Works For Cello And Piano

Barbara Hannigan, a Grammy award-winning artist at the forefront of creation, leads an ensemble of outstanding young musicians from the Royal Academy of Music and The Juilliard School. Since 2002, the Academy and The Juilliard School, both international leaders in their field, have enjoyed a special and fruitful friendship based on 20 years of performances, exchanges and recordings. In this latest collaboration, Hannigan directs students from both institutions in an all-Stravinsky programme, including the Octet, Dumbarton Oaks, Ragtime and Three Japanese Lyrics. Recently appointed the Reinbert de Leeuw Professor of Music at the Academy, Hannigan conducts this transatlantic group in a wonderfully intelligent and engaging programme of Stravinsky's most iconic ensemble repertoire.

Performances of less recorded orchestral works by Igor Stravinsky, which show the versatility of the Russian composer, who was never a supporter of any kind of expression aesthetics. On the contrary, he saw composing as an intellectual game, an attempt to solve self-invented musical problems. His constructivism could be kindled by Italian Baroque music, but just as well by the polyphonous structures of the Renaissance, by jazz, or by Anton Webern's serial tone complexes.

Classical Music

Classical Music

Classical Music

Igor Stravinsky’s later stage works Mavra (1922), Oedipus Rex (1927/28) or The Rake’s Progress (1951) are more than matched by his early “lyrical fairy tale in three acts” Le Rossignol, which occupies a special place – due to its brevity at scarcely 45 minutes. It is also unusual for the fairy-tale subject matter, based on a story called The Nightingale by Hans Christian Andersen; for its language – the original was Danish, this recording features the Russian version, yet it was premiered in French in Paris in 1914; and for its style, especially since there was a significant gap in time between the composition of the first and the other two acts, a fact that the composer was admittedly able to justify from a point of view of the shaping of the plot, since the cold atmosphere of the Chinese emperor’s royal household required a quite different musical approach to that of the beginning and end of the tale. The emperor, who is first enchanted by the bird’s song, then banishes the real thing when visiting emissaries present him with a mechanical nightingale which he names “first singer”. When the emperor later falls ill, the nightingale returns to sing to him, and saves his life.

Classical Music

Stravinsky's Rite of Spring & Firebird Suite 1919 version with the Oregon Symphony conducted by the late African-American conductor James DePreist. "One of the finest conductors this nation has produced"-Chicago Tribune.

That a simple visit to an exhibition of English art could have impelled Stravinsky to compose his last neoclassical masterpiece is really only slightly credible. It is true that the ultra-renowned series of engravings by William Hogarth effectively permits the conception of a 'plot' of a lyric work, but only Stravinsky's fervid fantasy could have allowed this to become a reality. But, as already stated, all this would not have been sufficient: in fact the composer himself had the firm intention of composing a lyric opera and (already from 1947 after having finished Orpheus) he had been seeking on ideal subject which would allow him to try hand in a new work, in the neoclassical style, which might be at one and the same time the apotheosis and the definitive conclusion of one of his compositional styles. His Hollywood neighbor, the celebrated writer Aldous Huxley, seeing the Stravinskian enthusiasm for the eighteenth century engravings, suggested that he entrust the libretto of the book to a really special writer: Wystan Hugh Auden. The result speaks for itself. This release features a live recording of the opera which took place at the Metropolitan Opera House of New York on February 14, 1953.

TRIO FOR VIOLIN, CELLO AND PIA

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On the 100th anniversary of Igor Stravinsky's Rite of Spring, the composer's piano arrangement appears on Tacet alongside smaller works, mainly for piano four-hands, played by Evgeni Koriolov and his partner Ljupka Hadzigeorgiewa. This piano version of the Rite freshly exposes several aspects of the work. Structures absorbed into the dominant orchestral instrument tone colors display a quite different balance, and compositional details that, until now not apparent, are opened up. The rhythmic drive takes on a new note, and the lyrical elements take on surprising coloring.

Classical Music

This album, featuring violinist Tianwa Yang and the Virginia Arts Festival Chamber Players, contains one of Igor Stravinsky’s small-scale theatrical works, The Soldier’s Tale (1918). Stravinsky wrote this work in collaboration with author Charles-Ferdinand Ramuz, and artist Rene-Victor Auberjonois. The work is based in a Russian folk tale by Alexander Afanasyev, and is scored for two speakers, a narrator, and a septet, as well as a non-speaking dance role. Pamela Berlin directs this production, and Joann Falletta is the conductor of the instrumentalists.