Palestrina: Lamentations - Cinquecento - Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina was perhaps the preeminent composer of the sixteenth century. His settings of the Lamentations of Jeremiah would have been integral to the liturgical rites of Holy Week. On this release, Cinquecento offer performances that bring out every nuance of this emotionally powerful music.
Two substantial Mass settings from Jacob Regnart, sound as though might have written them specifically for the glorious voices of Cinquecento. This is a welcome contribution to the restoration of an important, but still under-appreciated, figure.
35 year-old Jack Liebeck has established himself as one of the most compelling young violinists on the concert platform today. On Volume 19 of Hyperion's Romantic Violin Concerto series he turns in a dazzling performance of the much recorded Bruch Violin Concerto No.1 and readings of the gorgeous Serenade Op.75 and Romance Op.42 that are full of youthful vigor.
Dona Nobis Pacem became a somewhat unexpected hit for Vaughan Williams. A fervently antiwar plea, the work remains to this day one of the composer's most widely performed works. Coupled with it here is the first recording of Stephen Hough's Missa Mirabilis (the title derives from an unfortunate motorway incident), a work which shares with the Vaughan Williams an ability to seem very much greater than the sum of it's parts. Andrew Litton directs the Colorado Symphony and all-star soloists Sarah Fox and Christopher Maltman.
Volume seven of Hyperion's Complete Strauss Songs cycle focuses on the juvenilia. But the mysterious TrV references obfuscate compositions of a beauty hard to reconcile with the facts behind their genesis (Strauss was just six when he penned the first of them - his mother had to write in the words for him). Three new singers - Ruby Hughes, Ben Johnson and Gunter Haumer - join Roger Vignoles in this most unexpected of recitals to relish.
The Orlando Consort's third recording for Hyperion turns to the music of Loyset Compere, a composer the group first investigated some twenty years ago. In the intervening decades musicological research has elevated this composer from also-ran outsider to something of a trailblazer. For example, the wonderfully complex Magnificat recorded here, is now thought to predate the masterworks of Josquin by some fifteen years. A gorgeous selection of motets and chansons further charts this period of radical musical experimentation.
Florian Boesch possesses a sensuously attractive baritone voice, first-rate diction and remarkable acting ability. Following on his acclaimed album of Loewe songs, Boesch is joined again by Roger Vignoles for an album of Schubert Lieder. Der Wanderer focuses on the composer's darker songs. They encapsulate a recurrent theme of German Romantic art: that of the rootless outsider. It is the world of Goethe's mysterious Harper and Mignon, and of the solitary, silhouetted figures in the darker landscapes of Caspar David Friedrich. In music it found it's supreme expression, not only in Schubert's Winterreise but in these many individual 'wandering' songs: some grimly resigned, some serenely contemplative, others imbued with a sense of physical and spiritual isolation and longing for an ultimately unattainable 'otherness.'
The Gramophone Award-winning ensemble Arcangelo presents a selection from Monteverdi's last three books of madrigals. These ardent and passionate works are microcosms of Monteverdi's great operas and among his most celebrated music. The eighth book of madrigals introduces the genere concitato - (agitated style) that Monteverdi devised to convey the emotions of war, whether physical or psychological. Combattimento di Tancredi e Clorinda sets an extended passage from Tasso's epic poem Gerusalemme liberata. Tasso's text, set in the time of the first crusade, tells of the combat between the Christian knight Tancredi and the Saracen maiden Clorinda. Most of the action is conveyed by a narrator, sung here by celebrated tenor James Gilchrist.
This album contains Hindemith's most popular orchestral works, including the Balanchine-choreographed Symphonic Metamorphosis, performed with lapidary precision and great empathy by Hyperion regulars the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra and Martyn Brabbins, who have proved themselves consummate interpreters of this composer. Countermanding his reputation a composer of grim, gritty music, this is Hindemith at his most genuinely enjoyable - as Gavin Plumley writes in his informative booklet notes, "Hindemith's music is both intelligible and intellectual, as entertaining as it is finely wrought."
Alice Coote, one of the most distinctive mezzo-sopranos of today, makes her recital debut on Hyperion with pianist Graham Johnson, a stalwart of the label and tireless explorer of vocal repertoire. The Power of Love creates what Johnson describes as, "a pageant of English song and poetry," covering half a century of song and surveying not just human love but love of nature.
