This is a re-release within the new SWR series "SWR Century Classics". It contains two main works of Antonin Dvorak, his famous Symphony No.9 "From the New World" as well as the Carnival Ouverture, interpreted by the Radio Symphony Orchestra of the SWR, conducted by it's former chief conductor, Sir Roger Norrington. Sir Roger Norrington was born in Oxford, and comes from a musical University family. He was a talented boy soprano, studying the violin from the age of ten and singing from the age of seventeen. He read English Literature at Cambridge University, and spent several years as an amateur violinist, tenor singer, and conductor, before attending the Royal College of Music as a postgraduate student of conducting, studying with Sir Adrian Boult. Norrington's work on scores, orchestral sound and size, seating and playing style has had a growing effect on the perception of 18th- and 19th- century orchestral music. He is in great demand as a guest conductor for symphony orchestras worldwide, working regularly with orchestras in Berlin, Vienna, Leipzig, Salzburg, Amsterdam, Paris, New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles and London. He is Chief Conductor of the Stuttgart Radio Symphony Orchestra and of the Camerata Salzburg, and is closely associated with the Orchestra of the Age of the Enlightenment (which has taken over the work of the London Classical Players) and with the Philharmonia.

After making her first solo piano LP recording in 1959 at the age of seventeen, Idil Biret had to wait nearly three decades before recording with an orchestra in a studio. In 1988 she recorded in London the 2nd and 4th Piano Concertos of Saint-Saens with the legendary Philharmonia Orchestra conducted by James Loughran. The Philharmonia Orchestra was established after WWII and employed extensively by another legend of music, the great producer Walter Legge, to make recordings for EMI/HMV. It was led by some of the greatest conductors of the twentieth century, such as Furtwangler, Toscanini, Richard Strauss, and Karajan. Many great pianists had recorded with this orchestra. During the next twenty-five years Biret made recordings of over sixty works for piano and orchestra in studio and at concerts under the baton of eminent conductors including Jean Fournet, Emil Tabakov, and Toshi Shimada. All of these have been released on Naxos and IBA under Naxos catalogue numbers. Additionally, live recordings of other piano concertos from Biret's concertos from 1954 onwards with eminent orchestras are available as well. All of the aforementioned are included in this enormous release.

This is a new installment in the new series "SWR Century Classics." The recording gives testimony of Norrington's specific "Stuttgart Sound" and contains one of the best-known symphonies by Gustav Mahler. This is a re-release of a SWR bestseller, and is published on the occasion of Sir Roger Norrington's 85th birthday. Sir Roger Norrington was born in Oxford, and comes from a musical University family. He was a talented boy soprano, studying the violin from the age of ten and singing from the age of seventeen. He read English Literature at Cambridge University, and spent several years as an amateur violinist, tenor singer, and conductor, before attending the Royal College of Music as a postgraduate student of conducting, studying with Sir Adrian Boult. Norrington's work on scores, orchestral sound and size, seating and playing style has had a growing effect on the perception of 18th- and 19th- century orchestral music. He is in great demand as a guest conductor for symphony orchestras worldwide, working regularly with orchestras in Berlin, Vienna, Leipzig, Salzburg, Amsterdam, Paris, New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles and London. He is Chief Conductor of the Stuttgart Radio Symphony Orchestra and of the Camerata Salzburg, and is closely associated with the Orchestra of the Age of the Enlightenment (which has taken over the work of the London Classical Players) and with the Philharmonia.

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.

