The Danish Chamber Orchestra present more vibrant performances of Haydn’s 'London' symphonies with their chief conductor Adam Fischer. These recordings are the product of a two-decade partnership between Adam Fischer and the Danish Chamber Orchestra during which they have explored the most effective technical solutions necessary for performing these masterpieces. Volume 1 is on 8.574516.

Featuring more than a hundred pieces, this album showcases the charming dances Schubert composed for the many fashionable salons in Vienna between 1815 and 1823. It joins other Naxos albums dedicated to Schubert’s piano dances and miniatures by Yang Liu (8.573941) and Daniel Lebhardt (8.574145, 8.574277). French pianist Didier Castell-Jacomin is a Steinway Artist.

Antoni Wit adds to his extensive Naxos Penderecki discography with Symphony No. 6 ‘Chinese Songs’ – the composer’s last completed work in the genre. Jaroslaw Brek is the featured bass-baritone soloist in one of the last recordings he made before his untimely death in April this year. Wit conducts the Norrköping Symphony Orchestra in this selection of recent works from the 2010s.

Acis et Galatée is acknowledged as one of Lully’s finest masterpieces. This recording from the Maggio Musicale Fiorentino is conducted by the early music specialist Federico Maria Sardelli, and features tenor Jean-François Lombard and soprano Elena Harsányi in the principal roles. Also available on Dynamic Blu-ray (57971) and DVD (37971).

After Things to Come, his most famous film score, Arthur Bliss composed the soundtrack scores of CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS and MEN OF TWO WORLDS, two dramatic pictures which are largely forgotten today. Their music, however, enlivened by Spanish and African rhythms respectively, is colourful and interesting enough to be revived in the form of concert suites. Men of Two Worlds contains BARAZA, a miniature concert piece for piano and orchestra (like Addinsell�s �Warsaw Concerto� from Dangerous Moonlight, Bax�s Oliver Twist, R�zsa�s Spellbound and Herrmann�s �Concerto Macabre� from Hangover Square), with additional male choir. The three orchestral pieces from SEVEN WAVES AWAY are another real discovery and if anything even more deserving of concert performances than the two earlier scores.

This album presents a selection of concertos by the distinguished Spanish-Argentine composer; Eduardo Grau. A team of stellar soloists has been assembled to make these world premiere recordings; including pianist Fabio Banegas and violinist Ana María Valderrama.

REVIEW:

Eduardo Grau (1919–2006) wrote music of great lyricism and rhythmic vitality. His ‘Yuste’ Concerto evokes the grandeur of the eponymous Spanish monastery, while the Clarient Concerto successfully folds in folk dance rhythms from the motherland.

-- BBC Music Magazine

The latest instalment in this popular series focuses on the life and music of Russian composer Modest Mussorgsky. Illustrated with some of Mussorgsky’s finest works the biographical narrative includes excerpts from Songs and Dances of Death; Boris Godunov; Night on Bald Mountain and Pictures at an Exhibition.

Learn more about this recording on the Naxos Classical Spotlight podcast!

Stellar Brazilian cellist Antonio Meneses performs Villa-Lobos’s Cello Concerto Nos. 1 and 2; and the Fantasia in this latest release in the definitive The Music of Brazil series. With its youthful energy and eclectic style; the Cello Concerto No. 1 was Villa-Lobos’s first major orchestral work. Composed for the renowned Brazilian cellist Aldo Parisot; the no less inventive and lushly scored Cello Concerto No. 2 from 1953 suggests man’s solitude when facing the vastness of nature.

REVIEW:

Cellist Antonio Meneses has the full measure of the music. He plays with assurance and impeccable musicality and technique. Conductor Isaac Karabtchevsky’s credentials as an expert and convincing Villa-Lobos conductor include the recording of the complete symphonies for Naxos. Here, he leads vital readings of the substantial, often brilliant and demanding pieces. The São Paulo Symphony Orchestra play beautifully, and the recording are superb. Is it possible to ask for more? I think not. I recommend this release warmly to all those who love Villa-Lobos’s music, especially when it is played and recorded as finely as here.

-- MusicWeb International

First performed in 1765; Antonio Sacchini’s Saint Philip Neri’s Renunciation of All Worldly Wealth is an oratorio about the father of the oratorio. It depicts the spiritual trials of Saint Philip Neri as he is hounded by the personifications of Splendour and Deception; assisted and defended by Poverty on his journey towards God and virtue. Franz Hauk conducts Concerto de Bassus with a team of renowned soloists. World premiere recording.

REVIEW:

The performance is excellent. Both sopranos Yeree Suh and Ketevan Chutishvili have light and airy voices, suitable for the bravura arias Sacchini favors, while Markus Schäfer has a huge range as a tenor, negotiating the fiendish coloratura with ease. Daniel Ochoa’s bass is powerful and decisive. All are spot on in terms of pitch, and the tempos led by Franz Hauk suit this sort of music extremely well. I am also impressed by the accuracy and liveliness of the Concerto de Bassus.