On this album the young Spanish soprano Sylvia Schwartz, accompanied by pianist Malcolm Martineau, offers a deeply seductive collection of romantic Spanish songs. The recording includes works by Granados and Turina as well as less familiar composers such as Guridi, Toldr+i and Montsalvatge. Schwartz demonstrates her wonderful emotional and dramatic range in Granados's Tonadillas en estilo antiguo, a set inspired by the paintings of Goya, and her commitment to this repertoire is evident from her utterly enchanting performance of the folk-influenced songs by Guridi that set a beautiful series of Castillan melodies.
With this new volume in their ongoing Romantic Violin Concerto series, Hyperion proudly announces a new collaboration with the brilliant young British violinist Chloe Hanslip, the former child prodigy famously signed to Warner Classics at the age of just fourteen. Here, she lends her now mature talents to the second release in Hyperion's overview of Vieuxtemps' Violin Concertos. Henry Vieuxtemps (1820-1881) was a French violin virtuoso who, after the death of Paganini, was widely considered to be the best violinist in Europe. Besides being a brilliant player, he was a remarkably fine composer, as demonstrated in these, his first two concertos. Alongside the memorable violin fireworks, Vieuxtemps here shows a well-argued musical sensibility that straddles both the Classical and Romantic eras as well as the ability to write gorgeous, almost operatic slow movements in the best bel-canto tradition.
Mats Lidstrom / Leif Kaner-Lidstrom - "Swans". Inspired by Saint-Saens's iconic piece "The Swan (Le cygne)" from the Carnival of the Animals, cellist Mats Lidstrom and his son Leif Kaner-Lidstrom present no fewer than 24 "Swans" from across the world and down the ages. Featuring composers as diverse as Fanny Mendelssohn, Orlando Gibbons, Ravel and Villa-Lobos, the album offers up two-dozen musical reflections on the unmistakable and much-loved Saint-Saens original.
Marc-Andre Hamelin - "Found Objects / Sound Objects". Join Marc-Andre Hamelin on a fearless voyage into the extremities of piano music. Music by Frank Zappa, John Cage, Salvatore Martirano, John Oswald, Stefan Wolpe, Yehudi Wyner and Hamelin himself, all pioneers in their approach to the piano. More than any other pianist, Marc-Andre is renowned for winning over listeners with rare and daring repertoire.
Performing music from Baroque to new commissions on both modern and period instruments, Alina Ibragimova has established a reputation for versatility and the "immediacy and honesty" (The Guardian) of her performances. Alina has performed with orchestras including the Symphonieorchester des Bayerischen Rundfunks, London Philharmonic, Chamber Orchestra of Europe, Swedish Radio Symphony, Seattle Symphony, Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment, Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester Berlin and Tonhalle-Orchester Z?rich; and conductors Vladimir Jurowski, Sir John Eliot Gardner, Jakub Hrusa, Robin Ticciati, Daniel Harding, Edward Gardner and the late Bernard Haitink, among others. Her 2020 album of Shostakovich violin concertos with Vladimir Jurowski and the State Academic Symphony Orchestra of Russia 'Evgeny Svetlanov' won a Gramophone Award and Diapason d'Or and was one of The Times's Discs of the Year. This 2-LP set is pressed on 180g vinyl.
The music of CPE Bach makes complex stylistic demands of the performer like little else of it's time, the extraordinary drama and intensity tempered by Enlightenment elegance and the influence of the Baroque. Marc-Andre Hamelin's performances set new standards in this endlessly absorbing repertoire.
For his 2011 recording of the Grieg & Liszt Piano Concertos, Sir Stephen Hough travelled to Grieg's hometown of Bergen to join forces with Andrew Litton and the Bergen Philharmonic Orchestra. Upon it's original release, the Sunday Times named Hough's album "one of the Liszt bicentenary's prime releases, from Britain's greatest living magician of the keyboard." Available on 180g vinyl.
De Profundis/Eamonn Dougan - "Morales: Requiem a 5; Officium defunct". Cristobal de Morales's five-voice Missa pro defunctis is steeped in a grandeur and solemnity which resonate powerfully with the listener, especially in a large-scale account such as that recorded here by de Profundis. The Requiem is preceded by a selection of motets which address last things in an affecting Office for the Dead.
Polyphony and Stephen Layton present highlights from the choral repertoire by four twentieth-century American giants: Samuel Barber, Leonard Bernstein, Aaron Copland and Randall Thompson. Framed by Thompson's understated favorites Alleluia and Fare Well, the program includes Bernstein's Missa brevis, motets by Copland and - of course - Barber's inimitable Agnus Dei.
