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Sergey Rachmaninov’s orchestral works range from 1887, when he was not yet 14, to 1940, when he produced his valedictory work. His Second Symphony was written between 1906 and 1908 and the composer expressed doubts about being able to compose a symphony. This program of works was recorded by the Saint Louis Symphony with Leonard Slatkin.

Sony Classical is pleased to announce a new batch of reissues from the CBS/Sony and RCA Victor/BMG back catalogues. This latest instalment of the popular series showcases Mozart and Chopin along with conductor Robert Craft’s pioneering Webern recordings and the global journeys of that irrepressible musical explorer Yo-Yo Ma.

The supremely versatile Yo-Yo Ma has been aptly referred to as a musical omnivore. In addition to all the significant classical works written for his instrument, the eclectic cellist has passionately embraced the music of Latin America and Asia as well as American bluegrass and jazz. Seven of his most adventurous and acclaimed musical journeys have been collected by Sony Classical in a CD box entitled “Crossing Borders”. They include Appalachia Waltz and Appalachian Journey with Mark O’Connor and Edgar Meyer (Grammy 1998: “Best Classical Crossover Album”); Soul of the Tango – The Music of Astor Piazzolla (Grammy 1997: “Best Classical Crossover Album”); Obrigado Brazil – traditional songs and compositions by Antônio Carlos Jobim and Pixinguinha (Grammy 2000: “Best Classical Crossover Album”); Silk Road Journeys: When Strangers Meet and Japanese Melodies; Anything Goes: the cellist playing mostly Cole Porter with Stephane Grappelli; and, last but not least: Hush, his famous collaboration with Bobby McFerrin.

Review excerpts of previously released volumes included in this set:

Appalachian Journey / Yo-Yo Ma, O'Connor, Meyer

The Mark O’Connor/Yo-Yo Ma/Edgar Meyer power trio took a while to follow up their 1996 hit Appalachia Waltz, yet, no doubt about it, Appalachian Journey was worth the long wait. I love the gnarly funk of the opening cut, “1B”, with hard swinging fiddle and cello lines anchored by Meyer’s earthy, off-center pedal points. The less driving, more reflective reels, and lyrical Duet for Cello and Bass fuse bluegrass, wistful folk tunes, and stark Copland-esque landscapes into organic wholes that sound better with each rehearing. The deliciously virtuosic Caprice for Three proves that players of this caliber can channel their super-chops toward listening out loud. Guest vocal stints by James Taylor and Alison Krauss add the spice of variety to the mix, along with a potential wider audience. And why not? The arrangements are judiciously varied, perfectly paced, and exploit the violin/cello/string bass configuration in ingenuous ways. One wonders how this trio might approach certain pieces over a looser, more extended improvisational time frame. I hope we won’t have to wait another three and a half years to find out. If you’re in a blue mood, this disc will provide an antidote with long-range positive side effects. Fun, fun stuff.

-- ClassicsToday.com (10/10, Jed Distler)

Obrigado Brazil / Yo-Yo Ma:

The music on this enchanting, flavorful CD varies from classical to samba to bossa nova; the combinations range from guitar, flute, and cello to female voice (the remarkable Rosa Passos), cello, guitar, percussion, piano, and bass; to simple cello and piano; to cello and two guitars. The overriding element is rhythm; each selection has a beat which is both infectious and sensual, but the contexts are splendidly varied. It's impossible to get bored or tired listening to this creative CD; it's unique--just like Yo-Yo Ma himself--and endlessly surprising. It may not be quite what we'd call "classical" music, but it is many kinds of music, and they all will delight. The other musicians are as impressive on their instruments as Ma is with his cello, and that's saying a great deal.

-- ClassicsToday.com (Robert Levine)

Silk Road Journeys - When Strangers Meet

Silk Road Journeys is an invigorating, eye-opening ride. To be sure, some pieces fare better than others, but as with any unforgettable trip, you tend to forget the occasional bumps you hit along unknown roads. Our guides are a generally stellar selection of master artists, including the luminary pipa player Wu Man and kemencheh and setar player Kayhan Kalhor. These two musicians in particular can go head-to-head in virtuosity with Yo-Yo Ma any day. Complemented by cleanly articulated sound, Sony Classical has produced a real keeper in its Yo-Yo Ma catalog, but the cellist makes his collaborators the true focus of this album.

