The life of a professional musician typically requires stretching beyond a single genre to insure a healthy career. Pianist David Cook is a jazz pianist and composer of the highest order. He also wears another hat as a musical director in the realms of pop, folk, and blues. Returning to jazz and his incredible quintet is as much a pleasure for him as for his listeners, as heard on his new recording, Loyal Returns. Originally from Ohio, Cook settled in New York City in 1999. His career in music has required him to split his time between his own jazz related projects and being a musical director for big name acts like Taylor Swift and Shayna Steele. Even with all these divergent tasks, Cook remains true to first love: jazz. The rewards of coming home to his own sound world and musical friends is reason enough for David Cook to feel content. His new recording, Loyal Returns, is a whole-hearted tribute to the comradery of music making.

Multi-award-winning composer Paul Reale has a distinctly American voice, enriched and given touches of familiarity through references to folk idiom and musical ancestors such as Bartok and Kodaly. This program brings together Reale's works for cello and piano. His earliest, Séance, is a haunting combination of modernist sounds and Baroque melodies. The operatic Cello Sonata No. 1 daringly uses 'What Shall We Do with the Drunken Sailor' as the backbone of it's finale, and the recent 'Chopin's Ghost' explores the Romantic composer's long, weaving lines and evokes his poetic spirit. This is the world premiere recording of the aforementioned work.

The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam is a translation by Edward Fitzgerald of a selection of poems which were originally written in Persian and are attributed to Omar Khayyam, a Persian mathematician, astronomer, and poet. There are about a thousand poems in the complete volume. British composer Granville Bantock composed this choral setting of the works. Part 1 premiered in 1906, Part 2 in 1907, Part 3 in 1909, and the complete works were performed in 1910 at Queen’s Hall. This four disc set is the only complete recording ever made of the work, and is made up of original BBC Broadcasts from 1968 and 1979.

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REVIEWS:

Those who want to hear Omar Khayyam in all its glorious monumentality will need to buy the Lyrita set. it’s one of the monuments in British music that needs to be heard.

– The Guardian

Del Mar’s soloists sing with urgency and passion. A hugely enterprising addition to Lyrita’s ever-growing catalogue.

– Gramophone

This lively 1979 revival of the complete work is well coupled with other less rare Bantock, especially Fifine at the Fair. Del Mar, an eminent Strauss scholar, has a sure feel for the orchestral writing of this era, well paced and translucent rather than weighty.

– BBC Music Magazine

After Life, Tom Cipullo’s modern opera, investigates the role of art in a distressed world, and asks heavy questions about an artist’s obligation in confronting humanity in all of its good and bad parts. David Mason wrote the libretto for the work, which imagines a meeting between Pablo Picasso and Gertrude Stein as ghosts, who show their brilliance and flaws. In Sleep the World Is Yours, a song cycle by Lori Laitman, sets three lovely poems by Selma Meerbaum-Eisinger, who sadly would perish in a Nazi camp at the young age of 18.

Reviews:

Cipullo weaves David Mason’s ingenious, rhapsodic libretto into an absorbing, often lively, occasionally desultory narrative told in words and music that is translucently scored and makes full use of the five-member ensemble’s colours, astonishingly vocal at times in their effect.

– Gramophone

The coupling of the two works makes perfect sense thematically and stylistically. Both are well worth hearing and well performed, very good examples of some of the significant tonal modern work being made right now in the US.

_Gapplegate Classical/Modern Music Review

Note: This Blu-ray Disc is only playable on Blu-ray Disc players and not compatible with standard DVD players.

