In 2002, anticipating the 205th anniversary year of "The President's Own" Marine Band, the then-Directors of this beloved ensemble invited John Williams to conduct a gala concert at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. The legendary American composer graciously accepted, noting that his own father, a percussionist, had taught his son to love and respect the Marine Band from a young age. Williams first appeared with the band on July 12, 2003, one day after the band's official 205th birthday, thus inaugurating a long collaboration sustained by mutual respect and admiration. Williams would return to the Kennedy Center for another concert, this time in celebration of the band's 210th anniversary, in 2008. Several of his most enduring works were prepared especially for the Marine Band for these concerts, from film soundtrack highlights to original concert works. These full-length gala concerts from 2003 and 2008 are, taken together, a tour de force of some of Williams' most popular and creative scores, and serve as the primary source for this unique new recording collection. "Performing with 'The President's Own, '" writes Williams, "has been one of the highest honors of my working life in music. My great hope is that listeners of this special recording will experience some of the exhilaration and fun that I enjoyed conducting these two memorable performances... this ensemble truly is a national treasure of which all Americans should be justly proud."

SPOHR: Music for Violin and Harp, Vol. 1

Richard Strauss summed up his two-act opera Intermezzo as a 'bourgeois comedy with symphonic interludes'. The soprano role of Christine with it's shimmering cantilenas represents Strauss's wife Pauline, while the successful Kapellmeister Robert Storch serves as Richard Strauss himself in a domestic drama that was avant-garde for it's time but now resonates with the accessibility of today's reality shows. This production from the Deutsche Oper Berlin was acclaimed for it's lush orchestral sound and superbly characterful cast led by a formidable central performance from Maria Bengtsson.

Giuseppe was composed by Mayr in 1829 for graduation concerts at the academy of music in Bergamo over which he presided. His inspiration was a Biblical opera that had won great popularity, Méhul's Joseph, which had premiered in Paris in 1807, featuring prayers, hymns, and unassuming arias. Mayr, however, drew on a much wider musical canvas to include grand arias, duets, a cavatina, and a final chorus. He also repeatedly references popular melodies by his contemporaries Donizetti, Rossini, and Bellini, as befits a pasticcio oratorio.

Famous for composing one of the world's greatest marches, Alte Kameraden (available on Volume 1 in this series, 8.574317), Carl Teike wrote a body of works that have enriched the German concert-march repertoire. They imbue the medium with both diversity and charisma, marrying thematic invention with clarity of structure and richness of tone colours. For the 43rd anniversary of his death, a 1918 march was disinterred and named Neue Kameraden, while Sorgenbrecher is a tribute from Teike to his contemporary, the admired composer Paul Lincke. This is the final volume in the series.

Henrique Oswald was perhaps the most European of Brazilian composers, having spent a large part of his life in Italy; he also absorbed influences from France and Germany. Oswald's music always retains a lyrical character with qualities of elegance and radiance, which can be heard in the Sinfonietta. The expressive Elegia, originally conceived for cello and piano, is dedicated to the memory of a friend. With it's contrasts between darkness and light, coupled with undeniable beauty, the Symphony is regarded as Oswald's finest orchestral achievement and one of the most significant works in the Brazilian orchestral literature.

Virgile Barthe, winner of the 2025 Guitar Foundation of America Competition, presents works ranging from the Baroque to the 21st century performed with his impeccable virtuosity and artistry. This recital takes us from arrangements of Domenico Scarlatti's deeply expressive sonatas and Buxtehude's brilliant Suite, to the lyrical Songs without Words of Mendelssohn and the haunting Music of Memory by Nicholas Maw. The album closes with Dusan Bogdanovic's Third Sonata, a truly virtuoso piece with it's quotes from Stravinsky and musical influences from the Balkans, jazz and the Renaissance.

Famous for his role as keyboard player in rock band Genesis and as a solo artist, Tony Banks was always fascinated by the idea of writing orchestral music. His Success in composing for films led to the acclaimed Seven - A Suite for Orchestra. The intense orchestral sound pictures in Seven, Six and Five rank among some of Banks's most accomplished recordings marrying experimentation with form and structure, and a trademark melodic character that powerfully conveys both melancholy and joy.

Haydn composed the three symphonies in this volume during the mid-1780s in a spirit of triumph. Though still employed by the Esterhazy family, he had recently been allowed to publish his music himself and to accept outside commissions. A number of symphonies were duly commissioned by a new, large ensemble recently established in Paris. Superficially similar, they reveal Haydn's inexhaustible creativity whether in the astonishingly colourful introduction to No. 84, the rustic interludes in the trio section of No. 85 - a favourite of Marie Antoinette, or in the greatest of the Paris symphonies, No. 86, where the transition from the slow introduction to the main section is unequalled in his music.