-- ClassicsToday.com (10/10)

From the artists: "Our objective in creating this new arrangement was to remain as faithful to the original as practically possible. We set out to embrace not only the capabilities of the two pianos but also their limitations - we wanted to create a true piano work, rather than a less-than-satisfactory imitation of the orchestral version. We first performed our arrangement at St John's Smith Square in London in 2017 and for the next five years we worked to refine the textures and to create something comfortably pianistic while incorporating as much of Rachmaninoff's intention as is feasible. We sought inspiration from the composers own arrangement of the Symphonic Dances Op.45, from his two Suites for two pianos Opp.5 and 17, and from his four-hands version of The Rock Op.7. We hope that our arrangement will be enjoyable to all pianists who have a love for Rachmaninoff's music. The much-loved Adagio will serve as a great challenge for musicians of diploma level, while anyone who has enjoyed performing the Suites will surely enjoy this new challenge."

The Berliner Philharmoniker’s contribution to the great Russian composer’s anniversary year places a landmark performance of his perennially popular C minor Concerto by Kirill Gerstein and Kirill Petrenko in the illuminating context of his solo music.

Gerstein says that a feeling of love for Rachmaninoff’s music was palpable in his rehearsals with Kirill Petrenko and the Berlin Philharmoniker, and their love was shared with listeners to this performance at the Waldbühne Concert in June 2022. Such a deeply gratifying collaboration led naturally to a Rachmaninoff project, with Gerstein recording solo music at the Philharmonie to complement the concerto from the Waldbühne. In his selection, the pianist curates a glimpse into the evolution of Rachmaninoff’s creative vision. Starting out from the familiar Romantic brilliance of the Second Concerto, the pieces glance backward to the youthful style of his early works and forward to the pared-down harmonies of his late Variations on a Theme of Corelli. Rachmaninoff 150 is also a celebration of the Berliner Philharmoniker’s own ties to the man and his music: a tradition that dates back to 1903, when the C minor Piano Concerto became the first of his works to be performed by the orchestra. The composer played this same concerto in 1908 at his Berliner Philharmoniker debut, as did Kirill Gerstein at his debut with the orchestra in 2016. Accompanying the SACD/CD release with stereo and surround sound is an illustrated 76-page booklet containing atmospheric artwork by Thomas Struth as well as extensive texts.

Includes: 

Sergei Rachmaninoff
Concerto for Piano and Orchestra No. 2 in C minor, Op. 18
Morceaux de fantaisie, Op. 3: No. 3 Mélodie
Variations on a Theme of Corelli, Op. 42
Six Songs, Op. 4: No. 3 In the Silence of the Secret Night (Arr. Kirill Gerstein)

Fritz Kreisler
Old Viennese Dances: No. 2 Love's Sorrow (Arr. Sergei Rachmaninoff)

The music of Rachmaninoff is of “enormous significance” to Kirill Petrenko. In it, he finds his “musical home”. His third edition together with the Berliner Philharmoniker is dedicated to the Russian composer, the 150th anniversary of whose birth was celebrated in 2023. It presents four key works: the Second Symphony, the Piano Concerto No. 2 and The Isle of the Dead – Rachmaninoff regularly performed them together until his emigration in 1917 – and the Symphonic Dances, which the composer wrote shortly before his death.

As a young man, fresh from his first real success as a composer with the opera Aleko, Rachmaninoff was on his way to visit his mentor Tchaikovsky when he saw a crowd gathered outside. The news of Tchaikovsky’s death sent him into a tailspin, and he passed the next few weeks alone, walking and writing this magnificent ‘Trio Elegiaque’ in memory of Tchaikovsky. Although the Trio is an early work it bears the unmistakable imprint of Rachmaninoff’s musical personality.

No understanding of Rachmaninoff is complete without the Trio, and the anniversary year of 2023, 150 years since his birth, Brilliant Classics has produced a magnificent new recording made by the established international collective Trio RoVerde. The trio’s pianist is Ekaterina Litvintseva, ‘the Arctic Circle Pianist’ now resident in Germany, who has several highly praised recordings on Brilliant Classics to her name: ‘Ekaterina Litvintseva has been amassing a distinguished discography – and this…exhibits the combination of sensitivity and self-assurance that have marked her playing up until now.’

Alongside the Trio here are two complementary sets of salon pieces by the young Rachmaninoff, dating from his years as a prodigious student but already infused with the potent strain of yearning Romanticism that would carry his name far and wide: Two Pieces Op. 2 for cello and piano, and two Morceaux de salon Op. 6 for violin and piano.