Our comprehensive and successful Reznicek edition now presents three very different works – the Symphonic Suite No. 1 (1882), Dream Play Suite (1915 / 21), and Carnival Suite (1932) – which the composer nonetheless assigned to the suite genre. Taken together, they document his compositional and stylistic development over the decades. Moreover, they are performed by an orchestra that Reznicek himself once had conducted for a short time: the Weimar State Orchestra. His Symphonic Suite is more like a three-movement symphony for full orchestra. It is clearly audible that here Reznicek is not concerned with motivic work and thematic fission but with the contrast of moods. The harmony and the instrumentation leave little doubt about its source of inspiration in Wagner. The suite from the incidental music to Strindberg’s Dream Play is a series of short, atmospherically dense musical pictures, and in terms of its compositional history the Carnival Suite is a symphonic intermezzo dividing the opera Gondoliere des Dogen into two parts. In the manner of a Baroque suite, it consists of seven parts: March – Introduction – Pierrot and Columbine – Gigue – Furlana – Passepied – Aria – Gypsy March. The relation of the suite to the rest of the opera music results from the circumstance that here too the rhythm of the Furlana (dance from the Friuli region) is omnipresent.

Accompanied by a luxurious team of professionals, consisting of the renowned stage director Peter Stein, his stage designer Ferdinand Wöger and conductor Ádám Fischer, Teatro alla Scala presents with Mozart’s Zauberflöte a production where orchestra, chorus, soloists as well as outfitters all consisted of students of the Academia Teatro alla Scala, the educational institution aimed to train the young talents, founded by the Teatro alla Scala in 2001. The result was more than stunning and an instant success with the audience of the ten sold out performances at La Scala, which is famous for its more than critical loggionisti. According to Die Presse, Fischer “gets the best out of the Academy Orchestra with delicate execution and humane phrasing” while the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung praises Fatma Said as ''Pamina'' and Yasmin Özkan as ''Queen of the Night''.

Today Conradin Kreutzer is regarded as an absolutely paradigmatic representative of the musical "Biedermeier," which designates not so much an epoch as a style and a state of mind. Chamber music often clearly of more demanding execution also served the purposes of home performance in middle-class households. Viewed stylistically, Kreutzer’s music may be described as tranquil, with a basic stance of intimate lyricism and emotionally finely balanced expressive content. Singable, catchy melodies, cautious chromaticisms, and logical harmonic designs predominate in his chamber music. Nevertheless, Kreutzer repeatedly surprises us with unexpected tones actually already suggesting romantic tones. With his great command of the compositional craft, he writes music that is virtuosic but not complicated and always very easy to realize instrumentally – producing music for home performance at its very best!

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The six-movement Septet Es-Dur op. 62 for clarinet, horn, bassoon, violin, viola, violoncello and double bass is dated to 1804-10, even though the work was not printed until 1825, so that actually the opus number is not quite apt. The composition is of great musical richness, always soundly interesting, contrastingly attractive. The Ensemble Himmelpfortgrund offers an interpretation of undoubted freshness.

– Klassik.com

In 1948 Hanns Eisler returned to Europe from exile in the United States, where he had found refuge from the National Socialist regime. On his return he found hardly any traces of the Germany he had left in 1937 and expressed his feelings of grief and loss in many choice songs – some of which Holger Falk and Steffen Schleiermacher have selected for the enthralling and exemplary program on this second volume of their Eisler edition. These songs lend expression to Eisler’s profound love for Germany- a passion hardly to have been expected from a committed communist. He even calls for praise of Germany in the Neue deutsche Volkslieder to texts by Johannes R. Becher, and employs the folk element to counteract the poet’s tone, which at times exceeds the proper limits of pathos, and produces a tender emotional picture.

Rontgen’s Piano Concertos Vol. 2. Our second album featuring piano concertos by Julius Rontgen presents impressive Romantic music by this composer who was also an outstanding pianist and often interpreted his own compositions. His Piano Concerto No. 3 of 1887-88, by way of exception in four movements, is more reminiscent of Brahms and not at all of the New German School of Liszt adherents. In December 1929 Rontgen began composing his last two piano concertos, both of which are heard on this release. His Concerto No. 6 has one movement and lasts a mere fifteen minutes. The theme consists of repeated gentle wavy motion that recurs at the beginning, in the middle, with the cadenza, and at the end and reflects the bitonality so diligently practiced by Willem Pijper and Paul Hindemith, two composers whom Rontgen held in admiration. His Concerto No. 7, his last such work, has three distinct movements and an ABA structure that would enable it to stand alone. It is Rontgen’s posthumous triumph that his two last concertos have never disappeared from the repertoire and have continued to be regularly performed together. Now for almost ninety years!

