Classical Music

Classical Music

Classical Music

Classical Music

Classical Music

The Parker Quartet is widely known and respected for their inspiring performances, dazzling sound, and remarkable musicianship. The Grammy-Award-winning ensemble was founded in, and is currently based in Boston. The group has a vastly varied repertoire, ranging from classical to contemporary compositions. They have rapidly set themselves apart as one of the most trailblazing ensembles of its generation. The group is sought after worldwide, and appears at prestigious venues across North and South America, Europe, and South Korea. For the Quartet, the music of Felix Mendelssohn is rejuvenating. There is no other composer who can better channel the youthful soul that all of us have inside. This joyful music captures the spirit of life, which the Parker Quartet amplifies with their irresistible energy.

• A compilation of Mendelssohn's most important piano pieces

Felix Mendelssohn's Lieder ohne Worte (Songs Without Words), comprising 8 volumes and 48 individual works, are delightful solo piano miniatures that, although not so intended by the composer in most instances, have come to embody certain descriptive characteristics of people, places or things with the help of publisher's attaching names to some after-the-fact. Michael Endres award-winning (Diapason d'or; Choc du Musique) discography is an extensive one, amounting to 30 albums; for OehmsClassics he has recorded works of Schumann, Schubert, Weber, Ravel and Gershwin, among others.

•For their second OehmsClassics recording, the Lower Austrian Tonkünstler Austria decided on the Mendelssohn First and Third Symphonies. Recorded live at the Vienna Musikverein, these performances further reveal the growing sense of appreciation conductor Andrés Orozco-Estrada is receiving. He is soon to be appointed Principal Conductor of the hr‑Sinfonieorchester, Frankfurt, Music Director of the HoustonSymphony and Principal Guest Conductor of the LondonPhilharmonic.

One of his most popular works, Felix Mendelssohn’s Symphony No. 4, op. 90 (‘Italian’), composed while on an Italian journey in 1835, contains within itself that period’s general enthusiasm for Italy. In the spirit of Bach, the Reformation Symphony is infused with the spirit of baroque music. It is marked by contrapuntal density and constructed on church-music themes that already had their place in Bach’s musical consciousness. The internationally recognized Columbian-born conductor Andrés Orozco-Estrada recently concluded his brilliant five-year tenure with the Tonkünstler Orchestra.

Fresh interpretation and technical brilliance imbue "Mendelssohn: Sonatas from Childhood, Adolescence, and Adulthood," the first period instrument recording of this repertoire. This debut recording by the New York City based Karr-Yang Duo features three relatively unknown Mendelssohn Piano and Violin Sonatas, including the duo's own version of the unfinished 1838 F major sonata, and the stunning albeit incomplete Fragment in D. As a whole, the works tell the story of Mendelssohn's development as a composer, spanning his artistic life beginning at the age of 11, through the teenage years, and into his mature period. In this recording, the sumptuous tone and refinement of a fully restored Conrad gRaf piano from 1825 converses in equal partnership with the warm, resonant sonority of the violin's gut strings and historical set-up, revealing Mendelssohn's full-blooded, lyrical, and colorful music at its fullest realization. The Karr-Yang duo bridges the divide between musicological research and communicative performance, and presents an album which will appeal to the period instrument aficionado as well as the Mendelssohn lover.

Classical Music

Classical Music

The Swedish award-winning string orchestra, Musica Vitae, directed by violinist Malin Broman and accompanied by pianist Simon Crawford-Phillips, is showcased here in a sparkling performance of Felix Mendelssohn's challenging Concerto for Violin, Piano and Orchestra. The concerto is coupled with Felix's sister, Fanny Hensel Mendelssohn's, String Quartet, here for the first time recorded in an arrangement for string orchestra. As a bonus, Malin and Simon also perform four songs by Fanny, arranged for viola and piano. Musica Vitae Chamber Orchestra is the ensemble that brings live music - indeed the music of life - to each and every individual member of the audience. The vast realm that is art music is handled with the utmost precision and elegance by it's 15 string players. The repertoire consists of baroque and romantic as well as modernist and contemporary music from a wide variety of genres. Musica Vitae appear on stages big and small in Sweden and abroad. Internationally, the orchestra has been warmly greeted in China, the United States, Greece, Switzerland, Germany and Spain to name but a few countries.

German-Canadian cellist Johannes Moser and Irish pianist Alasdair Beatson present a moving portrait of the Mendelssohn family with this recording of pieces by the siblings Felix and Fanny. Once composed for the popular Sunday Sessions at the Berlin Mendelssohn family house, these works fit into the typically nineteenth-century tradition of domestic music-making, albeit at the highest thinkable level. Beatson plays an 1837 Erard fortepiano, identical to the instrument that belonged to the Mendelssohn household when these pieces were composed. Besides Felix Mendelssohns two sonatas for cello and piano, his Variations concertantes, op. 17, Lied ohne Worte, op. 109 and Albumblatt in B Minor are featured. Fanny Hensel-Mendelssohns Fantasia in G Minor and Capriccio in A-flat Major show what could have become of this talented female composer if societal conventions had not restricted her musical activities to the private salon. This is Mosers fifth album as an exclusive PENTATONE artist, after releases with the cello concertos of Dvorak and Lalo (2015), Elgar and Tchaikovsky (2017), works for cello and piano by Rachmaninov and Prokofiev (2016, awarded with a diapason dor and ECHO Klassik 2017), and cello concertos by Lutoslawski and Dutilleux (2018). He records for the first time with Alasdair Beatson, who makes his PENTATONE debut.