REVIEW:

The young trio RoVerde documents a live performance of the Trio élégiaque in Studio 150 (Amsterdam) with this album. The interpretation makes a very rounded, well-formed and mature impression.

-- Neue Musikalische Zeitung

In 2024, Riccardo Chailly and the Lucerne Festival Orchestra continued their acclaimed Rachmaninoff cycle with a concert spanning the composer's lifetime: from the youthful freshness of the composer's earliest works like the rarely performed "Youth Symphony" and his Piano Concerto No. 1, to the musical mastery and maturity of his last major work, the "Symphonic Dances". Young piano prodigy Alexander Malofeev, in whose repertoire Rachmaninoff's music occupies a special place, gave his much-lauded Lucerne Festival debut as the soloist of the evening with an electrifying performance.

In 2024, Riccardo Chailly and the Lucerne Festival Orchestra continued their acclaimed Rachmaninoff cycle with a concert spanning the composer's lifetime: from the youthful freshness of the composer's earliest works like the rarely performed "Youth Symphony" and his Piano Concerto No. 1, to the musical mastery and maturity of his last major work, the "Symphonic Dances". Young piano prodigy Alexander Malofeev, in whose repertoire Rachmaninoff's music occupies a special place, gave his much-lauded Lucerne Festival debut as the soloist of the evening with an electrifying performance.

Under the title My Rachmaninoff, Alexander Krichel will release his new album on Berlin Classics on March 24, 2023, and with it a very personal tribute to the Russian pianist and composer, whose birthday will be celebrated for the 150th time just a few days later. For his eighth album, Alexander Krichel has selected works that have shaped his strong connection to Rachmaninoff. From the world-famous Prélude Op. 3 No. 2 in C-sharp minor to the virtuosic Corelli Variations and Études-Tableaux, some of the most difficult repertoire written for piano, to the concluding Vocalise, Krichel invites listeners to discover Rachmaninoff's biography musically. He wants to inspire his audience with the music of this great composer in the same way that it once captivated him. 2023 is the year of Rachmaninoff anniversaries: April 1 would have marked the 150th birthday of the Russian composer, pianist and conductor, and March 28 marks the 80th anniversary of his death.

High time for Alexander Krichel, after the great success of his first Rachmaninoff album in 2015 on Sony Classical, to dedicate himself once again to the composer who has always accompanied and shaped his playing and his career. With two of the greatest contemporary Russian pianists as teachers - Alexander Krichel was Vladimir Krainev's last student in Hanover and studied at the Royal College of Music with Dmitri Alexeev - the exceptional Hamburg-born artist developed a strong connection to the Russian piano school. This is noticeable in his playing - he combines risk-taking keyboard thunder with a highly sensitive feeling for sound. Alexander Krichel had his first encounter with Rachmaninoff when he was nine years old at a youth piano competition, where an older competitor entered the Prélude in C-sharp minor. "I was just talking to my piano teacher, and although I only heard the music in the background, the first three dramatic notes grabbed me right away and wouldn't let go," the pianist said. In order to expose his audience directly to the captivating effect of Rachmaninoff, Alexander Krichel opens his album with precisely this piece, which is also biographically one of Rachmaninoff's first works.

Together with the Prélude Op. 23 No. 5 in G minor and the Prélude Op. 32 No. 12 in G-sharp minor, the works quite literally form a prelude to the journey through Rachmaninoff's musical biography. With the Études-Tableaux op. 39, Alexander Krichel places one of Rachmaninoff's pianistic highlights at the center of his album, which, with great successes in South America and Asia, became a door opener for him personally to the stages of the world. The composer described the nine highly virtuosic etudes as musical "paintings" that always place the strong emotional message above the challenging technical background. The final work, composed by Rachmaninoff for solo piano 15 years after his emigration to the United States, is the Corelli Variations, miniatures that range from jazzy to classically virtuosic and are so individual that each could stand alone as a composition.

The album culminates with one of Rachmaninoff's most famous works: the Vocalise. With it, Alexander Krichel closes the circle and returns to the key of the first composition: C-sharp minor, a key for which Rachmaninoff was so well known that he was even called "Mr. C Sharp Minor" in the USA. "Whether I'm soaring high or saddened to death, I feel a special connection to Rachmaninoff; we share a very similar intense emotionality," is how Krichel describes his relationship with Sergei Rachmaninoff. "Especially in difficult or deeply sad moments, his music shows me that I am neither alone with my feeling of melancholy, nor that it is wrong to give in to it. In his compositions I don't look for consolation, but I find a friend who understands me and with whom I can share every feeling." "My Rachmaninoff" will be released on CD and 2 LP on March 24, 2023 by Berlin Classics as well as all known streaming services.