Johann Sebastiani’s name no doubt will be familiar only to a few certified music experts. Born in Weimar in 1622, Sebastiani spent a good many years of his life in Königsberg, where he arrived around 1650 and later was appointed court chapel master. He composed countless occasional works as well as a St. Matthew Passion (1672) – a welcome addition to our picture of Lutheran church music and a work closing a gap in the history of Passion settings between Heinrich Schütz and Johann Sebastian Bach. Stephen Stubbs, Paul O’Dette, and their Boston Early Music Festival Chamber & Vocal Ensemble have fond memories of Bremen, where they have recorded in the radio broadcast hall on occasions and produced Marc-Antoine Charpentier’s Baroque opera La Descente d’Orphée aux Enfers, for which they won a Grammy Award in 2015. Their current release featuring Johann Sebastiani’s St. Matthew Passion pays tribute to Königsberg’s music culture and to the composer who was one of its central representatives.

Alex Potter - praised by the press as "a rising star in the world of countertenors" - interprets sacred works by Telemann for cpo on this album. The setting of Psalm 6 continues to be thoroughly obliged to the tone of the sacred concertos of the seventeenth century associated with names such as Dietrich Buxtehude, Johann Rosenm�ller, and Johann Schelle. However, even though this psalm setting entitled "Ach, Herr strafe mich nicht" very much resembles similar works by older authors, it nevertheless displays a very special aura. Accompanied by two violins and basso continuo, an affectively nuanced narrative of a soul plagued by fear and hoping for the end of it's torments is heard. The Missa in B minor is similar in style to the music of the psalm; it is what is known as a Lutheran �short mass,� which with it's Kyrie and Gloria merely consists of two compositional complexes. All the numbers comprising "Me miserum" concern the faithful soul, which tells it's story, is aware of it's insufficiency but does not yield to despair, and therefore is able to register it's experience of faith. A sonata and two fugues round off the album.

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

Also available on standard DVD

Virginia Woolf defied the false order of narrative conventions to depict a heightened, startling and poignant reality. Woolf Works recreates the synaesthetic collision ofform and substance in her writings. Each of the three acts springs from one of Woolf’s landmark novels: Mrs Dalloway, Orlando and The Waves – but these inspirations are also enmeshed with elements from her letters, essays and diaries. Woolf Works expresses the heart of an artistic life driven to discover a freer, uniquely modern realism, and brings to life Woolf’s world of ‘granite and rainbow’, where human beings are at once both physical body and uncontained essence. Woolf Works (2015) was Wayne McGregor’s first full-length work for The Royal Ballet. "At its creation in 2015, Woolf Works felt like a breakthrough for choreographer Wayne McGregor, adding a new emotional weight to his athletic force and fascination with technology. In this first revival, it’s even stronger, with Alessandra Ferri luminous as the Virginia Woolf figure… It’s a thoughtful, heartfelt performance in a ballet that is both intelligent and tender." (The Independent 4 Stars)‘‘Since its premiere in 2015, Wayne McGregor’s first full-length ballet has won the 2015 Critics’ Circle award for best classical choreography and the 2016 Olivier Award for best new dance production, while its star, the fiftysomething ballerina Alessandra Ferri, has won an Olivier for outstanding achievement in dance. No wonder the Royal Ballet decided to revive Woolf Works as part of the celebrations marking McGregor’s tenth anniversary as resident choreographer." (The Times 4 Stars)

