This new album presents three major orchestral works by British composer William Mival, performed by the Philharmonia Orchestra under Martyn Brabbins. Spanning two decades, the album features the expansive new symphony Vale, the contemplative Tristan - still, and the Welsh-themed Pluen (feather). Together, they trace Mival's engagement with tradition and landscape. From the concentrated focus of Tristan - still to the folk-song variations of Pluen and the broad, five-movement design of Vale, the recording offers a clear overview of Mival's approach to writing for large forces.

This is a hybrid Super Audio CD playable on both regular and Super Audio CD players.


These are two of the most brilliant and insightful Shostakovich performances to come along in quite a while, and that's saying a lot given the excellence of the recent competition. Certainly if you're looking for this coupling, which is becoming a popular one, this is the disc to have. Yakov Kreizberg's account of the Fifth Symphony is simply the most grimly intense since Sanderling's (Berlin Classics). The first movement is implacably urgent and as architecturally cogent in its monothematic single-mindedness as any conductor has ever projected it. An aptly gruff and gawky scherzo precedes a very slow, hushed, and emotionally draining account of the magnificent Largo. Have you ever noticed that this movement uses no brass instruments at all, but still manages the most powerful climax in the entire symphony?

Kreizberg, like Sanderling, is absolutely convinced that the finale does not represent a "happy" ending. After an impressively portentous opening and a brooding central interlude, he grinds out the coda with as much relentless menace as the music can take, and then some. By the time the movement heaves its lacerated carcass through the final bars, the cessation of sound comes as a positive relief. Throughout, the Russian National Orchestra plays with 100 percent conviction, and PentaTone's sonics, whether in stereo or SACD surround, are extremely natural and well-balanced.

What makes this disc even more special is the fact that the Ninth Symphony is every bit as good. The first movement's deadpan humor comes across with perfect clarity and point. The ghostly waltz that follows has the same quiet intensity as the Fifth Symphony's Largo, while the scherzo demonstrates just how well Kreizberg has the orchestra on its collective toes. His account of the finale just might be the best on disc: he goes completely nuts in the recapitulation, with a freedom of tempo that the composer surely would have applauded, and the coda breezes by at a truly startling clip. It's at once the most hilarious as well as the most satisfying account of this movement to have appeared yet. Do not miss this release.

– David Hurwitz, ClassicsToday.com

This is a hybrid Super Audio CD playable on both regular and Super Audio CD players.

TCHAIKOVSKY Manfred Symphony • Mikhail Pletnev, cond; Russian Natl O • PENTATONE 5186387 (SACD: 59:29)


Arrival of this release in the same shipment that also brought me Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No. 7 and Piano Concerto No. 3 with Dmitri Kitaenko and the Cologne Gürzenich Orchestra on Oehms (reviewed elsewhere in this issue) is kind of funny in a way. You see, Mikhail Pletnev and Kitaenko have played a game of leapfrog through Tchaikovsky’s symphonies, contending not only against each other, but also against Christoph Poppen and Vladimir Jurowski in a four-way competition. After they all crossed the finish line, I judged Pletnev and Kitaenko the tied winners.


The part of this that’s funny, to me at least, is that as if not to be outdone by the other, each of these two conductors has followed up their symphony cycles with what might be described as a mop-up operation. Kitaenko already had a Manfred Symphony in the catalog with his Cologne orchestra; in fact, he recorded it in March 2009, even before taking up the standard six symphonies. So, there was nothing left for him to do but turn to the cobbled-together score by Sergei Bogatyryev of an abandoned seventh symphony by Tchaikovsky and the closely related concertante piano work the composer derived from those same rejected symphony sketches, which came to be designated the Piano Concerto No. 3


Pletnev, too, had a Manfred already under his belt and with the same Russian National Orchestra as here, but it dated back to 1993 and was part of his previous Tchaikovsky symphony cycle for Deutsche Grammophon, so it was time for a remake to complement his SACD cycle for PentaTone. It remains to be seen whether Pletnev will give us a performance of Bogatyryev’s reconstructed Seventh Symphony in order to have the last word, or, in this case, the last note.


Tchaikovsky was the not the first composer inspired by Lord Byron’s Manfred , a dramatic poem with overtones of the supernatural and undertones of a Gothic English horror, a genre that has been described as “Romantic closet drama.” Robert Schumann composed his Manfred: Dramatic Poem with Music in Three Parts in 1852. But Tchaikovsky’s “inspiration,” if you can call it that, didn’t come spontaneously; he was pressed into service by Mily Balakirev, nominal leader of the “Mighty Five.”


