Classical Music

Classical Music

Liszt: Piano Works

CONCERTO FOR VIOLIN AND ORCHES

Classical Music

Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy's oratorio Elias Op. 70 was premiered in 1846 at the Birmingham Festival. It depicts the life of the prophet Elijah, taken from the books 1 and 2 Kings of the Old Testament. While it was composed in the spirit of Mendelssohn's Baroque predecessors Bach and Handel, it's lyricism and use of orchestral and choral color clearly reflects Mendelssohn's own genius as an early Romantic composer. Paulus Op. 36, written a decade earlier, was a popular work during Mendelssohn's lifetime, but failed to maintain it's stature in comparison to his other oratorios and the oratorios of Handel and Bach. These two sacred works, alongside Mendelssohn's Symphony No. 2 and "Lobgesang" Op. 52, are presented on this magnanimous release by world-renowned conductor Hellmuth Rilling and the Bach-Collegium Stuttgart and Gachinger Kantorei. A brilliant interpreter of Mendelssohn, Rilling works beautifully here with the members of the ensembles as well as the oratorio soloists.

Classical Music

This recording presents two of "Papa" Haydn's greatest essays in the symphonic form: Symphony No. 90 in C Major and Symphony No. 92 in G Major, known as the "Oxford" Symphony. Both symphonies were part of a three-symphony commission by Comte d'Ogny for the Concerts de la Loge Olympique, where Haydn previously had tremendous success with the performances of his six "Paris" Symphonies. In 2011 Thomas Fey was nominated for a Grammy for his world premiere recordings of the music of Antonio Salieri. Every release from Thomas Fey and his ensemble is presented as Haydn should sound today, performed on both modern string instruments and replicas of authentic period woodwind, brass and percussion instruments.

Dan Ettinger is one of the leading international conductors of his generation. Since the start of the 2015/2016 season he has been Principal Conductor of the Stuttgart Philharmonic and General Music Director of the City of Stuttgart. His contract was prematurely extended in July 2016 to run till the summer of 2023. Ettinger regularly conducts at the world's great opera houses such as the Metropolitan Opera in New York, the Washington National Opera, London's Royal Opera House at Covent Garden, the Op�ra National de Paris, the New National Theatre in Tokyo, Opernhaus Z�rich, the Salzburg Festival and the State Opera Houses of Vienna and Munich. Since 2018 Ettinger has taken up his new post as Music Director of the Israeli Opera in Tel Aviv. On this recording, Ettinger interprets Tchaikovsky's Fifth Symphony, and Rachmaninoff's Piano Concerto No. 1.

Classical Music

At the time he wrote Enoch Arden, Strauss was known primarily as a composer of tone poems, having made a name for himself with works such as Macbeth, Don Juan, Death and Transfiguration, Til Eulenspiegel's Merry Pranks and Thus Spoke Zarathustra. The brilliantly orchestrated symphonic work From Italy was written at about the same time as Enoch Arden. It took Strauss a while to develop a reputation as an operatic composer: his opera Guntram was a critical failure. Of his 16 operas, Salome was the first to achieve any kind of fame, albeit of a rather scandalous and even infamous nature. Pianists have often deplored the fact that the gifted painter of orchestra colour wrote so little music for their instrument. Apart from the early Piano Sonata in B minor, Op. 5, the Five Piano Pieces, Op. 3, the Funf Stimmungsbilder, Op. 9, and Theme, 15 Improvisations and Fugue, there are only the highly demanding piano accompaniments for the lieder and, of course, the piano part in Enoch Arden. Despite its rarity, the 50-minute work in two parts has remained more or less at the fringes of mainstream repertoire. Yet no less than the eccentric Canadian musician and Bach specialist Glenn Gould recorded it, although it ''clearly contains some of the most sentimentally unbearable music that Strauss ever wrote''.

MAJESTÄTISCHE ORGEL

CONCERTOS FOR 3 & 4 HARPSICHOR

MENDELSSOHN: Der Onkel aus Boston (The Uncle from Boston)

DIE WINTERREISE D 911