When orchestras became larger and larger, instrumentations more and more refined, and sound impressions louder and louder, Robert Fuchs composed . . . string quartets. Working in what is certainly the most intellectual musical genre, he had ears for intimate personal statements, while the music business had eyes mostly for showy spectacles. The Minguet Quartet, now a sought-after ensemble, once rescued Fuchs’s four quartets from decades of neglect when it was as aspiring young formation; the newly released special edition even today makes for true listening pleasure. The namesake of the Quartet is Pablo Minguet, a Spanish philosopher of the 18th century who attempted, in his writings, to facilitate access to the fine arts for all sectors of the population – and this idea is a chief artistic concern of the Minguet Quartet particularly while touring for concerts around the whole world. The passionate and intelligent interpretations of the Minguet Quartet always ensure inspiring listening experiences – “for the joy in sound and expression with which the ensemble makes the works speak enlivens even the smallest detail”. (Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung)

An astonishing success story goes into its second overtime on Volume 8 of our Dutch Cello Sonata series. This time this release is really supposed to mark the conclusion, and for this occasion Doris Hochscheid and Frans van Ruth have selected sonatas by Georg Hendrik Witte and Wouter Hutschenruyter made to order for a crowning culmination. Utrecht was the hometown of both composers, but their paths also crossed in other places. On a recommendation from Richard Strauss, White gained a foothold in Essen, where he shaped its expanding music culture over many years. He had a special talent for persuading the greats of the European music world to come to perform in Essen, which until then had been a rather insignificant coal-mining town. A special high point was surely his role in initiating the premiere of Gustav Mahler’s Symphony No. 6 in Essen’s recently built concert hall- in a performance by the Utrecht Orchestra, which had developed into a phenomenal ensemble with Wouter Hutschenruyter as its principal conductor. The compositions of the two are closely related. Witte had received significant impulses during his studies in Leipzig. The tradition of Schumann and Mendelssohn held in the highest honor in that city is in audible evience in his works. The Drei Stucke in particular clearly reveal Schumann’s famous Fantasiestucke as their source of inspiration.

Heinrich Baermann is quite well known today as Carl Maria von Weber's source of inspiration. The famous virtuoso, for whom Weber personally created his clarinet concertos, repeatedly took up the pen on his own - and did so with great success. Several dozen works by Baermann have been transmitted to us. Here Rita Karin Meier and the Belenus Quartet turn to his three quintets for clarinet and strings and with them very outstandingly bring back to life his much-acclaimed cantabile playing as well as his legendary virtuosic capabilities. Especially in the Quintet in F minor, Op. 22 Baermann's closeness to Weber cannot be missed. The tempestuous beginning, in which the strings introduce the yearning and urgency of the Allegro non troppo, is pure romanticism from the very start. The magnificent opera scene in the second movement offers Rita Karin Meier outstanding opportunities to display her wonderfully warm tone in all sorts of different shadings. The Adagio of the Quintet Op. 23, which even today is quite frequently performed, acquired unsual fame. After its rediscovery in 1922 it was initially regarded as a work by Richard Wagner - which absolutely certifies its high quality!

For more than fifty years Eduard Napravnik conducted at the Imperial Opera in the Mariinsky Theater in St. Petersburg. The legendary renown of this theater very much goes back to the Napravnik Era. The Spyros Piano Trio demonstrates on the recording premiere of Napravnik’s two piano trios that the gifted orchestral conductor was also an outstanding composer. It is thus not all that surprising that we frequently encounter operatic elements in Napravnik’s works. Going against the emperor’s predilection for everything Italian, he frequently and fondly included the music of his Russian contemporaries on the program. He conducted the premieres of operas such as Tchaikovsky’s The Queen of Spades and Mussorgsky’s Boris Godunov. Nevertheless, in his own works one is occasionally reminded of Verdi. The astonishing fact is that Napravnik found any time at all to compose while conducting a total of more than four thousand performances. His quick mind enabled him to conduct the second rehearsal of an opera from memory. It is rumored that the legendary Felix Mottl interrupted a general rehearsal of Wagner’s Tristan prepared by Napravnik after half an hour because after the excellent preparation there was no longer anything left to rehearse. The members of the Spyros Trio, Tatiana Korsunskaya, Bartek Niziol, and Denis Severin, came together by chance to perform chamber music by Louise Adolpha Le Beau. The resultant MDG recording immediately received rave reviews and in 2015 was awarded the coveted ECHO Klassik prize- just the right incentive for closer collaboration and the welcome continuation presented on this recording of works by Napravnik.

