Triumphant
352 products
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Piano Heroines
$20.99CDAlpha
Feb 06, 2026ALPHA1231 -
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Liberte
$20.99CDChannel Classics
Dec 12, 2025CCS48825 -
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American Dream
$20.99CDAlpha
Oct 03, 2025ALPHA1171 -
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Prokofiev: Romeo & Julia; Tchaikovsky: Symphony No. 4
$29.99CDBR Klassik
Nov 14, 2025BRK900230 -
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Jenkins: The Armed Man (A Mass for Peace) / London Orchestra da Camera
Their third release on Signum Classics, David Temple and Hertfordshire Chorus present Karl Jenkin’s The Armed Man. This is the first recording of the ensemble version of The Armed Man: A Mass for Peace. It was conceived by the composer as an alternative where performances of the full symphonic version are not possible. The work loses none of its impact, retaining the same big sound with driving rhythms, thundering climaxes, fearful moments and tender, memorable melodies. This recording features celebrated mezzo soprano Kathryn Rudge as well as muezzin Osama Kiwan and cellist Jamal Aliyev.
Coates: Orchestral Works, Vol. 4 / Wilson, BBC Philhamonic
African Pianism, Vol. 2 / Rebeca Omordia
SOMM Recordings is thrilled to announce African Pianism, Volume 2, a new installment in a collection of piano music by African composers. Following suit from her critically acclaimed first African Pianism album, Rebeca Omordia brings us a fascinating program with no less than 8 First Recordings. Among these is the 4th in a selection of three Studies in African Pianism by Akin Euba, a Nigerian composer who makes a return on this second volume and whose “African Pianism” style, inspired by the research of Ghanaian composer J.H. Kwabena Nketia. The music of Algerian composer Salim Dada attempts to be a means by which a natural message of peace and dialogue may exist between the Arab-Muslim world and European civilization. Moroccan composer Nabil Benabdeljalil, like Akin Euba, makes a second appearance in this series with a new set of four pieces including 3 first recordings. Fellow South African Grant McLachlan contributes his arrangement for solo piano of the anti-apartheid protest song “Senzeni Na?”, which begins “What have we done? Is our sin that we are black?”. Fela Sowande, a Nigerian composer of the previous century, figures on the program with hauntingly original “K’A Mura” from 2 Preludes on Yoruba Sacred Folk Melodies. Also representing the first half of the 20th century is celebrated African American composer Florence Price in her luxuriantly pianistic Fantasie nègre.
Hailed as an "African classical music pioneer" (BBC World Service) and "a classical music game changer" (Classical Music), award-winning pianist Rebeca Omordia is an exciting virtuoso with a wide-ranging career as soloist, chamber musician and recording artist.
Piano Heroines
Brahms: Reimagined Orchestrations / Stern, Kansas City Symphony
REFERENCE RECORDINGS® proudly presents an imaginative album of three compositions by Johannes Brahms, in an outstanding interpretation from Michael Stern and the Kansas City Symphony. It features the first recording of American composer and Kansas City native Virgil Thomson’s 1957/8 orchestration of Brahms: Eleven Chorale Preludes for organ, op 122. It also contains composer Bright Sheng’s enchanting orchestration of the Brahms Intermezzo for solo piano, op. 118, No. 2, and the beloved and spectacular Arnold Schoenberg orchestration of the Piano Quartet No. 1 in G Minor, op. 25. "Brahms: Reimagined Orchestrations" was produced by GRAMMY® winner Peter Rutenberg, who has over half a century of experience in the music industry as a producer, composer, director, and teacher. This album was engineered by RR’s esteemed technical team, composed of GRAMMY® winning engineer 'Prof' Keith O. Johnson and multi-GRAMMY® nominated engineer Sean Royce Martin.
REVIEW:
This is an enjoyable and beautifully performed release with some unusual material. What is impressive is that the three works each offer a different approach to the orchestrator’s art. Brahms’ 11 Chorale Preludes, Op. 122 were orchestrated in the 1950s by Virgil Thomson, who was always an eclectic-spirited figure. The entr’acte is Bright Sheng’s Black Swan for orchestra, a version of the Intermezzo in A major for piano, Op. 118, No. 2; despite the retitling, this is the most straightforward of the three orchestrations, although Sheng’s orchestra is quite large. Perhaps the best-known item here, although it is hardly commonplace on orchestral programs, is Arnold Schoenberg’s orchestration of Brahms’ Piano Quartet No. 1 in G minor, Op. 25. This is also the most unconventional of the group; it actually sounds as much like Schoenberg as it does like Brahms. Reference Recordings’ sound from Helzberg Hall in Kansas City is clear and detailed, and this is a fascinating look at how composers from various periods have heard the music of Brahms.