Literary critic Vladimir Stasov had penned a program in 1868, which he thought suitable for a musical setting and sent it to Balakirev, hoping the respected Russian composer would rise to the challenge. But Balakirev declined and forwarded Stasov’s program on to Berlioz, who’d already had success with Harold in Italy , another Byron-inspired work, based on Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage . But Berlioz deferred as well, sending the program back to Balakirev with a note pleading old age—he was only 49 at the time—as his excuse.


No one, it seemed was interested in Stasov’s idea, and so for over 15 years it sat and gathered dust, until Balakirev finally prevailed on Tchaikovsky to take it up. Whether or not the project appealed to him, Tchaikovsky set to work on it in earnest, completing the score in 1885, which places it chronologically between his Fourth (1877) and Fifth (1888) symphonies. Manfred contains some of Tchaikovsky’s best music, but it has long existed in a kind of Limbo between symphony and symphonic tone poem. The composer himself recognized the hybrid nature of the work; and even though it’s structured in four movements that correspond to the layout of a typical Classical-Romantic symphony, he purposely avoided assigning it a number.


Over the years, there have been some iconic recordings of Tchaikovsky’s Manfred Symphony and some great ones too, the two not necessarily being the same thing. Toscanini’s 1949 RCA recording with the NBC Orchestra from Carnegie Hall, for example, is an iconic one due to the name and fame of the conductor; but unless you’re willing to accept a performance with some cuts and one which, in my opinion, is sort of glossed over, it’s not a reading I’d personally characterize as one of the greats. A somewhat later recording, but still in mono, that I would call one of the greats, is the 1957 Constantin Silvestri performance with the National Orchestra of France, an emotionally charged reading which, sans cuts and less frantic tempos, runs some 10 minutes longer than the Toscanini.


Venturing into the stereo era, there are fine, if perhaps neither iconic nor great, performances by Ormandy and the Philadelphia Orchestra, Paul Kletzki and the Philharmonia, and Michael Tilson Thomas and the London Symphony Orchestra.


More recently, Vasily Petrenko has given us a brilliant Manfred with the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic on Naxos, and of course there’s the aforementioned Kitaenko Manfred with which the conductor kicked off his Tchaikovsky cycle. It received mixed reviews in 34:2 from both Arthur Lintgen and Raymond Tuttle.


Pletnev’s earlier Manfred , cited above, is not as good, either as a performance or a recording, as this new remake for PentaTone, so the most likely candidate, I think, to compare it to is the Petrenko, which received a rave review from Lynn René Bayley in 32:4, and a somewhat cooler reception from Arthur Lintgen in that same issue.


One immediate strike against this new release is that neither Pletnev nor PentaTone saw fit to include a filler. The disc is just shy of 60 minutes, which isn’t short, but Petrenko and Naxos included Tchaikovsky’s tone poem The Voyevoda , and I might add, for half the price of the PentaTone; but then the latter has the advantage of being an SACD, which does much to enhance the listening experience in a such a heavily and colorfully orchestrated score.


Right from the heavily accented marcato eighth-notes in the strings, beginning in the second bar, Pletnev introduces us to a Manfred tortured, sullen, and precognitive of the fiendish fate that awaits his arrival in the infernal bacchanal of the finale. Tchaikovsky pulled out all the stops and poured everything he had into what the insert note labels an “elemental portrait of the soul and kitschy transfiguration.”


Pletnev’s reading is as wild and wound-up as any I’ve heard, but there’s also a pall of gloom and doom hanging over it that adds to the sense of implacable Fate and tragedy, even if the protagonist of the story is a bit of an insufferably self-absorbed anti-hero. There are those who say that Tchaikovsky ruined the work by ending it with those tacky B-Major strains on organ—“the matter of taste here leads to hearty discussions,” as the booklet note puts it. But I say that Tchaikovsky knew the central character of the story well and provided him with a fittingly superficial sendoff.


It’s too soon to call Pletnev’s Manfred “iconic,” but I don’t think it’s too soon to call it one of the greats. Very strongly recommended.