Fran�ois-Adrien Boieldieu numbers among the most important exponents of the op�ra comique of the French imperial era and the subsequent restoration. With La dame blanche (1825) he even produced one of the internationally most successful works of this genre; it served as a model example for other composers and played a significant role in the further development of the op�ra comique. Fran�ois Boieldieu received his early training in music in particular from Charles Broches, the organist at the Rouen Cathedral. In 1796 he went to Paris, where he met Cherubini. From 1803 to 1811 he was the court music director in St. Petersburg, and in 1817 he became a professor of composition at the Paris Conservatory. In the overtures of his op�ras comiques Boieldieu usually anticipates thematic material from the particular opera. As a result, the overture not only prepares the listener for the atmosphere and tone color of the particular op�ra comique but also provides for a recognition effect when the themes familiar from the overture reappear in a later phase of the stage action. The great wealth of melodic invention and the pronounced melodic cantability particularly characteristic of Boieldieu's music and the Piano Concerto heard here inspired his contemporaries to call him "the French Mozart."

This fine collection of arguably the Greatest Film Music ever written brings together on one album music from some of the most memorable films ever made. Opening with the unforgettable music from the ground-breaking 1977 movie ‘Star Wars’ by the greatest living composer of film music, John Williams, this selection includes a unique 14-minute concert suite of music from the film. Other Williams scores for Stephen Spielberg blockbusters include those for the unforgettable fantasy ‘E.T. – The Extra-Terrestrial’ and the haunting science fiction ‘Close Encounters of the Third Kind’. This album also looks back to the heyday of Hollywood, with scores by Max Steiner – from ‘Gone With the Wind’ – and the undisputed Master of the genre, Erich Wolfgang Korngold, with music from ‘The Adventures of Robin Hood’ and the weepie ‘Escape Me Never’. The hit theme from ‘The Big Country’ by Jerome Moross is also here, and British music from legendary U.K. movies widens the scope of this unique collection, with two great film scores by Sir William Walton – ‘Henry V’, starring Laurence Olivier, and ‘The First of the Few’ – the famous ‘Spitfire Prelude and Fugue’ – as well as the great Ron Goodwin’s memorable ‘633 Squadron’ alongside music from two Soviet composers: Prokofiev’s score for ‘Alexander Nevsky’ and Aram Khachaturian’s famous ‘Adagio from Spartacus’, featured in the romantic historical drama ‘Mayerling’. All in all, this SOMM release should form part of any collection, conducted by the great Scottish-born Maestro Iain Sutherland, directing the Philharmonic Promenade Orchestra of Hilversum.

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REVIEW:

Expertly recorded by conductor Iain Sutherland and the Philharmonic Concert Orchestra, Great Classic Film Music captures the magic of cinema through the music we know and love.