Considered a lesser-known gem of the operatic repertoire, Smetana's Dve vdovy ('The Two Widows') is set in a Bohemian country estate in which the contrasting personalities of recently widowed cousins Karolina and Anezka are tested by the attentions of gentleman-farmer Ladislav. Smetana's expert theatrical craftsmanship seamlessly blends Czech dances and choruses with beautiful cavatina-like solos. With the humane warmth of it's chamber-like comedy and deftly transparent orchestration, Smetana created a style of conversational opera in The Two Widows that was much admired by Richard Strauss.

From the 1830s onward, Liszt's compositions increasingly acknowledged poetic, literary and philosophical impulses, often signaled through titles, epigraphs or extra-musical associations. This stimulus would later crystallise in his codification of the symphonic poem, but it was equally present in his keyboard music, where narrative, rhetoric and symbolism frequently replace abstract formal logic. A central expression of this aesthetic is Liszt's lifelong engagement with transcription and transformation. For him, the piano was not simply a self-contained instrument but a medium capable of absorbing the sonorities, gestures and emotional weight of voices and orchestras alike. His transcriptions were acts of interpretation rather than replication - creative reimaginings that sought the core meaning of a work and translated it into a pianistic language of heightened intensity. Choral music posed a particularly compelling challenge: the task of condensing collective utterance into the hands of a single performer allowed Liszt to explore the boundary between shared musical identity and individual contemplation. The works recorded here trace Liszt's artistic evolution from the assertive rhetoric of his early maturity to the compressed, exploratory language of his final years. Michael Kaykov's selection of repertoire brings together pieces that illuminate Liszt's habit of revisiting and reworking material across decades. Heard in this context, these works emerge not as peripheral by-products of Liszt's workshop, but as self-contained musical statements - compact, vivid, and eloquent - whose significance lies in their interconnections as much as in their distinctive voices.

Il Bajazet was commissioned in 1735 to open Verona's carnival season. Vivaldi chose a libretto by Agostino Piovene drawn from the well-known story of the defeated Ottoman sultan, King Bajazet, captured by Tamerlane who duly falls in love with Bajazet's proud daughter, Asteria. Vivaldi was in his late maturity when he completed the opera, modifying his music to suit contemporary taste, and using the pasticcio form, incorporating some arias written by other, mostly Neapolitan, composers. Repurposing of this kind was wholly acceptable at the time and such works enjoyed great popularity. The conductor and Vivaldi specialist, Federico Maria Sardelli, has integrated lost arias, clarified the use of historically appropriate orchestration, and brought the opera to rich theatrical life.

Felix Draeseke's early affiliation with the music of Liszt and Wagner permeated his own compositions of the period, not least his Sonata quasi fantasia in C sharp minor, a work of sumptuous Wagnerian candour as well as balletic lightness. It also marked a significant turning-point from a revolutionary style to something more conservative. As Liszt wrote to him, 'Since Schumann's F sharp minor sonata, I know of no more such significant work of this genre.' The programme also includes a virtuoso Grande Fantaisie, two characterful Fantasiestucke and Chopin-like gestures in the Valse-Nocturne.

Camargo Guarnieri loved writing for the human voice, composing hundreds of vocal works over the course of his long and distinguished career. The works in this programme all use texts by Mario de Andrade - a hugely influential writer who was Guarnieri's friend and long-term collaborator. The comic opera Pedro Malazarte is representative of an attractively unconventional and colourful Brazilian modernism that sets it apart from Romantic traditions. Alongside other powerful settings, A Serra do Rola-Moca is one of Guarnieri's finest dramatic vocal works, narrating the tragic story of two young people who die on their wedding day as they and their horses plunge into a ravine.

DELIUS: Paris / Brigg Fair / Eventyr / Irmelin / La Calinda

Exploring the byways of Chopin' work reveals gems such as the elegant Rondeau for two pianos, and the Variations for flute and piano on a theme by Rossini then at the height of his popularity.