FANFARE: Jerry Dubins

Once, driving in the rain, I had to pull over to the side of the road because I was so incredibly moved by the sublime music on the radio. The last movement of the mystery work turned out to be Korngold’s “Much Ado About Nothing” Suite — was so joyful and witty, featuring the horns prominently, that I was transported to a different world. This rarely performed work should be better known. — Mei-Ann Chen, Chicago Sinfonietta conductor (Pentatone)

Mikhail Pletnev's Shostakovich Symphony No. 11 excels beyond the much-hyped Rostropovich version on LSO Live, which suffers from a deadening slow, heavy tread. Pletnev's urgent pacing brings the piece in at around 62 minutes (10 minutes less than Rostropovich), while his lively phrasing, attention to rhythm, and powerful dynamic contrast makes for compelling listening. Even the long, slow first movement--fatal in the wrong hands--remains interesting due to Pletnev's insistent rhythmic pulse and skillfully maintained tension. This tension gets released in the swirling winds and strings of the second movement, and even more so in the gripping march at the movement's conclusion.


The Russian National Orchestra takes on these passages with discernible enthusiasm, if not always razor-sharp articulation. In the slow movement, Pletnev's refusal to belabor the music has Shostakovich's touching theme emerge as a poignant elegy. In the finale, Pletnev drops the main theme's tempo by half--then launches full-speed into the following allegro, creating a bracing dramatic effect. The percussion section is the star of this movement (and in much else of the symphony), with bells and gongs ringing full-out from the orchestra. The brass is pretty impressive too, though occasionally the players don't project quite as they should. However, this could be due to the circumstances of the live recording. Somewhat bright and dry, it nonetheless reproduces with exceptional clarity on stereo SACD. Berglund's 1980 EMI version remains the standard reference, and there have been a number of fine new recordings of this symphony, but Pletnev's is a good choice for those desiring to hear the Eleventh played by a Russian orchestra, in modern sound.
--Victor Carr Jr, ClassicsToday.com

This lively and lovable disc of Stravinsky's neoclassical and small ensemble pieces stands with the best available. The two Suites for Small Orchestra never have been better done, the opening Andante taken a bit more slowly than usual so as to wring every drop of sweet nostalgia from the music, while the concluding Galop offers brilliance and high spirits galore. The same observations apply to the Soldier's Tale Suite, with superb contributions from trumpet, double bass, violin, and percussion making for a winning performance, energized by Paavo Järvi's clean rhythms and vigorous tempos. The players bring a toe-tapping spring to the Three Danses, while the devil's music has apt ferocity and an entirely appropriate, cartoonish intensity.


Ragtime also goes about as well as any version around, while the two concertos sound much less dry than usual, a combination of open, airy textures and warm sonics. Speaking of which, in multi-channel format there are some strong reflections from the rear speakers in loud sections, but otherwise we hear natural instrumental placement and good front to back depth. Stereo, of course, eliminates the rear channels, but in this case it sounds a bit flat, comparatively speaking. Certainly the Deutsche Kammerphilharmonie Bremen is a world-class chamber orchestra, and it does itself proud here. If you like "little" Stravinsky, you'll enjoy this release very much.
--David Hurwitz, ClassicsToday.com

Award-winning conductor Kazuki Yamada leads Orchestre de la Suisse Romande in an all French program of highly melodious music. Most recently Kazuki Yamada was the winner at the 51st Besancon International Competition for young conductors in 2009, receiving the audience award as well as the Grand Prize.

This is a hybrid Super Audio CD playable on both regular and Super Audio CD players.

This is a hybrid Super Audio CD playable on both regular and Super Audio CD players.

Classical Music

This is a Super Audio CD playable only on Super Audio CD players.

Quartetto Italiano presents this brilliant album of Schubert's String Quartets Nos. 13 and 10. Recorded at the Musica Theatre, La Chaux de Fonds, Switzerland in January 1976, it has been digitally remastered for optimum sound quality. Quartetto Italiano is Paulo Borciani, Elisa Pegreffi, Piero Farulli, and Franco Rossi.

This album of Russian Dances is beautifully performed by Orchestre de la Suisse Romande, under the baton of Kazuki Yamada. The album contains masterful works from brilliant conductors, including Tchaikovsky’s Suite from Swan Lake, Glazunov’s Two Concert Waltzes, Shostakovich’s The Golden Age, and Stravinsky’s Circus Polka. The album does an excellent job of preserving the important role that ballet has in Russian musical culture.