– Classic FM

Previous albums have featured electrifying marches, sparkling polkas, and yearning waltzes by Benjamin Bilse and Richard Ellenberg, the conductor Christian Simonis – this time with the Nuremberg Symphony – now presents peppy popular pieces by Carl Millöcker, who was born in Vienna in 1842. In the context of the Viennese operetta of the nineteenth century, the composer and theater conductor Millöcker is usually mentioned together with the younger Johann Strauss and Franz von Suppé, and he certainly numbers among the most important creative personalities of the »Golden Years« of the Viennese operetta era. His musical oeuvre comprises some 110 stage works (operettas, singspiels, music for farcical comedies – and more), numerous piano compositions, some ninety songs, music for orchestra (waltzes, polkas, marches), choral works, and chamber music. At the time the customary practice was to arrange the best and most beloved melodies from stage works as dance music, as waltzes, polkas, quadrilles, and marches, and such was also the case with Millöcker’s music, including the “Sonntagskind-Walzer.” Its formal design is like the one known to us from the Strauss waltzes of this period. After a lavish introduction a series of four waltzes is presented; then a lengthy coda follows in the manner of a reminiscence.

Aram Khachaturian was an established Soviet artist when he realized an old dream of his in the first postwar year 1946 and composed a grand, quasi-symphonic work for his main instrument. Following his spectacular concertos for piano and for violin, which in the meantime had taken the world by storm, he now surprised his public with music that only gradually reveals its fiery temperament: we hear very clearly how well the composer knew the violoncello, the instrument on which during his study years he had practiced until his fingers hurt, in all its special qualities and how precisely he knew how to bring out its expressive and velvety autumnal personality. Neither this concerto nor the Rhapsody composed by Khachaturian seventeen years later for Mstislav Rostropovich can be mastered with mere virtuoso ostentation. Both works demand the services of a soloist who does not misunderstand the unprecedented difficulties of his parts as an opportunity for self-display, and Daniel Raiskin has found such an interpreter in the person of the Swedish cellist Thorleif Thedéen: sovereign in every technical respect, he surmounts the enormous challenges even when he removes himself from the intensive dialogues with the orchestra and – left entirely to his own devices – captures the whole of Khachaturian in the monologues.

The term used to describe the epoch in which the works brought together on this album were composed is a matter of dispute. Did it come before the period of Viennese classicism, which means that it represents "pre-Classicism?" Or is it part of this period, that is, "Early Classicism?" The Austrian musicologist Rudolf Flotzinger came up with a pithy formulation for this phase of music history, terming it "the epoch between the epochs," which means that it is no longer Baroque and not yet Classicism. During this period, in the middle of the eighteenth century and in the age of Empress Maria Theresa, the genres of instrumental ensemble music continuing even today to dominate the concert repertoire were developed - including the "clavier concerto," which was performed in equal measure on the organ, on the harpsichord, and later on the pianoforte. The designation "clavier" current at that time merely generally referred to an instrument with claves (keys). A collection of clavier concertos extant in the Studies Library in Ptuj (Pettau), Slovenia, preserves the compositions recorded here in manuscript form. The harpsichordist Michael Hell, along with the Neue Hofkapelle Graz, led by him and Lucia Froihofer, performs these exciting works. Two highly outstanding instruments were available to Michael Hell for this recording: the harpsichord built by Johann Leydecker in Vienna in 1755, now freshly restored, and it's copy built by Martin P�hringer in 2017. These instruments enable listeners to become acquainted with two instruments forming a perfect match for this repertoire: on an extremely well-preserved original instrument and on a copy that in it's way is tonally just as suitable - after all, even during the time of it's composition the music was performed on new instruments. The Ptuj collection shows how fragile and incomplete our knowledge of the musical practice from "the epoch between the epochs" really is. The transmitted manuscripts, above all the extant concertos by Wagenseil, document the variety of performance options, broad compositional palette, and widespread dissemination of music for keyboard instruments.

In 2016, almost three hundred years after the composition of Georg Caspar Schurmann’s Die getreue Alceste, Barockwerk Hamburg presented a semi-scenic performance of this opera in the atrium of the Hamburg State Foundation for the Promotion of Science and Culture. Ira Hochman founded the ensemble Barockwerk Hamburg in 2007 with the goal of rediscovering both vocal and instrumental chamber and stage music from the Baroque era and bring it back to life. The ensemble draws particularly often from the rich tradition of Hamburg, which not only attracted numerous great musicians during the 17th and 18th centuries, but also the public and patrons from all over Northern Europe. The permanent cast of Barockwerk Hamburg consists of 15 instrumentalists and singers. However, the ensemble cooperates closely with other Baroque specialists and adapts the cast to the requirements of different programs. Its members include musicians with international experience as well as up and coming talents from Hamburg University of Music and Drama.

