After releasing the complete set of Ennio Morricone's Cinema Suites for violin and orchestra on two�albums�(Cinema Suites, A495 and�Cinema Rarities, A554),�Marco Serino now presents world premiere recordings of the Maestro's own arrangements for violin and piano. Marco is joined by pianist Leandro Piccioni, who, like Marco, brings over twenty years of experience working closely with Morricone in his favoured orchestra, Roma Sinfonietta. These original arrangements, all from celebrated soundtracks,�represent the point of departure for an original anthology in which the two musicians investigate the wider repertoire connected to the cinema.�Cinema Memories�ranges from works that have since become classics such as the�Three Pieces from Schindler's List�by John Williams to Bernstein's�West Side Story Suite, one of the outright masterpieces of musicals on film, and Myroslav Skoryk's Melody in A minor, a jewel of a piece that has since become a sort of national anthem for the Ukrainian people. It is a programme that interweaves memory and imagination, melancholy and light, dreams and reality, making each listening experience a truly multifaceted experience.

THE COUNTERTENORS

2018 collection. Bernstein's most popular and best-loved melodies from West Side Story, Candide & On the Town. Featuring the composer as conductor in West Side Story, one of the greatest musicals of all time, and in Candide, a visionary work with a dazzling score. Bernstein prot�g� Michael Tilson Thomas conducts On the Town. Featuring all-star casts, with artists including Jos� Carreras, Kiri Te Kanawa, Marilyn Horne, Thomas Hampson, Christa Ludwig, Frederica von Stade, June Anderson, and Jerry Hadley.

Classical Music

This diverse programme of works for guitar trio is bound by the common thread of music inspired by stories from literature, stage or screen. With it's rhythmic exuberance and tragic beauty, Bernstein's West Side Story has never lost it's freshness and relevance. Ensemble member Luca Isolani's Note fuori campo is a homage to the versatile Italian composer Nino Rota, who, like Manos Hadjidakis, first shot to international fame with an Oscar-winning film score. Ravel's Ma Mere l'Oye evokes the poetry of childhood with a refined expressiveness that makes it as popular and unforgettable as Grieg's music for Peer Gynt.

Compilation producers: Steve Backer, Andy Kaufman, Bob Belden.

Recorded live at Birdland, New York, New York between March 11 and June 28, 1998. Includes liner notes by Larry Blumenfeld and Ted Panken.

Personnel: Peter Bernstein (guitar); Christian Howes (violin, electric violin); Antonio Malaby (saxophone); Jimmy Greene (soprano saxophone, tenor saxophone); Chris Potter (tenor saxophone); Darren Barrett (trumpet, flugelhorn); Richard Nant, Hugh Ragin, Dave Douglas (trumpet); Aaron Goldberg (piano, Fender Rhodes piano); D.D. Jackson (piano, keyboards); Bruce Barth (piano); Kenny Davis (acoustic bass, electric bass); Ben Perowsky, Billy Kilson, Joe Farnsworth (drums); Robert Quintero (congas); Ralph Irizarry (timbales); John Lamkin (percussion).

Liner Note Author: Ted Panken.

Recording information: Birdland, New York, NY (03/11/1998-06/28/1998).

Editors: Dave Baker ; Katsuhiko Naito.

Photographers: Teri Bloom; Joseph A. Rosen.

Featuring a nice slice of New York's modern jazz crowd, this ten-cut compilation showcases two songs apiece from pianist D.D. Jackson's quintet, trumpeter Dave Douglas' quartet, timbales player Ralph Irizarry and Timbalaye, the Jimmy Greene/Darren Barrett quintet, and guitarist Peter Bernstein's non-organ quartet. Jackson leads off the record in a spiritual mood on "Easy," and follows up with the hot bopper "For Monk's Sake," which features the heart-tugging violin of Christian Howes, the shining star of this entire showcase. The Douglas quartet offers a bluesy "Driftwood" and the slow, dour "The Frisell Dream." Greene and Barrett recall Art Blakey & the Jazz Messengers on the hard-charging "Half-Steps," and go easy on the steadiest cut of the disc, "Re-Affirmation." The hottest and most innovative band here is Timbalaye, with its riddle-laden charts and atypical Afro-Cuban grooves. The Oriente Lopez composition "Rampa Arriba" finds this septet using a deep bass and piano line from Waldo Chavez and Luis Perdomo as a thrust for saxophonist Tony Malaby, trombonist Joseph Fiedler, trumpeter Richard Nant, and conga player Robert Quintero. Timbalaye's take on Bob Franceschini's "Piesotes (Giant Feet)" is a sweet, jiving chart featuring a piano montuno and a spontaneous solo by Irizarry. Bernstein is steadily earning a reputation as one of the best young jazz guitarists, as evidenced by his supersonic bopper "Jet Stream" and the midtempo swing of "Booker's Little Blues." Certainly, more can be heard from each of these leaders on their own recordings, but this CD brings them all together in one, nice package. A fine example of the modern jazz movement. ~ Michael G. Nastos