Liszt Complete Piano Music, Vol. 13: Hungarian Rhapsodies, V

The greater part of Chopin's music was written for his own instrument, the piano. At first it seemed that works for piano and orchestra would be a necessary part of his stock-in-trade, but the position he found for himself in Paris enabled him to write principally for the piano alone, in a characteristic idiom that derives some inspiration from contemporary Italian opera, much from the music of Poland, and still more from his own adventurous approach to harmony and his own sheer technical ability as a player. Of the forms that Chopin used, the romantic Impromptu offered a particular freedom, with it's suggestion of music dashed off in some fine, careless rapture. His Fantaisie-Impromptu was written in 1835, but published posthumously. It was followed by three further works under the same generic title. The Mazurka, a Polish dance, provided Chopin with a basic rhythmic pattern, his first attempt made in childhood at the age of ten and his last in the year of his death. The form became one with which he was particularly closely associated, an expression of his patriotism. Writers had started to show an interest in the traditional ballad with the publication by Bishop Percy of his Reliques of Ancient English Poetry, which first appeared in the 1760s. The work of Sir Walter Scott as a collector and as a poet added to the enthusiasm. In Germany further interest was shown, with the publication of translations of ballads and the creation of new ones, first by Bürger and then by Goethe and Schiller. This literary form, reflected in ballad settings by Schubert, Loewe and others, led Chopin to a purely instrumental form, based, it has been suggested, on poems by Mickiewicz, contemporary ballads of Polish patriotic purport. The first of Chopin's four Ballades implies a narrative content, opening with the words of the story-teller and proceeding to events of greater excitement. Chopin completed his collection of Preludes in 1839, when he published a set of 24, using all major and minor keys. A number of the Preludes were written during his winter in Mallorca with George Sand and her two children. They had arrived on the island in November, their appearance arousing some suspicions in the minds of local people. Deterioration in the weather aggravated the weakness of Chopin's health and doctors diagnosed tuberculosis. Forced to leave their lodgings and to pay for their fumigation, the party moved to rooms in the deserted monastery at Valldemosa, where George Sand continued to nurse him, in spite of considerable local hostility towards this woman who smoked cigars, the two long-haired boys and a girl who dressed as a man. It was with some relief that they left Mallorca in February, happy to return to France. It was in these circumstances, graphically described by George Sand in her Hiver à Majorque, that the Preludes were completed and revised, before being dispatched to Camille Pleyel for publication, each one a musical vignette. The second of Chopin's three sonatas includes, as a slow movement, his famous Funeral March, written in 1837, while the second of his four scherzos, the Scherzo in B flat minor, was written in the same key and same year. Originally a musical joke, with Beethoven a relatively jocular symphonic movement that replaced the traditional minuet as a bridge between a slow movement and a final symphonic rondo, the scherzo, for Chopin, became an extended and independent composition, here passionate in it's content. His single Berceuse, completed in 1844, makes much more than might be expected from the lullaby of the title. The Polish dance, the Polonaise, found it's way from village to ball-room and thence abroad. In Paris in 1830 Poland was in the news, with the attempted rising against Russia and it's suppression, and things Polish enjoyed considerable popularity, a fact from which Chopin benefited on his arrival in the city. As with other relatively trivial dance forms, he was able to raise the Polonaise to a new level, imparting a degree of complexity and a degree of feeling that had not always been present in the work of his elders in Warsaw. Chopin's first attempts at the form were at the age of seven and his last in 1846, three years before his death, and there is a clear element of patriotism about the two Polonaises included in the present collection, the Military and the Heroic.

ALBINONI: Oboe Concertos, Vol. 2

BAROQUE TRUMPET (THE ART OF THE), Vol. 1

VIVALDI: Dresden Concertos, Vol. 2

Fifteen years before Chopin wrote his first "nocturne", Irish pianist/composer John Field composed his Nocturne No. 1 in E-flat major, followed by at least 15 more pieces in the same style. In these short works for solo piano, Field--who was one of the most celebrated pianists in the world during the first quarter of the 19th century--put form to the idea of a contemplative, lyrical composition, specifically tailored to the piano's expressive capabilities. These "night" pieces are primarily characterized by a dominant, gracefully flowing melody, with most of the harmonic activity in the pianist's left hand. Although other pianists have recorded at least some of Field's Nocturnes--most notably John O'Conor (Telarc) and Miceál O'Rourke (Chandos)--Benjamin Frith's own uniquely inflected, poetic readings have a satisfying aura of intimacy cast in the warm colors of his well-tempered, expertly recorded piano. Although O'Conor's playing is more lyrical, with more fluid legatos, Frith generally takes more time--and these invariably lovely pieces blossom just as fully and brilliantly. The two sonatas are not notable for their originality--they owe much to their dedicatee, Field's teacher Clementi--but they reveal the young composer's gift for understanding the piano's unique voice. This is music for everyone--for any time of day, for any prevailing mood--and we're lucky to have such a fine pianist as Frith joining the Field field. [10/22/1999] --David Vernier, ClassicsToday.com

The names of William Schwenck Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan are fused when speaking of their collaboration on a series of operettas. It is almost impossible to consider the music of Arthur Sullivan on its own terms without thinking of Gilbert. This is unfortunate because Sullivan was a fine composer of serious music and wrote oratorios, hymns and large orchestral works that have been neglected. This collection of overtures puts Sullivan in the spotlight and his music rises to the occasion.
The Sullivan overtures on this recording are curtain raisers for the most beloved of the operettas written with W.S. Gilbert. Each and every one is a delight and filled with the jaunty melodies that make the operettas so charming. Sullivan was a clever orchestrator and the overtures are colorful and filled with exuberant energy. The Royal Ballet Sinfonia under the direction of Andrew Penny deliver loving performances. This is an ideal recording for lovers of the overtures of Rossini and waltzes of Johann Strauss.