This release is the third of Pentatone's three-album series where Jakub Hrůša conducts the pKF-Prague Philharmonia in an all Dvořák program of appealing orchestral works comprising the evergreen favorite Symphonic Variations, Op. 78 coupled with the lesser-known Slavonic Rhapsodies, Op. 45. This album builds on the critical success of his earlier releases in the series. Dvorak's unfailing gift for appealing melodies, potent rhythms and colorful orchestration are put on full display.

Antonin Dvorak’s overtures are comparable in length and form to the first movement of a symphony. The pieces were written with the intention of preceding a performance of a spoken play or opera. The works on this recording, however, begin to show a transition away from the preceding purpose and toward full independence, each overture expressing a story or scene rather than anticipating what is to follow.

"My Home" was originally performed as an overture to a play in 1882. The play however, fell out of the repertoire, but the overture has lived on. The "Hussite Overture" from 1883 was written with the intention of preceding a play which was never completed, but again, the overture survived. The overtures "In Nature’s Realm", "Carnival", and "Othello", ranging in composition date from 1891-1892, were intended from the beginning to be concert works, with the "plot" specified by the title or verbal indications written into the manuscript score.

This is a hybrid Super Audio CD, playable on both Super Audio and standard Stereo CD players.

The Scriabin centenary got off to a good start with Garrick Ohlsson’s top-notch traversal of the Poèmes. No doubt there will be many more tributes to this complex and enigmatic composer, including well-priced compendia such as the 18-CD Scriabin Edition from Decca Universal. Buried in that box, which boasts 64 newly recorded items, are Vladimir Ashkenazy’s recordings of Symphonies 1 and 3, Eliahu Inbal’s No. 2 and Valery Gergiev’s Poème de l’extase. Rob Barnett welcomed the Ashkenazy set, recorded in the 1990s, adding that it would suit those who find Scriabin ‘consistently hysterical’. Not that I ever do, but I can understand why others might think differently.

Mikhail Pletnev’s new Pentatone recording of Symphony No. 1 and the Poème de l’extase also has to compete with Riccardo Muti’s celebrated Philadelphia set for Warner (review) and Leif Segerstam’s, with the Royal Stockholm Philharmonic, for BIS (review). In his favour Pletnev has at his fingertips the Russian National Orchestra, which he founded in 1990. These splendid players are in peak form, having just recorded a revelatory account of Shostakovich’s Leningrad with Paavo Järvi. That recording and this one also benefit from Polyhymnia’s impressive engineering skills.

Scriabin: Symphony No. 1; The Poem of Ecstasy / Pletnev on Pentatone:

Scriabin’s First Symphony, in six movements with a vocal finale in praise of the supremacy of Art, is a remarkably sensual piece that really does demand dedicated interpreters. There’s no doubt that Muti – not always the most subtle of conductors – is one of them; he’s blessed with the legendary Philadelphia sound – Ormandy stepped down in 1980, just a few years before these recordings were made – not to mention a full-bodied recording. Listening to Segerstam after that is instructive, for while there is much detail to be found in his Scriabin performances there’s not much of the hypnotic, sense-stroking beauty that I associate with these pieces. As a result, I must exclude his set from my list of comparisons.

In Pletnev’s hands the opening bars of the first Lento waft into one’s consciousness as if borne on a gentle, perfumed zephyr. It’s clear this is going to be a finely calibrated and highly poetic performance; also, the music has a certain, seamless flow, and the micrometer-like precision of the orchestral playing is just right for this score. Goodness, what stupendous playing and exemplary sonics. Indeed, Muti’s performance seems almost garish by comparison, his recording almost crude.

Make no mistake, Pletnev’s reading is not a self-indulgent wallow, as his sharply characterised Allegro dramatico so amply demonstrates. Once again the level of detail that emerges from this recording is extraordinary, as is the range and sophistication of Scriabin’s colour palette. Such is Pletnev’s authoritative/intuitive way with this music that I don’t hear any of the longueurs that often plague the piece. And lest one think this symphony is all about flutters and fibrillations, there’s thrilling weight and amplitude as well. Moreover, Pletnev integrates these elements rather more effectively than Muti, who's rather impulsive at times...