-- Fanfare

Composer and novelist; Anthony Burgess; was a remarkably diverse artist. The three guitar quartets on this album range from the well-crafted First Quartet intended as a homage to Ravel; while the Second and Third Quartets explore virtuoso technique alongside adventurous and at times haunting harmonies and polytonality. A selection of Burgess’s arrangements for guitar quartet are also featured; including Holst’s Mercury; the Winged Messenger from The Planets. Three of Burgess's orchestral works can be heard on 8.573472 and The Bad-Tempered Electronic Keyboard: 24 Preludes and Fugues on Grand Piano GP773.

Pulitzer-prize winner John Harbison has a catalogue of more than 300 works and remains one of America’s most prominent and distinguished composers. He has collaborated extensively with pianist Se-Hee Jin since their first meeting at Tanglewood many years ago. Includes three world premiere recordings.

Learn more about these operas on the Naxos Classical Spotlight podcast!

James P. Johnson is renowned as the father of stride piano but he also flourished as a composer of opera and of show tunes in the 1920s and 1930s. The Dreamy Kid and De Organizer offer contrasting stories of African American life at that time, set to an eclectic and powerful mixture of jazz, swing, blues and ragtime. These two works were reconstructed by the renowned musicologist, composer and bandleader, James Dapogny, before his untimely death in 2019. The Dreamy Kid is a world premiere recording.

REVIEW:

Both works are one act operas. De Organizer is labelled a ‘Blues opera’ and is, moreover, a choral opera, where there is, apart from a few longer solo portions, constant dialogue between the chorus and individual solo voices. The story takes place on a plantation in the South in the 1930s, i.e. contemporaneous to when the opera was written. A group of Afro-American sharecroppers are waiting for a union organizer and his companion is handing out leaflets. De Organizer appears and explains the advantages of forming a union. Then the Overseer interferes, threatening, with a whip in hand, but the croppers overpower him and the union is formed.

The opera is compact, just over thirty minutes, and packed with drama. The music is permeated with jazz rhythms and blues feeling – it is really A Swingin’ Affair! OK, If I want to be pernickety, there is a great deal of over-vibrant solo singing and some wobbly choristers, but this is easy to wink at in view of their enthusiasm, conviction and vitality, and the chorus Plantin’, plowin’, hoein’! just a couple of minutes into the opera is very moving. Though the score is divided into numbers, it is performed continuously and the whole opera is only one track.

The Dreamy Kid is quite different. It is a chamber play with no chorus and only four characters, and structured more in the European tradition, but musically with an American twist. While the orchestra in De Organizer is a jazz combo, here we have a traditional symphony orchestra. Even though this also is a one-act-opera, it is a bit longer – by how much I don’t know, as we get only seven excerpts, and they amount to 34 minutes. The libretto is an adaptation of an existing play by O’Neill about an old Afro-American woman lying on her deathbed, and her grandson, Dreamy, who has killed a white man in a quarrel. The police are on his heels but he risks his life to visit his grandma, persisting in spite of the knowledge that they could turn up any time. This, too, is a tightly knit drama, but there are several good solo arias. In the first scene (track 2), Irene, Dreamy’s woman, has a long solo and further on Mammy sings a beautiful, tender song to Dreamy. There are also lots of highly dramatic quarrels, including one which turns into a love duet between Dreamy and Irene – though the police’s arrival at any moment is constant threat. I only wish the opera had been recorded complete.

It should be mentioned that both operas had been reconstructed by James Dapogny, who unfortunately didn’t live long enough to experience the issue of this CD, but was present at the recordings and the staged performances back in 2006. In the notes, he writes at length about his extensive restoration work, without which we wouldn’t have been able to hear this music and the world would have been much poorer.

So, dear reader, grab the opportunity and give this disc a listen. Whether you like it or not is less important than that you should be made to think about to what degree the world for African-Americans has since changed

-- MusicWeb International

Previously released on Marco Polo (8.223455). Joachim Raff’s Fifth Symphony is one of his most popular works in the genre. The overture Ein feste Burg ist unser Gott uses Martin Luther’s famous melody to commemorate the drama of the Thirty Years’ War. This release follows on from the reissue of Symphonies Nos. 8 and 9 by the same forces in July (8.555499).

Premiered in 1937, Shostakovich's Fifth Symphony proved to be an overwhelming success, returning the composer to temporary favor in the eyes of Soviet authorities. It remains one of the most performed symphonies of the 20th century. The jaunty, neo-classical Ninth Symphony offers a stark contrast in size and mood to its companion work on this disc.

The Hong Kong Philharmonic Orchestra is regarded as one of the leading orchestras in Asia. The orchestra turned professional in 1974, and is celebrating its 50th anniversary during the 2023/24 concert season. The orchestra has toured Europe, Asia, Australia, and extensively across Mainland China with music director Jaap van Zweden. In 2019 the HK Phil won the prestigious Gramophone magazine Orchestra of the Year Award – the first orchestra in Asia to receive this accolade.

Turkish pianist and composer, Fazil Say, is joined by his long-standing friend, the violinist Friedemann Eichhorn, in an album of mid-19th-century German repertoire. Includes the world premiere recording of Say’s transcriptions of the Prelude and Liebestod from Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde, alongside the F–A–E Sonata of Dietrich, Schumann and Brahms, and Schumann’s Violin Sonata No. 1.