The pianist Lukas Geniušas has recorded the original version of Rachmaninoff’s Piano Sonata no.1 in the composer’s Swiss home Villa Senar (Sergei & Natalia Rachmaninoff) and on his own piano, an unusually long Steinway & Sons model, presented to the composer and concert pianist by the manufacturer to mark his sixtieth birthday. The difference between the original version of Sonata no.1 and the second version, shorter by more than 100 bars, is not just a question of length, according to Lukas Geniušas: ‘There is a lot lost between the first and second editions. I know it goes against the grain, but I would name this sonata to be one of, if not the best Rachmaninoff’s solo piano work. Its shattering might, its splendor and scale can only be likened to the Third piano concerto, which was written soon after.’ The programme is completed by four preludes from the Op. 32 set.

For Riccardo Chailly, celebrating Rachmaninoff in Lucerne is something dear to his heart. In 2022, the the Lucerne Festival Orchestra and their music director devoted themselves to the Second Symphony and the Piano Concerto No. 2, the most famous of all four Rachmaninoff concertos. "The harmonic ideas are his special hallmark. One need only hear three chords to recognize his creative genius immediately," Chailly once said of Rachmaninoff's timbres. Japanese pianist Mao Fujita took on this grandiose work's emotional power and virtuosity. Since winning the silver medal in the XVI Chopin Competition in 2019, this exceptional artist has been playing in the world's most renowned concert halls.

For Riccardo Chailly, celebrating Rachmaninoff in Lucerne is something dear to his heart. In 2022, the the Lucerne Festival Orchestra and their music director devoted themselves to the Second Symphony and the Piano Concerto No. 2, the most famous of all four Rachmaninoff concertos. "The harmonic ideas are his special hallmark. One need only hear three chords to recognize his creative genius immediately," Chailly once said of Rachmaninoff's timbres. Japanese pianist Mao Fujita took on this grandiose work's emotional power and virtuosity. Since winning the silver medal in the XVI Chopin Competition in 2019, this exceptional artist has been playing in the world's most renowned concert halls.

Back in 2015, Fanfare singled out Ekaterina Litvintseva's first solo album of Rachmaninoff, including the Moments musicaux Op.16, as an 'impressive outing. Her playing is tonally rich and extremely thoughtful.' Since then, she has assembled an impressive and critically acclaimed catalogue on Piano Classics, including most recently the great Trio elegiaque which Rachmaninoff wrote in memory of Tchaikovsky: 'an attractive and valuable disc' (Fanfare). Litvintseva now turns to a trio of uncontested masterpieces by the Russian composer, demonstrating within a single album the range of his stylistic evolution over the course of 40 years. He was still a teenager, studying at the Moscow Conservatoire, when he wrote his First Piano Concerto in 1891. On the instruction of his teachers, he took the Grieg Concerto as a model, and poured his own invention into it: a remarkably successful strategy, as it turned out, because the finished work is both strong and personal, touched with many of those fingerprints of gesture and harmony which we have come to think of as quintessentially Rachmaninoff. These include flights of lyric fantasy and equally sudden, unexpected turns towards melancholy introspection. Rachmaninoff had become an international celebrity by 1913, when he took his family to live the high life with him in Rome, at a home which Tchaikovsky had once used. In the Italian capital he began work on the imposing Second Piano Sonata, though the work had to be completed back at the family estate, Ivanovka, when his daughters came down with typhus. Rachmaninoff overhauled the Sonata in 1931, cutting and in some places simplifying it's form, and it is this version which Litvintseva plays: a stylistic bridge between mid-period and late-style in a composer whose capacity for reinvention has often been underestimated. By 1941 he was an exile living in the US and Switzerland, where he wrote his Variations on a theme of Corelli - the 'La folia' theme adopted by countless of his predecessors. Informed by decades of pianistic and creative mastery, Rachmaninoff makes the theme his own with a neoclassical severity and haunting economy of expression. Thus, taken as a whole, Ekaterina Litvintseva's new album pays a wide-ranging and personal tribute to a composer who has inspired her playing since her formation in Siberia. - Ekaterina Litvintseva is one of the most remarkable pianists of her generation. Her recordings won her enthusiastic acclaim in the international press: "a notable moment in the history of Chopin interpretation" (Fanfare); "a sense of spontaneous invention" in Mozart's K.271 (Gramophone) and "an expressive depth" in Brahms's 1st Piano Concerto (BBC Music Magazine). She previously recorded for Piano Classics an album with piano works by Dora Pejacevic (PCL10226), as well as the Works for Piano and Orchestra by Chopin (PCL10142 and 10274), which was a CD Of The Week at Classic FM. - In this new release Litvintseva displays her innate feeling for the idiom in works by Sergei Rachmaninoff (1873-1943): the youthfully exuberant First Piano Concerto, the monumental Second Piano Sonata and the innovative Corelli variations Op. 42, cornerstones of the piano repertoire nowadays, and played with vigour, drama and a deep sense of poetry. The concerto is accompanied by the Nordwestdeutsche Philharmonie, conducted by Vahan Mardirossian.

