth Symphony. Here the composer reacts to the political demand to be popular and monumental – which leads to an absurdly overstated “jubilant” conclusion.

The concept of metanoia - that which goes beyond thought - most commonly describes a change in the way of seeing and thinking about things. With this recording, Italo-Brazilian conductor Simone Menezes and her chamber orchestra "K", together with the choir "Sequenza 9.3", go on a musical journey to find moments of metanoia in the lives and works of composers such as Giacomo Puccini, Arvo Pärt, Heitor Villa-Lobos, Alexander Borodin as well as Johann Sebastian Bach. Simone Menezes is a visionary musician, known for her creativity and innovative spirit and ability to brilliantly combine classical and contemporary repertoire. Whether as the founder and artistic director of chamber music ensemble “K”, as a coveted guest conductor with many of the world’s most respected orchestras or in her stunningly creative projects in partnership between music and other arts, Simone Menezes has established herself as a rising artist of a new generation.