Bernstein gives a performance of such persuasiveness that in every sense it sounds like a composer's performance.

It was Leonard Bernstein who in the early 1940s in New York gave the first performance of Copland's tough and ambitious Piano Sonata. With a characteristic display of versatility he took over the premiere at forty-eight hours' notice and played from memory. Here on one of the first records he ever made, later in that decade, he gives a performance of such persuasuiveness that in every sense it sounds like a composer's performance. The toccata-like figuration of the first two movements has nothing mechanical about it as Bernstein presents it, urgent and electric but with light and shade, while the slow concluding movement, tough and bald, draws a performance of such concentration from Bernstein that the many pauses are as expressive as the notes.

In Bernstein's own pieces dating from 1943, a set of seven intended to characterise different friends, the element one misses, knowing the later Bernstein, is a sense of fun. Brief as they are, these tend to be rather solemn character sketches, but the opening portrait of Copland (with a hint of pastiche) is certainly memorable and so is the piece in memory of Nathalia Koussevitzky with its echoes of Russian Orthodox chanting.

-- Gramophone [6/1976, reviewing an LP release of the piano works]

This album offers a great program of works for piano trio from the 20th and 21st centuries.

Musical fireworks flare and dazzle in this New Year's concert! This live recording of the 2024 New Year's concert is Philzuid's seventh album - and it's a very different New Year's concert with Latin rhythms and American dance in the foreground. Chief conductor Duncan Ward takes us from Gershwin's lively Overture from Strike Up the Band to a radiant Adriana Bignagni Lesca in Montsalvage's Cinco canciones negras. The dancing continues with Bernstein's On the Town: Three Dance Episodes and ends with a premiere: the first recording of the swinging Cuban Suite by young composer Jenny Pena Campo.

Classical Music

Classical Music

MOVIE LOVE SONGS ORMANDY, PHI

BERNSTEIN: SONGFEST, SYMPHONY

This is not just an anthology which works—it's a wow!

This is the sixteenth gala of the Richard Tucker Music Foundation—''a look at an era just gone by'', as conductor James Conlon calls it—recorded live before an enthusiastic audience. It starts with a great lift-off: America the Beautiful (no mention of its composer Samuel Augustus Ward, whose hymn is treated to a showbiz arrangement) sung by Leontyne Price. At the age of 63 she can still summon enough patriotic fervour to make non-Americans want to apply for citizenship papers on the spot! And she isn't the oldest performer by any means. Robert Merrill is ten years her senior and delivers Weill's ''September Song'' touchingly but with a maddening tendency to anticipate the beat.

Weill is also represented by the ecstatic virtuosity of the Ice-Cream Sextet from Street Scene, still fresh in one's memory from the ENO performances in London and the two recordings now available on Decca and TER. Then there are two settings of William Blake's ''Tiger! Tiger! burning bright'' (''Songs of Experience''). Virgil Thomson set the poem twice: this is the second of his Five Songs from William Blake written in 1951, but it is William Bolcom who brings the house down with his version for chanting chorus backed by a variety of orchestral percussion.

One of the most moving performances is Karen Holvik in Stephen Foster's immaculate Ah! May the red rose live alway, with piano (Steven Blier). More calculating, but equally polished nostalgia comes from Barber, especially ''Must the winter come so soon'' from Vanessa, hauntingly sung by Frederica von Stade, recently admired for her Melisande at Covent Garden. But also ''Give me my robe'' from Barber's Anthony and Cleopatra, sung with equal poignancy by Carol Vaness.

