The world-renowned violinist Ida Haendel CBE (1928-2020) was born in Poland, a child prodigy whose career spanned seven decades. She studied with the greatest teachers of the time, Carl Flesch and George Enescu. Haendel made her London debut playing the Brahms Concerto at the Royal Albert Hall Promenade concerts in 1937, to great acclaim. The association with the Proms was lifelong and resulted in 68 appearances there. At the outset of war she moved to the UK, before finally settling in the US. Her close affinity with the Sibelius Violin Concerto drew praise from the composer, while her performances of the Brahms, Elgar and Britten concertos were of the very highest quality. She toured widely under such great conductors as Sir Thomas Beecham, Sir Adrian Boult, Sergiu Celibidache, Bernard Haitink, Otto Klemperer, Raphael Kubelik, Charles Munch, Sir Georg Solti, Lorin Maazel and Zubin Mehta. She died at her home in Miami aged 92.

SOMM Recordings celebrates the wealth of popular concert music produced in Vienna in the 19th and early 20th centuries with a release called Dancing in Vienna, an exhilarating collection of waltzes to set your feet tapping. The Philharmonic Concert Orchestra is led by the versatile Scottish conductor, Iain Sutherland, whose previous, wide-ranging collaborations with SOMM have received enthusiastic critical response: "strong and trenchant, often exhilarating, never sentimental, " Gramophone; "getting pretty much everything right, every nuance and subtle rhythm, " Amazon USA. Einzi Stolz, widow of one of the last masters of Viennese light music, Robert Stolz, wrote to Sutherland, "You have a Viennese heart with the golden arm for Viennese music." Robert Stolz's rousing march, Greetings from Vienna, opens this collection, which also includes his Viennese Cafe Waltzes. Dominating the light music programmes of Vienna for almost a century was the Strauss family-Johann I and his three sons Johann II, Josef, and Eduard. They composed dances and conducted their own orchestras for all the grand balls and concerts almost every day of the week in Vienna, as well as all over the world. Among the works by Johann Strauss II included here is his famous Emperor Waltz, commissioned in 1889 for a state visit by Emperor Franz-Joseph I of Austria-Hungary to Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany. Reflecting the rise of popular Hungarian gypsy music at the time is his Salute the Magyars polka, along with the Trisch Trasch, Thunder and Lightning, and Champagne polkas, and the overture to his operetta masterpiece, Die Fledermaus. Johann II was the most famous of the family of musicians, though he once said of his younger brother, Josef Strauss, that he was "the more gifted of us two; I am merely the more popular..." From Josef Strauss we have the Chatterbox Polka, Dragonfly Polka-Mazurka, Jockey Polka (incorporating the international trumpet call marking the opening of the racing season), the Feuerfest! Polka to celebrate the Wertheim company's 200, 000th fireproof safe, and the beloved Pizzicato Polka, on which he collaborated with popular brother. The youngest of the Strauss brothers, Eduard Strauss, was better recognized as a dance music conductor than as a composer. Still, this release includes his Clear Track Polka, heralding the opening of a new railway company in 1869. Johannes Brahms greatly admired the melodic genius of Johann Strauss II. Their respect was mutual, and Strauss often included his good friend's Hungarian Dances on his programmes. This present collection includes Nos. 1, 5, and 6 from Brahms's collection of 21 dances. The lesser-known composer, author, and musical administrator Richard Heuberger is represented on this CD of Dancing in Vienna by the overture to his light opera, The Opera Ball.

This album presents three highly distinctive, yet complementary masterworks. The foremost of which is Brahms's third Piano quartet Op. 60 - the Werther quartet; it's music unquestionably reflecting the profound emotions of love, despair and overwhelming sorrow which lead to the ultimate demise of the protagonist in Goethe's famed novel. In this unique and fresh, but highly considered interpretation, a new light is shone on one of Brahms's greatest works. Hindemith's moving Viola Sonata Op. 11 No. 4 blends Germanic depth with French tinged colour, it's counterpoint and lyricism showcasing a composer equally adept in complexity and folk-like charm. To conclude the album, Penderecki's Cadenza for solo viola is a sharp stylistic contrast, to the Brahms, yet draws a powerful message as a companion piece; it's exploration of the falling semitone motif covers a vast emotional spectrum with relentless virtuosity, culminating in pained, hoarsely whispered harmonics.

Marking 70 years since Enescu's death, celebrated violinist Charlie Siem returns to Signum Classics performing the Brahms Violin Concerto, and works by George Enescu with previous collaborators, conductor Oleg Caetani and the Philharmonia Orchestra. This release features a world premiere recording of the Brahms Violin Concerto cadenza written by George Enescu. PRAISE for Siem, Caetani and Philharmonia on Signum Classics: "Terrific performance there from Charlie Siem and the Philharmonia Orchestra and conductor, Oleg Caetani"� - Classic FM Album of the Week

COMPLETE ORCHESTRAL MUSIC

GERMAN REQUIEM

REQUIEM, OVERTURES, SYMPHONIES

BRAHMS: Symphonies Nos. 2 and 4 (Mengelberg) (1941)

BRAHMS: Symphonies Nos. 1 and 3 (Mengelberg) (1930-1941)

Baritone Florian Boesch and pianist Malcolm Martineau continue their successful collaboration on Linn with a recital pairing two geniuses who hated each other. Exploring the rivalry between Johannes Brahms and Hugo Wolf, the album showcases some of their most compelling songs which express deep emotion and philosophical themes. Brahms's Vier ernste Gesange, written in memory of Clara Schumann, contrasts melancholy with transcendence, whilst lieder like Sehnsucht and Die Trauernde evoke poignant pain and unresolved longing. Wolf, in his Goethe and Michelangelo songs, captures profound existential reflections, contrasting fame with love and weaving harmonies that echo the complexities of human emotion. The album concludes with Wolf's Prometheus, a tour-de-force of maximum power befitting Florian and Malcolm, two giants of the lieder scene.