Erich Wolfgang Korngold greatly revised the comic operetta A Night in Venice by Johann Strauss (Jr.) on the basis of the libretto version by Ernst Marischka. The original Straussian version initially rapidly made its way around the world, with performances in the lands of the Danube monarchy as well as in Hamburg, Munich, and London and even in New York. Nevertheless, until the end of World War I it experienced only about five hundred performances, which means that it was clearly overshadowed by Die Fledermaus. Again and again the attempt was made to reinterpret the text with interventions revising its content. Erich Wolfgang Korngold took an additional step in 1923, when he not only adapted the text but also changed the original instrumentation and integrated inserts into the work from other operettas by Strauss, for example, from Simplicius (1880). For several reasons Korngold’s revised version was a success when it was performed at the Theater an der Wien on 25 October 1923: the stage set was lavish and magnificent, the new orchestration displayed tonal sophistication, and the great Richard Tauber was heard in the role of the Duke in quest of erotic adventures. A few years later Korngold’s version made its way to the stage of the Vienna State Opera.

This recording is the final volume in Lars Vogt’s new cycle of Beethoven’s Piano Concertos on Ondine. It includes Piano Concertos Nos. 2 and 4, two outstanding examples of Beethoven's writing. Conducting Royal Northern Sinfonia from the keyboard, Vogt’s fresh interpretations of Beethoven concertos have been widely welcomed, and recently he was nominated for Artist of the Year 2017 by the Gramophone magazine.

Beethoven’s 2nd Piano Concerto was largely written before 1789. The work was premiered in 1795 with Beethoven debuting as piano soloist. This early work shows the influence of Mozart but at the same time it is a powerful evidence of Beethoven’s development as a composer towards maturity. Beethoven’s 4th Piano Concerto is considered by many as his best achievement in the field of piano concerto. Beethoven opens this work in a revolutionary way by means of a calm dialogue between the piano and the orchestra. The second movement includes some of the most dramatic music that Beethoven ever wrote – only to be contrasted by the boundless joy and freedom of the final movement. Lars Vogt was appointed the first ever “Pianist in Residence” by the Berlin Philharmonic in 2003/04 and enjoys a high profile as a soloist and chamber musician. His debut solo recording on Ondine with Bach’s Goldberg Variations was released in August 2015 and has been a major critical success. Lars Vogt started his tenure as Music Director of the Royal Northern Sinfonia in September 2015.

REVIEW:

It’s perhaps no coincidence, given that Vogt is currently Music Director the Royal Northern Sinfonia, that the rapport between the soloist and this highly accomplished band of musicians is everything it should be, and more. These are marvelous performances, and the recordings, derived from live performances at Sage Gateshead, serve them well.

– Gramophone

In Berlin the composers Berthold Goldschmidt and Franz Reizenstein developed into products of the anti-romantic “new realism.” However, both distanced themselves from this dry objectivity and sought more powerful means of expression while avoiding the late romantic excesses that at the time continued to predominate in Germany. The surprising fact is that neither Reizenstein nor Goldschmidt felt drawn to Schonberg’s method of twelve-tone composition. In 1934 and 1935 both composers fled from Berlin to England, that is, prior to the tightening of immigration requirements. Influences from Reizenstein’s teachers Paul Hindemith and Ralph Vaughan Williams are audible in the rather harsh, expressionistic character of his concerto. Raphael Wallfisch writes of this work, “Reizenstein’s Cello Concerto is a tour de force for the cellist. What is involved here is an epic and heroic statement in which lyrical and dramatic elements alternate.”