Lukáš Vondráček and Sergei Rachmaninoff. Scarcely do we encounter a connection between a musician and a composer so close, strong and energizing. When, at the age of 15, Vondráček was invited by Vladimir Ashkenazy and the Czech Philharmonic to perform Rachmaninoff’s Concerto No. 1, he had garnered international acclaim at numerous concerts and competitions. Just a year later, the pianist toured the USA and appeared at Carnegie Hall. At the age of 29, he triumphed at the Queen Elisabeth Competition in Brussels (2016), performing Rachmaninoff’s Concerto No. 3, conducted by Marin Alsop. Love at first listen, Rachmaninoff has become his flagship composer: “Besides affording the opportunity to showcase one’s technique, his music impresses by being contrastive and having an immense dynamic range ... What more could a person keen on tone color wish? It’s sheer beauty!”

Lukáš Vondráček has been invited to perform Rachmaninoff’s concertos by the most prominent orchestras and conductors worldwide. The present album is one of the few sweet fruits of the Covid pandemic, which cleared the soloist’s otherwise jam-packed diary and afforded him peaceful time for recording. The booklet contains an interview with Lukáš Vondráček, within which he provides an account of his ample experience of and great affinity to Rachmaninoff. Yet the most powerful confession is the recording itself, made with the superb Prague Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Tomáš Brauner, capturing performances rendering every detail, teeming with emotion, colour and contrast. Sheer beauty indeed! Rachmaninoff in Lukáš Vondráček’s hands. A lavish musical feast.

Francesco Piemontesi, a BBC Music Magazine award-winning pianist and lauded as a 'wonderful Mozartian', has an intense curiosity about his fellow artists - their pianos, the sonorities they cultivate, the secret elements that animate their playing, and what drives them. In this documentary by Jan Schmidt-Garre, filmed over one year, Piemontesi talks with some of the world's leading performers, including his mentor Alfred Brendel, Maria Joao Pires, Stephen Kovacevich and Antonio Pappano, in a series of revealing encounters that illuminate their individual approaches to the instrument, it's colour and form. The film is complemented by a bonus 60-minute recital by Yulianna Avdeeva, Zlata Chochieva and Francesco Piemontesi, played on Rachmaninoff's Steinway piano at Villa Senar, his home in Switzerland during the 1930s.

The music of the Russian Orthodox Church was an essential part of Sergei Rachmaninoff’s musical background. As a boy he was deeply moved by the sound of St Petersburg’s cathedral choirs, and phrases reminiscent of liturgical chant permeate his music. His Vespers has long been admired as a summit of Russian liturgical music. It has unfortunately tended to overshadow the Liturgy of St John Chrysostom, his earlier large-scale sacred composition. Named after the fourth-century Archbishop of Constantinople and Church Father, the Liturgy consists of a sequence of prayers, psalms and hymns, which are sung or chanted by the different participants in the service. Rachmaninoff did not make use of any existing chants (as he would later do in his Vespers), but chose to reflect their style and spirit with music entirely of his own. The sonorities he creates is rarely achieved by plain four-part writing: instead the voices are frequently divided, solos emerge from the choir, and the range of textures shows great imagination. The Liturgy is here performed in the warm acoustics of the Niguliste Church in Tallinn by the Estonian Philharmonic Chamber Choir – listed among the ten best choirs in the world by the BBC Music Magazine in 2020 – conducted by Kaspars Putninš.