— AllMusic.com (James Manheim)
Thomas Shippers - A Retrospective
Gerhard: Don Quixote (Complete Ballet); Suite from Alegrias;
Liberte
Armenian Brilliance / Madoyan, Grigoryan
A selection of delightful miniatures for violin and piano in original versions and arrangements by some of Armenia's most admired composers. This album marks the Naxos debut of acclaimed violinist Nikolay Madoyan. A selection of Armenian piano music can be heard on Naxos 8.573467. Works by Arutiunian, Bagdasarian, Barkhudarian, and Komitas can also be heard via albums on the Grand Piano label.
Les chansons des roses
Arnold, Benjamin, Shostakovich & Stravinsky: Music for Flute
Khachaturian: The Dancing Violin
Gershwin, Montsalvatge, Bernstein & Campo
musica viva #46 - Johannes Kalitzke & Luc Ferrari
Borodin, Glazunov, Mussorgsky & Rimsky-Korsakov: Dances of Light / Masurenko, Yaruss Quartet
The familiar in a new guise – Tatjana Masurenko and the Yaruss Quartet are therefore in good company when they clothe the music of the Russian Romantics in novel acoustic garments. Using viola, soprano domra and alto domra, accordion and double bass, they play 19th century works in their own arrangements, using gut strings for all of their instruments, the domras sounding somewhat like Italian mandolins. In this guise, compositions by Rimsky-Korsakov, Musorgsky, Borodin and Glazunov seem lighter, more open and agile, their music expressing a fresh elegance with different colours, taking on a completely new character.
United
The Pacific Quintet have gone beyond the standard classical repertoire and have selected pieces that represent their diversity. Its musicians were born and raised all over the globe — Japan, Honduras, South Korea, Germany, and Ukraine/Turkey — and here present music from their home countries, transcending all differences of culture, language, and tradition. Two pieces, one by the Honduran composer Jorge Santos and the other by the South Korean female composer Soeui Lee, were commissioned especially for this album, which also includes Fazil Say’s quintet Alevi dedeler raki masasinda and a medley of Japanese folk songs; Hanns Eisler’s Divertimento represents Germany, the Pacific Quintet’s home base. The album ends with an arrangement of music from West Side Story and pays homage to Leonard Bernstein, the founder of the Pacific Music Festival in Sapporo where the players first met. As this project shows, they are truly United in music.
Lachenmann: My Melodies
To mark the 75th anniversary of the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra (BRSO) in 2024, the BR-KLASSIK label is now making previously unreleased recordings of concerts available on CD and as a stream. The six-part composition My Melodies for eight horns and orchestra was composed between 2016 and 2018, revised for the first time in 2019, and then again in 2023 as the musica viva Munich version. It was commissioned by Bavarian Radio’s musica viva with the support of the Friends of the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra e.V. This is a live recording of the premiere of the Munich 2023 version on June 23, 2023, from the Herkulessaal, again as part of BR's musica viva concert series, with the horn section and the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra under the direction of Matthias Hermann.
Helmut Lachenmann, born in Stuttgart in 1935, is one of the most renowned German composers of contemporary music. He studied piano, music theory, and counterpoint in Stuttgart and composition with Luigi Nono in Venice. The first public performances of his works took place in 1962 at the Venice Biennale and at the Darmstadt Summer Courses for New Music. He taught composition in Hanover (1976-1981) and in Stuttgart (1981-1999), and gave numerous master classes in Germany and abroad. His works are performed by internationally renowned players and orchestras all over the world. Helmut Lachenmann has received numerous awards, most recently the GEMA German Music Authors' Prize for his life's work (2015).
The phenomenon of melody has long preoccupied Helmut Lachenmann. He went to study in Venice at the end of the 1950s with Luigi Nono, a teacher who strictly insisted on a critically reflective approach to musical material. Nono had objected to any trace of linear progression in Lachenmann's compositional sketches as a "tonal cell" – a melodic object that was seen as a recourse to a romanticizing tonal language that had to be overcome. The impetus for the scoring of My Melodies came from a rehearsal of Lachenmann's opera The Little Match Girl in Madrid in 2008: eight horns forming a homogeneous yet at the same time complex instrument. The premiere took place ten years later. In 2023, My Melodies was extended by 77 additional bars since that first performance, with Lachenmann drawing on further sketch material. It is rare for the composer to alter his own works after their premiere - but the sound ideas for the eight horns seem to have retained a special fascination for him. The bonus tracks offer short excerpts from this concert recording of My Melodies. They present characteristic passages of the work, inviting listeners to detect specific noises or sequences and to familiarize themselves with Lachenmann's world of sound.