SCARLATTI, D.: Keyboard Sonatas (Complete), Vol. 1

Lutoslawski was one of the great composers of the 20th century. Although he was imprisoned by the Nazis and subject to the whims of a communist government after the war, Lutoslawski's voice remained original and always provocative. This collection presents orchestral music and two song cycles from a period spanning nearly 50 years of the composer's long life.
Symphony No. 1 was written during the 1940s and is scored for a large orchestra augmented by battery of percussion instruments. The symphony is a work of shifting moods, animated by colorful orchestration. When the Communists took power in Poland they demanded that composers write music based on folk-songs. Lutoslawski's 'Silesian Triptych' written in 1951, meets the party's demands but rises above the genre with its sensitive vocal writing and genial Slavic flavor.
Olga Pasiecznik's warm soprano voice is perfect for the 'Silesian Triptych,' and she floats lovely pianissimo notes in the complex song cycle 'Chantefleurs et Chantefables.' The Polish National Radio Symphony Orchestra directed by Antoni Wit play this music with energy and technical proficiency.

DANZI: Bassoon Concertos

Chen, He, Yan, Zhu & Zhang: Romantic Violin Concertos

BACH, C.P.E.: Keyboard Sonatas

PROKOFIEV: Symphony No. 6 / Waltz Suite

Wagner’s visionary Ring of the Nibelung was first performed as a cycle of four operas in 1876. Its mythic plot examines the relationship between love and earthly power through the agency of a ring which confers ultimate power on its bearer.

One of the most sustained and remarkable achievements in all of music, the tetralogy is performed by an all-star cast, conducted by the new music director of the New York Philharmonic Orchestra, Jaap van Zweden, in performances that have been critically acclaimed worldwide for their “thrilling sense of drama.” (The Sunday Times, London)

Past praise of previously released volumes included in this set:

Das Rheingold

Van Zweden’s approach is closest in memory to Herbert von Karajan’s–intimate and chamber-like. The back and forth between the fine, unexaggerated Fricka of Michelle De Young and the remarkable, surprising Wotan of Matthias Goerne is natural and familiar, and Goerne is the surprise of the performance. His experience and expertise as a Lieder singer comes in very handy in this opera.

– ClassicsToday.com

Die Walküre

This is a Walküre that reveals its treasures slowly; it’s a warm, intimate reading. The Wälsungs are stunning. Stuart Skelton's tone is big and clean, wobble-free. And his cries of “Wälse” in Act 1 have to be heard to be believed. Heidi Melton as Sieglinde is wonderfully expressive. The listener hangs on every perfectly pronounced, clear word she and Skelton sing, and thanks to Zweden, who leads their interactions as if the opera were bel canto, we feel for them. Interrupting their budding love is Falk Struckmann, surprisingly (he’s a baritone, not a bass). He is a grand, scary Hunding.

– ClassicsToday.com

Wagner: Siegfried

Van Zweden's marvelously-rehearsed orchestra play with accuracy, brilliance, and color. I commented on the beauty and sadness of the Walküre performance, and here, added to those two qualities is, by the third act, passion.

Simon O’Neill may not be the most intuitive Siegfried on disc, but he’s among the brightest-toned and most solid, showing no flatting even at the end of his bout with Brünnhilde. Heidi Melton is an excellent Brünnhilde and a marvelous singer/actress, using her half hour to transform with clarity. Everyone proves their mettle, taste, and polish here, and I suspect there will be few who are disappointed.

– ClassicsToday.com

Wagner: Götterdämmerung

This is a grand finale to the Hong Kong Philharmonic’s Ring Cycle. Both Walküre and Siegfried were marvelously conceived, excellent concert performances, each with a minor flaw or two: recording balances out of whack and unfocused mid-voice for Brünnhilde in Walküre; recording too recessed in Siegfried; lack of character delineation in the Wanderer/Mime scene in Act 1 of Siegfried. I was quite taken by the storytelling in both, finding beauty, sadness, and in the Siegfried finale, passion. This set, recorded at two concert performances (and, I suspect, a patch-up session or two—there is NO applause or audience reaction anywhere), is, in one word, majestic, which is a fitting end to the Cycle.

– ClassicsToday.com