Also available on standard DVD

"I attended the premiere, fearful that the opera would be tawdry and terrible, that the work would make fun of Smith, who died in 2007 at 39. But it proved a weirdly inspired work: engrossing, entertaining and ultimately quite moving... Here is an unlikely holiday gift that should delight and fascinate anyone interested in contemporary opera and American popular culture." -- Anthony Tommasini, The New York Times [11/20/2012]

In a tragic-comic take on the extremes of celebrity culture, composer Mark Anthony Turnage, librettist Richard Thomas and director Richard Jones add Anna Nicole Smith to opera’s gallery of bad, sad girls. A pneumatic Playboy model who married an octogenarian billionaire, she achieved grotesque fame before her destitute, drugriddled death. With its jazz-coloured score and Eva-Maria Westbroek’s starry performance, this is, as the New York Times said: “an engrossing outrageous, entertaining and, ultimately deeply moving opera”.

"...It's a tremendous show...shocking it isn't; stunning it is!" The Independent

Anna Nicole – Eva-Maria Westbroek
Old Man Marshall – Alan Oke
The Lawyer Stern – Gerald Finley
Virgie – Susan Bickley
Cousin Shelley – Loré Lixenberg
Larry King – Peter Hoare
Aunt Kay – Rebecca de Pont Davies
Older Daniel – Dominic Rowntree
Blossom – Allison Cook
Doctor – Andrew Rees
Billy – Grant Doyle
Mayor – Wynne Evans

Royal Opera Chorus
Royal Opera House Orchestra
Antonio Pappano, conductor

Richard Jones, stage director

Recorded live at the Royal Opera House, 23 & 26 February 2011.

Bonus:
- Cast Gallery
- Illustrated synopsis
- Behind the scenes feature including artist interviews

Picture format: 1080i High Definition
Sound format: LPCM 2.0 + DTS 5.1
Region code: 0 (worldwide)
Subtitles: English, French, German, Spanish
Running time: ca. 120 mins
No. of Discs: 1 (Blu-ray)

Also available on standard DVD

Also available on Blu-ray

"I attended the premiere, fearful that the opera would be tawdry and terrible, that the work would make fun of Smith, who died in 2007 at 39. But it proved a weirdly inspired work: engrossing, entertaining and ultimately quite moving... Here is an unlikely holiday gift that should delight and fascinate anyone interested in contemporary opera and American popular culture." -- Anthony Tommasini, The New York Times [11/20/2012]

"Anna Nicole may not be the new Madame Butterfly, but its subject matter certainly constitutes a modern-day Lulu of sorts. Prudes should run for cover, ’cause almost everything in this opera is out in the open. Everyone else has gotta see it." -- San Francisco Classical Voice

In a tragic-comic take on the extremes of celebrity culture, composer Mark Anthony Turnage, librettist Richard Thomas and director Richard Jones add Anna Nicole Smith to opera’s gallery of bad, sad girls. A pneumatic Playboy model who married an octogenarian billionaire, she achieved grotesque fame before her destitute, drugriddled death. With its jazz-coloured score and Eva-Maria Westbroek’s starry performance, this is, as the New York Times said: “an engrossing outrageous, entertaining and, ultimately deeply moving opera”.

"...It's a tremendous show...shocking it isn't; stunning it is!" The Independent

Anna Nicole – Eva-Maria Westbroek
Old Man Marshall – Alan Oke
The Lawyer Stern – Gerald Finley
Virgie – Susan Bickley
Cousin Shelley – Loré Lixenberg
Larry King – Peter Hoare
Aunt Kay – Rebecca de Pont Davies
Older Daniel – Dominic Rowntree
Blossom – Allison Cook
Doctor – Andrew Rees
Billy – Grant Doyle
Mayor – Wynne Evans

Royal Opera Chorus
Royal Opera House Orchestra
Antonio Pappano, conductor

Richard Jones, stage director

Recorded live at the Royal Opera House, 23 & 26 February 2011.

Bonus:
- Cast Gallery
- Illustrated synopsis
- Behind the scenes feature including artist interviews

Picture format: NTSC 16:9 anamorphic
Sound format: LPCM 2.0 + DTS 5.1
Region code: 0 (worldwide)
Subtitles: English, French, German, Spanish
Running time: ca. 120 mins
No. of DVDs: 1

Also available on Blu-ray