LIEDER & LIEBESLIEDER WALTZES (VERBIER FESTIVAL)

The preeminent violin and piano partnership of Alina Ibragimova and C�dric Tiberghien give matchless accounts of Brahms's three Violin Sonatas. The works, which reveal the composer at his most lyrically reflective, are coupled with a fabulous encore by Clara Schumann.

Though founded only in 2003, the Yale Schola Cantorum harks back to the small university student choirs that, in the early and middle 20th century, did much to introduce the choral music of earlier eras to the American public. Under the auspices of the Yale Institute of Sacred Music, the Schola Cantorum has performed in concerts and church services internationally. Their repertory focuses on historically informed performances of music of the Renaissance and Baroque, and they have collaborated with historical instrument groups from the Yale and Juilliard Schools of Music. They have also, however, performed later music up to that of the present day. The Yale Schola Cantorum was founded in 2003 by it's first conductor, Simon Carrington, who remained in his post until 2009. The group has attracted internationally known music directors; Masaaki Suzuki, director of the renowned Japan Bach Collegium, held the post from 2009 to 2013, and that year he was succeeded by David Hill, chief conductor of the BBC Singers among other top British groups. The Schola Cantorum has also hosted domestic and international guest conductors from the top of the A-list: Dale Warland, James O'Donnell, Helmuth Rilling, Paul Hillier, Stephen Layton, Nicholas McGegan, and Krzysztof Penderecki, among others. The choir maintains a regular concert schedule in New Haven and New York City, and has toured in Britain, China, Estonia, France, Greece, Hungary, India, Italy, Latvia, Russia, Singapore, South Korea, Spain, and Turkey. The Schola Cantorum immediately attracted the attention of recording companies, releasing a live performance of Heinrich Biber's 1693 Vesperae longiores ac breviores with the Yale Collegium Musicum, and then featuring the little-known Missa Resurrectionis of Antonio Bertali (1605-1669) on the Rezound label in 2007. These albums received wide critical acclaim. The choir has also recorded for Naxos, Delos, and, in the late 2010s, Hyperion, issuing a performance of Palestrina's Missa Confitebor tibi Dominum on that label in 2018. The Schola Cantorum is one of the most selective choirs in the international academic world. Membership, by audition, is open to Yale students from any department of the university, although many of it's singers are music students. - James Manheim

Recently awarded the prestigious Brahms Prize of the Schleswig-Holstein Brahms Society, Kent Nagano and the Hamburg Philharmonic State Orchestra, of which he was principal conductor from 2015 until 2025, perform the last two symphonies by the Hamburg-born composer, recorded in concert. The most personal of Johannes Brahms's four symphonies, the Third is both heroic and deeply troubled; moreover, all four movements end quietly. After the heroism of the First Symphony and the pastoral flavours of the Second, the Third Symphony reveals Brahms at a crossroads: the youthful impulses are now reined in and the mood is more one of profound reflection on life and death. The theme of the slow movement has been adapted many times and even sung by Frank Sinatra under the title of 'Take My Love'. The Fourth Symphony might be described as the most classical of Brahms's symphonies, not least because of it's chaconne finale, a variation form inherited from the baroque era. Described as an 'autumn symphony' or 'elegiac', it's mood is sometimes tormented and fiery, sometimes harsh and solitary. The culmination of a genre that cost him so much effort, the Fourth is the last word of Brahms the symphonist; he would never compose another work of this kind.

The album you hold in your hands charts a journey that is, in more than one sense, the cartography of a life. Not only does it span both the first and one of the last piano works of Johannes Brahms, but beneath it's design lies a deeper meditation on the nature of time. The young Italian pianist Elia Cecino does not merely confront the pianistic and expressive challenges of these works; he assumes the role of a narrator, shaping, through the poetry of sound, a tale of fullness and nostalgia, of youth and age, of promises and memories dissolving into the ether. The Sonata No. 1, written in the ardor of youth, still resounds with echoes of Beethoven-it opens with a direct citation from the Hammerklavier-revealing a Brahms who raises his voice with impassioned fervor, boldly claiming the great classical legacy with the audacity of one who knows he has something to say. At the heart of the program, the Variations on a Theme by Schumann dwell in a space of reverence and sorrow, where a more mature Brahms converses with his friend and mentor in a gesture of tribute and love, of confidences and affinities, of encounters and brotherhood. Finally, the Pieces, Op. 119 transport us to a realm where the urgency of performance and virtuosity has given way to the most intimate contemplation, a kind of personal, confessional journal, in which every note is almost a whisper, a thought suspended in time. Through these three great works, Elia traces the arc of a life and, in doing so, invites us to share in the experience of an entire existence in each listening-to traverse, in little more than an hour, the distance that separates youth from twilight, certainty from doubt, fullness from farewell.