No one, and I mean no one, delivers the second Lento more beautifully than Pletnev and the RNO. Together they create an air of delicious intoxication that seduced me from the start; indeed, it’s as if they’ve unlatched and unleashed all one’s dormant senses. From the music’s languid caresses to its precipitous teasings, this is the most erotically charged performance of the piece I can recall. No wonder the literary satyr Henry Miller extolled Scriabin’s oeuvre. The Vivace, played here with unparalleled delicacy and point, is a reminder of Scriabin’s - and Pletnev's - attention to even the smallest of details. Not even Muti comes close to such levels of excavation and insight.

Pletnev’s grasp of the work’s architecture is beyond doubt – there are no weak spots, even in the sometimes rhetoric-prone Allegro – and his soloists in the finale are much better than Muti’s. Soprano Svetlana Shilova is creamy and secure, and tenor Mikhail Gubsky adds ringing ardour to the mix. The Pentatone balance is preferable too, so we get warm, very communicative soloists rather than bright, somewhat excitable ones. The chorus sing with unalloyed passion and purpose while, unerring as always, Pletnev guides the work to its all-consuming close. The moment of release, when it comes, is almost indescribable in its intensity and impact.

Heavens, what an experience. In fact I’m certain you won’t hear a more powerful or persuasive account of this piece any time soon. As so often with ‘difficult’ composers – mavericks such as Havergal Brian and Rued Langgaard spring to mind – it takes a proselytizing zeal to unlock these seemingly abstruse scores. It’s a measure of Pletnev’s skill that Scriabin’s First Symphony is finally revealed for the masterpiece it is. One mustn’t forget the contributing talents of the Polyhymnia team, especially those of producer, balance engineer and editor Erdo Groot. His name may be incorrect at one point in the credits, but otherwise there's not a single blemish in this splendid recording.

After all that unbridled passion one might be tempted to recover in a darkened room before tackling Scriabin’s so-called ‘Symphony No. 4’, the Poème de l’extase. With the composer’s talk of mystic chords and the Cosmos/Spirit, newcomers to the work might expect a grand musical séance; nothing could be further from the truth, for this is a robust and clear-eyed score laced with moments of colossal grandeur. Muti certainly plays it that way, and Warner’s ultra-vivid recording really stokes up the fires. As before the Philadelphians respond to the music with great enthusiasm and energy.

That’s not the only way to play the Poème, as Pletnev proceeds to demonstrate. The discreet harp figures and gold-threaded trumpet at the start point to a refined, highly nuanced reading. So it proves, for whereas Muti succumbs to the big gestures, Pletnev exercises a degree of control that builds tension rather than releases it too soon. Also, there’s a greater sense of the mystic and mysterious in the Pentatone performance; even the trumpet rises from the mix in a most atmospheric way. Muti’s percussionists are suitably thunderous – Pletnev’s are much better defined though, the bass drum especially – and there are times when Muti's Poème sounds more like Respighi’s Roman carnivals than a contemplation of loftier things.

Interestingly, Pletnev’s Scriabin was recorded in a studio, so the organ of St Ludwig-Kirche has been spliced in. It too makes a mighty noise, along with all those pealing bells. Once again the recording pushes the envelope, with overwhelming results. I imagine this would be even more immersive in its multi-channel form.

I hope this is just the start of a Scriabin series from Pletnev and the RNO, for we desperately need strong, redefining accounts of these underrated works. It goes without saying that Pentatone/Polyhymnia are the right team for such a project. Will I be ditching Muti any time soon? Not just yet, but if Pletnev does give us a new cycle it will surely sweep the board.

Incandescent Scriabin, superbly recorded; Muti has met his match at last.

- Dan Morgan, MusicWeb International

It is hard to escape the incredible pull of Symphony No. 7, knowing the background to its composition and its general significance. Shostakovich began to work on the actual composition in July 1941 in Leningrad, where he wrote the first three movements under constant attack from the enemy; and after his evacuation from the city besieged by German troops, he completed the Finale and the instrumentation in Kuibyschev in December 1941.

Reviews:

Paavo Järvi's Leningrad is the opposite of his father's 1988 epic with the Scottish National Orchestra - light, laconic and sonically lean where Neeme's recording was spectacularly big in every way.

– BBC Music Magazine

Järvi and his engineers offer ruthless clarity and precision, exposing a rogue E flat clarinet with a flash of the theme at one point (never heard that before) and lacerating flutter-tongued trumpets as the shock and awe peaks…there is no denying the excellence of the playing.