Bruckner: Symphony No. 5 / Gerd Schaller
Bruckner’s Fifth is eminently suited to an arrangement for performance on the organ above all because of its musical texture. In no other Bruckner symphony, for example, does counterpoint play such an important part. I am thinking in particular of the great fugue in the final movement. It really does seem as if many passages of this magnificent work were composed as if with the organ in mind, even though the Fifth is not a piece for organ at all, being in the first place a symphonic work. And yet it lends itself admirably to the extraction of a compositional substrate with no loss of essential content. That cannot be said of all Bruckner’s symphonies. Of all his symphonies, in my opinion, the Fifth, Eighth and Ninth are most amenable to an arrangement for organ. Building on the compositional core, it is the orchestral treatment above all that plays a key role. If this is lacking, an arrangement of the work can deprive the work of its grandeur. That is again at risk if one attempts to copy the orchestra or to transpose certain orchestral effects one-to-one onto the organ. Such an approach is generally unsatisfactory, because organ writing is governed by different rules than those applying to orchestral scoring. It would be fatal to make the organ rival the orchestra. My aim from the start was to avoid imitating the orchestra and to create a work specifically for organ in the manner of an organ symphony.
American Dream
Lalo: Orchestral Works / Jarvi, Estonian National Symphony
Lalo considered himself to be first and foremost an opera composer, even though Le Roi d’Ys was his only opera to be performed in his lifetime. He is now best known for his symphonic and chamber music, largely because of the highly political musical establishment in France in his time. The Overture to the opera (which opens this album) is now the best-known music from the piece, which proved a considerable success in France. His ballet Namouna was commissioned by the Paris Opéra and, remarkably, was completed in just four months following extensive delays in agreeing the subject – part of the tales of Casanova. After a successful run of fifteen performances, Lalo parcelled the music up into three ‘rhapsodies’ for orchestral performance. The first two of these were published as Suites Nos 1 and 2. The third was not published, but the ‘Valse de le Cigarette’ was later issued separately. Lalo’s only surviving Symphony was completed in 1886, but somewhat overshadowed by Saint-Saëns’s Organ Symphony (1886) and Franck’s Symphony in D minor (1888), but it is a strong work that showcases Lalo’s melodic gift and forward-looking harmonic palette.
Angelus ad Pastores - Weihnachtsgeschichte / Arman, Bavarian Radio Choir
In the Revelation of James, an apocryphal gospel that was not included in the Bible, events and details surrounding the birth of Christ are reported that do not appear in the better-known versions of the Christmas story from the gospels of Matthew and Luke. The Christmas story is presented by James in a vivid, dramatic, and almost theatrical manner.
Howard Arman's Christmas Story follows the tradition of works such as Bach's "Christmas Oratorio", where newly-composed settings of the Gospel alternate with chorales. Here, Gregorian and polyphonic chorales as well as several motets from the 17th century are woven into Arman's composition and form a second narrative level. They frame the episodes of the Christmas story and can also be understood as musical reactions to the narrated events.
This new BR-KLASSIK CD is complemented by the chorales from Peter Maxwell Davies' Christmas cantata "O magnum mysterium". Arman contrasts the powerful language and mysticism of James’ gospel by reducing musical means to their essentials: monophonic singing, syllabically conceived solo passages and, as the only accompanying instrument, a hurdy-gurdy, which with its monotonous, archaic sound represents a certain timelessness. All of this results in maximum text comprehensibility, whereby the emotional declamatory singing style almost makes the figures resemble characters in a stage play. A key moment is Joseph's vision shortly before the birth of Christ: time seems to stand still, and the mystical and sublime aspect of this scene is intensified by poetic words full of linguistic contrasts and contradictions. – The chorales and motets integrated into Arman’s Christmas Story gradually develop ever greater polyphony. Thus, three settings by Nicolaus Zangius, Hieronymus Praetorius and Hans Leo Hassler, scored for ever greater numbers of voices, lead to a fourth, ten-part composition by Melchior Vulpius, which concludes with the words "Peace on earth". In its formal layout, Arman's Christmas Story bears similarities to Peter Maxwell Davies' cantata "O magnum mysterium". This work, written in 1960 for the choirmaster of Manchester Cathedral, also consists of chorales and instrumental sonatas, although the order is not compulsory. The four a cappella chorales in particular constitute a self-contained unit in terms of both content and music.
Santoro: Complete Piano Sonatas
Khachaturian: Piano Transcriptions / Ayrapetyan
Mahler: Symphony No.5
Weinberg: Dawn; Symphony No. 12 / Storgårds, BBC Philharmonic
Every five years the Soviet Union celebrated the anniversary of the October 1917 Revolution with large-scale public events, to which the country’s leading artists were expected to contribute. Mieczyslaw Weinberg, like his friend Shostakovich, enjoyed mixed fortunes with his efforts. The symphonic poem Dawn (Zarya), Op. 60, dedicated to the fortieth anniversary of the Revolution, seems to have remained unperformed during his lifetime, despite its ideologically irreproachable content. Its première was finally given in the BBC studios in Manchester, on 15 May 2019, by the BBC Philharmonic under John Storgårds.