Tatiana Troyanos sings Copland's setting of Robert Lowry's ''At the river'' with impressive, quiet dignity. Bernstein is the only composer who gets in three times—the Collegiate Chorale is on form for the first of the Chichester Psalms; Jerry Hadley sings ''Maria''; and there's an ensemble from Candide. Finally, in case you didn't sign on for US citizenship, Marilyn Horne gives a truly commanding performance of Berlin's classic God bless America. This is not just an anthology which works—it's a wow!

-- Peter Dickinson, Gramophone [6/1993]

CD 1
We kick off proceedings with the superheated sprint and flicker of the Candide Overture. It takes the breath away even in the broad romantic theme.
 
West Side Story is reflected in the Ramin and Kostal orchestration that makes up the Symphonic Dances. They’re all here: sleazy, laid-back, bluesy, woozily romantic, eager and rowdy. The highlight comes in the ever-so-on-your-toes Cha Cha. one can virtually see Bernstein's smile as well as his sentimentality in the Adagio finale where Prokofiev’s Romeo and Juliet must have had its influence. Spun silver meets a fine drizzle of Stateside lachrymose romance!
 
This version of the dry and witty Prelude, Fugue and Riffs has seen plenty of action on disc. Here is Benny Goodman holding on by his fingernails.
 
After three tapes from the 1960s we have Hilary Hahn's 1998 Serenade. Its transparency lets light and air into a piece which although more dynamic in the hands of Francescatti and Stern responds well to this more diaphanous and nuanced recording and approach from Hahn, Baltimore and Zinman. There’s a touch of Pulcinella in Aristophanes, of the Barber concerto in Ericymachus and of Schuman or and Glass in Agathon. It’s all most beautifully done by Hahn.
 
CD 2
Classic 1965 Britten meets New York pizzazz in Bernstein’s Chichester Psalms. The booklet, in common with the other four issues, is pretty thin on information and certainly no sign of the sung words. The Songfest is a cycle of 12 poems set for six singers and orchestra. Good to hear this Slatkin-conducted version from St Louis. This Britten-modelled anthologised structure ranges from portentous to histrionic. It is also touched with Copland's traditional queasy-wincey Old American Songs. There are two lovely - almost Sondheim-style - ballads in the shape of To My Dear and Loving Husband and Storyette HM.
 
Bernstein's Mass has been written about elsewhere on this site. A Simple Song is beautifully sung by Alan Titus - its popular sentimental roots show through and do no harm. To close the disc Marilyn Horne treats us to a group of gentle Bernstein songs with Martin Katz.
 
CD 3
This comprises groups of songs from West Side Story, On the Town, Wonderful Town and Candide. There's hardly a Latino DNA strand to be heard in the voices of Larry Kert and Carol Lawrence in Maria and Tonight but the magic flows like mercury still. Mind you - contrary to the critical consensus and my own expectations - I also enjoyed immensely DG's Te Kanawa West Side Story. Before we get to the 1957-recorded Somewhere ballet we have a bright 2009 America. The 1957 tapes have been very well revived indeed. 
 
On the Town 1960 recalls the world of Allegro (wonderfully given new life by Sony in their recent definitive set) in John Reardon's voice not to mention in those of Comden and Green. In Some Other Time there 's a real lump in the throat with the repeated words Oh well, we'll catch up some other time. I recall that I first heard this extraordinary and fragile song in that wonderful 1980s radio series Book, Music And Lyrics from Robert Cushman. There’s not a dry eye in the house but it’s not sentimental trash. It’s an irresistible hymn to sentiment with real power to move. By contrast I found little to like in the wince-making Wonderful Town.
 
Candide is a big flouncy piece of Hollywood, complete with orange blossom, cotton bolls and twirling sun parasols. It has real glitter and sentiment and delights in the Latino style in I'm easily assimilated. It ends with Make Our Garden Grow with what amounts to a touching hymn to Thoreau’s Walden. It’s not out of place that the listener may also sense the benevolent shadow or pre-echo of Copland's The Tender Land.
 
I had forgotten how powerful is Some Other Time but there is so much here to be reminded of and to smile about. Interestingly the sources are predominantly 1950s and 1960s before a degree of self-importance came into his music. I note that the selection also avoids the symphonies.



-- Rob Barnett, MusicWeb International