REVIEW:

Rachmaninoff himself esteemed this work highly, and when it receives the careful performance it gets here, it is indeed lovely. Choral music in the Baltic countries maintains a very high level of quality, and this small choir is arguably the jewel in the crown. Note that some online sources designate this as a reading of "excerpts," but it is not; Putniņš omits only some short responsorial sections, including one short movement, in accordance with the preference of modern editors. A wonderful performance of this Rachmaninoff masterwork.

-- AllMusicGuide.com (James Manheim)

Simon-Pierre Bestion writes: “I discovered Rachmaninoff’s ‘Vespers’ singing in a choir, and the work made a genuine emotional impact on me! This music gives off an impression of naturalness and ‘simplicity’, yet in fact its architecture is complex and innovative for its time in the quasi-orchestral treatment of the voices. I wanted to place the work in a liturgical context that I conceived by drawing my inspiration from the Orthodox ceremonies I have been lucky enough to attend in Russia and Romania. The special characteristic and the beauty of this Vigil service (which in the Orthodox churches includes both Vespers and Matins) is that it accompanies the prayers of the faithful from dusk until sunrise.”

John Wilson and Sinfoina of London complete their set of Rachmaninoff symphonies with this recording of the First Symphony and the Symphonic Dances. Rachmaninoff hoped that the First Symphony, composed in 1895, would build on the reputation of his graduation opera Aleko, which had proved a great success. The premiere, in St Petersburg in March 1897, was, however, a disaster. Rumour had it that the conductor, Alexander Glazunov, was drunk: true or false, it seems clear that he had little interest in the piece, leading to a raft of scathing reviews. This setback hit Rachmaninoff very deeply, and is considered by many to be the reason for the following three-year creative block only lifted by a course of hypnotherapy. Rachmaninoff left the score in Russia when he fled the revolution in 1917, and it was subsequently lost. Two years after his death it was reconstructed from a set of orchestral parts in the Leningrad Conservatory, and given it's second performance, in Moscow, in October 1945, since when it has gained it's place as standard orchestral repertoire around the world. The Symphonic Dances were written towards the very end of the composer's life, and started out in a version for two pianos, which Rachmaninoff performed with Vladimir Horowitz. He then set about orchestrating the work, which was first performed by the Philadelphia Orchestra and Eugene Ormandy in January 1941. Set in three movements, the Symphonic Dances reference the theme from the final movement of the First Symphony. In this recording, Sinfonia of London plays from John Wilson's own performing edition of the work.

Composed at the age of 19, Rachmaninov's earliest published cycle of piano pieces, the Morceaux de Fantaisie, contains the Pr�lude in C-sharp minor, destined to become his signature work, and the M�lodie in E major, much loved by Tchaikovsky. The expressive Morceaux de Salon show Tchaikovsky's influence and some of the grief felt by Rachmaninov after his mentor's death. With the inclusion of the melodically rich Nocturnes and the Four Pieces, the earliest to survive in his hand, this collection shows both the young composer finding his voice and the timeless Rachmaninov we recognise today.

Star tenor Piotr Beczala presents a selection of romances by Rachmaninoff and Tchaikovsky, together with the acclaimed lied accompanist Helmut Deutsch.

The romance was the most popular musical genre in nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Russia, practiced by professionals as well as amateurs. Tchaikovsky and Rachmaninoff both enriched this genre with their lyricism and melodic invention.

Elevated by Deutsch’s splendid accompaniment, Beczala delivers these songs with a great sense for the Slavic idiom and meaning of the words, combined with colorful lyricism and italianità, perfectly fitting the Russian and cosmopolitan musical language of these two masters.

Piotr Beczala is one of the most sought-after tenors of his age, both on the opera and concert stage. His Pentatone debut album Vincerò! has been one of the most successful and critically acclaimed opera recital albums of the last few years. During the 2021 Opus Klassik Awards, Piotr Beczala was crowned as Singer of the Year for this exceptional recording. Pianist Helmut Deutsch is a first-class song accompanist, working together with the greatest vocalists of today. He makes his Pentatone debut.