When Shostakovich died, on 9 August 1975, it had been five years since Weinberg composed his last symphony. To commemorate his friend and mentor (whom he regarded as the greatest symphonist of his age) Weinberg decided on a full-scale, four movement, non-programmatic work as his personal tribute. Symphony No. 12, written between December 1975 and February 1976 is the longest of Weinberg’s purely instrumental symphonies. Kirill Kondrashin was due to conduct the première, but his last-minute insistence on large-scale cuts and changes to the score was taken by Weinberg as a great insult, and ended their relationship. The first performance was finally given as a radio broadcast on 13 October 1979, (probably) by the USSR TV and Radio Symphony Orchestra under Maxim Shostakovich.
Kaufmann, Rubin & Tal: Exodus
Piano Concertos from the Netherlands
Unbounded - Music by American Women / Wohn, Phelps
As a second generation Korean-American woman, violinist Dawn Wohn notes that it has not always been easy to relate to the world of classical music, which is still largely Euro- and male-centric. Since delving into the diverse world of female composers, I have felt much joy, connection, and ownership to the music that I perform. To be able to champion this repertoire feels unbounded— joyful and limitless. I am particularly excited to share this album, which celebrates the music of American women, as performed by two American women.
There is no denying that historically, female composers have faced challenges. Amy Beach was unable to take composition lessons or have a performing career for most of her life, as it was deemed improper for a married woman. The two Black composers on this album, Dorothy Rudd Moore and Irene Britton Smith, faced further struggles for widespread recognition during their lifetimes, due to the classical world’s long reluctance to admit works by minority composers into the performing canon.
In an ideal world, there would be no need to call attention to the race or gender of these composers. In doing so, my concern is that the composers or their works will be overshadowed or grouped together by those labels. Just as Moore cautioned against typecasting, stating that “there are many Black artists in all disciplines and each is an individual with his or her unique experiences,” it is important to listen to and recognize each composer as an individual.
However, an all-male composer program would not raise questions on how to present it without diminishing the music or pigeon- holing the music or the composers. So, with this album, I choose to amplify and celebrate music by these four composers and all they have created through adversity. I relate deeply to the optimism, humor and beauty in these works, and hope that it inspires the listener.
REVIEW:
The two artists play with passion and elegantly the music of four composers defined not by gender or ethnicity but by the kind of tenacity that helped them achieve the often seemingly unreachable acceptance of the music establishment. Highly recommended!
-- All About the Arts (Rafael de Acha)
Prokofiev: Romeo & Julia; Tchaikovsky: Symphony No. 4
Schubert: Symphony in C, D. 944 "The Great" / Bernstein, BRSO
Leonard Bernstein conducted regularly in Munich from the 1980s onwards. It was during this time that he came to appreciate and love the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra in particular. In October 1976, Bernstein had appeared with an all-Beethoven program, and in 1983 he began a series of annual concerts with the orchestra. In 1987, he rehearsed Franz Schubert's Great C Major Symphony, which was performed in the Congress Hall of the Deutsches Museum in Munich. This BR-KLASSIK CD features not only the live recording of this concert event but also a rehearsal recording on a bonus CD, "Conductors in Rehearsal," which has been preserved in the sound archives of Bavarian Radio. Bernstein's warmth and friendliness, as well as his astonishingly good German, are most impressive.
Franz Schubert most probably composed his Great C Major Symphony in Bad Gastein in the summer of 1825. Chronologically speaking, it is his eighth symphony, although it is still sometimes referred to as his ninth. It can be assumed that Schubert, who had witnessed the first performance of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony in Vienna in 1824, wanted to be on an artistic level with his much older colleague. He dedicated his work to the Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde in Vienna, in whose archives the score can be traced back to the end of 1826. However, it was not until 1839—after Schubert's death—that the history of its performance began, after Robert Schumann became aware of the work and organized its publication. In 1840, after the posthumous first performance by the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra conducted by Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy on March 21, 1839, Schumann formulated one of the most famous quotations about Schubert’s symphony, that of its "heavenly length." Because of the value the composer himself attached to it, and to distinguish it from the much shorter Sixth Symphony in the same key (therefore often referred to as the "Little C Major"), it was titled "The Great.
"The live recording was made on June 13 and 14, 1987, in the Congress Hall of the Deutsches Museum in Munich. In the rehearsal recording “Conductors in Rehearsal – Leonard Bernstein Rehearses with the BRSO in German,” Friedrich Schloffer (narrator) and Johannes Ritzkowsky (horn) can be heard alongside Bernstein.