John Wilson and Sinfonia of London release their second album of Rachmaninoff. The Second Symphony was mostly composed in Dresden – where Rachmaninoff was escaping the political and professional pressures of Russia – in 1906 – 07. An hour’s worth of music, the symphony is one of his largest works after the operas, and is widely viewed as one of his greatest works. It was possibly of some significance to the composer, following the less than auspicious début of his First Symphony (which he withdrew after the première). First performed in St Petersburg and Moscow, conducted by the composer, the Second Symphony was an immediate success with audiences and critics alike, and remains a mainstay of the orchestral repertoire to this day. Rachmaninoff dedicated the score to his teacher Sergei Taneyev, who was a pupil of Tchaikovsky. Rachmaninoff composed the Prélude in C sharp minor in 1892, originally for piano, at the beginning of his career. Stokowski’s orchestration, performed here, whilst not the only one in existence, is certainly the best known and arguably the most successful.

Sergey Rachmaninoff's two Elegiac Trios became the pinnacle of Russian musical symbolism, forming an epigraph to the revolutionary upheavals that split Russian civilisation and Rachmaninoff's life in two. The moods of nostalgia and echoes of soulful longing found in these works are infused with ideas of death. The beautiful theme of the Trio elegiaque No. 1 in G minor transforms into a funeral march in the epilogue, while the complex Trio elegiaque No. 2 in D minor is a memorial to Tchaikovsky filled with powerfully prophetic symbols most notably the Dies irae motif.

Francesco Piemontesi, a BBC Music Magazine award-winning pianist and lauded as a 'wonderful Mozartian', has an intense curiosity about his fellow artists - their pianos, the sonorities they cultivate, the secret elements that animate their playing, and what drives them. In this documentary by Jan Schmidt-Garre, filmed over one year, Piemontesi talks with some of the world's leading performers, including his mentor Alfred Brendel, Maria Joao Pires, Stephen Kovacevich and Antonio Pappano, in a series of revealing encounters that illuminate their individual approaches to the instrument, it's colour and form. The film is complemented by a bonus 60-minute recital by Yulianna Avdeeva, Zlata Chochieva and Francesco Piemontesi, played on Rachmaninoff's Steinway piano at Villa Senar, his home in Switzerland during the 1930s.

In this recital, prize-winning Canadian pianist Jaeden Izik-Dzurko explores the evolving language, dramatic breadth and technical daring of Alexander Scriabin's piano works. The album charts the remarkable evolution of Scriabin's musical language from his earliest pieces, to the sensual, volatile Piano Sonata No. 5, which stands at the summit of Scriabin's creative trajectory. As a resonant counterpart, Izik-Dzurko plays Rachmaninov's brooding Piano Sonata No. 1 in D minor. A digital-only release of four early piano works by Scriabin is also available on 9.70408.

Shortlisted for the Gramophone Awards!

Following her triumphs on the stages of the Salzburg and Bayreuth festivals and at Covent Garden, Asmik Grigorian now belongs to the world’s vocal elite. She joins Alpha Classics for several projects and presents here her very first recital, devoted to one of her favorite composers, Sergei Rachmaninov. This album, titled Dissonance, assembles vocal works carefully chosen by the soprano for the contrasts they generate when grouped together: ‘Most of Rachmaninov’s songs really call for operatic power. In fact, he wrote mini-operas lasting a few minutes.’ While this album is called Dissonance, in reference to the ‘internal conflicts’ that punctuate these songs, the duo formed by the Lithuanian singer and her pianist compatriot Lukas Geniušas is one of total consonance!

"[Grigorian's] powers of expression are as fierce in front of the microphone as they are on the stage...Her tone at its fullest, all velvet-wrapped steel, gleams with enough edge to cut through anything a full-throttle Rachmaninov piano part can throw at it, and Geniušas does not give the impression of holding back[.] As a duet partner, he’s just soloistic enough, with an attentive ear for the detail of what Grigorian wants to achieve with the shape of a phrase.

"The program, in a sequence chosen by the performers, ranges from some of the Op. 4 songs Rachmaninov wrote as a student to his Op. 34. Some last barely 90 seconds, but here they still seem like a scene rather than merely a song – a panoramic view, not a snapshot. Grigorian and Genušias will make you wonder why you don’t hear them more often." -The Guardian

"There’s a palpable energy between the [performers] on this recording. [Grigorian] unfurls her otherworldly quality—what Barrie Kosky once called 'Planet Grigorian'—like a banner; [Geniušas] provides the breeze to hold it aloft. By no means are the songs on Dissonance calm or gentle, but Grigorian and Geniušas handle them lovingly." -Van Magazine