– Gramophone

Rising star violinist Chloe Chua presents a recording combining Chen Gang and He Zhanhao's Butterfly Lovers Violin Concerto with Niccolo Paganini's First Violin Concerto, performed together with the Singapore Symphony Orchestra, Rodolfo Barraez and Mario Venzago. The Butterfly Lovers Violin Concerto was written in 1959, and inspired by a tale often called the Romeo & Juliet of ancient China. Chen and He deftly combine a Western classical idiom with elements from Chinese opera, such as grace notes and portamento effects, and the work has become one of the most famous and acclaimed pieces of Chinese classical music. This album also features an interpretation of Chen Gang's Sunshine over Tashkurgan, which adds Central-Asian maqam to the stylistic palette. The programme concludes with Paganini's First Violin Concerto, musically inspired by Rossinian bel canto. The three works share a richness of melodic invention and orchestral colours, as well as breathtaking virtuosic demands for the soloist. The solo parts are in excellent hands with Chloe Chua, who admires the steadfast love and perseverance of the Butterfly Lovers, and feels fully at home in these evocative and exhilarating masterpieces.

Vladimir Jurowski’s award-winning interpretation of Strauss’s Eine Alpensinfonie with the Rundfunk-Sinfonieorchester Berlin returns in a limited vinyl edition to celebrate the orchestra’s centenary anniversary, taking place in late October 2023. The Alpine Symphony was inspired by the composer’s experiences during a mountain trail, and is an audience favourite thanks to its picturesque, idyllic charm and powerfully evocative score. To Jurowski, the attraction of this piece lies not so much in the picturesque, but rather in Strauss’s Nietzschean embrace of living in the now and the transformative power of being in complete harmony with sublime nature.

In that respect, this album shares a kinship not only with Jurowski’s previous recording of Strauss’s Also Sprach Zarathustra (2017), but equally with his acclaimed interpretation of Mahler’s Das Lied von der Erde (2020), in which he also recognizes a composer coming to terms with the mortality of man while celebrating the immortal nature of Life. Seen in this light, Strauss’s Alpine Symphony becomes much more than just an exquisitely scored postcard. The recording, first released in 2021, was crowned with an Opus Klassik Award in 2022.

At the Festival Hall, on 24 April, 1960, an 80-year-old Sir Thomas Beecham gave what would turn out to be the final concert he conducted with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra in London. SOMM Recordings is releasing the last work on that historic programme as part of it's continuing Beecham Collection of live recordings-the Bacchanale from the opera Samson et Dalila by Camille Saint-Saens. Unbeknownst to them, the audience's tumultuous reception of this performance proved to be a farewell to Beecham on the London concert platform. In June 1960, he suffered a cerebral thrombosis and never conducted again; he died on 8 March 1961. Jon Tolansky, a former musician at the Royal Opera House who has since specialised in making documentary features on composers and performers, recalls hearing this programme as an 11-year-old. "I had never heard anything remotely like it," he says, "as Sir Thomas, now standing fully upright on the podium, became a generator of electric lightning and as the Royal Festival Hall seemed to be shaking, most especially in the last two minutes or so, in a catastrophic earthquake." This historic release also includes live recordings of Saint-Saens's First Cello Concerto and Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov's Scheherazade. Once again, audio restoration is by the renowned audio recording engineer Lani Spahr,�whose work has recently been honoured with four Gramophone�Magazine Editor's Choice Awards-for Bruckner from the Archives Vols I and IV and, more recently, Bliss, the Composer Conducts and E.J. Moeran's music conducted by Sir Adrian Boult. Beecham was always what The Times called "a quietly persistent advocate for Saint-Saens," and he offers attentive support to the 1958 reading of Saint-Saens's First Cello Concerto by Ukrainian-born soloist Mischel Cherniavsky. The concerto is in one continuous movement with three tightly structured sections sharing interrelated ideas. Cherniavsky came from a family of nine musically gifted children, and he played in the Cherniavsky Trio with two of his brothers from 1901 until 1934, after which he was mostly based in London and France. The live performance of Rimsky-Korsakov's Scheherazade on this release was given at the Royal Festival Hall on 21 March, 1957. This fell right in the middle of recording sessions when the orchestra was immersed in the piece for three days, which goes some way to explaining the glorious quality of the playing in the concert. What Rimsky-Korsakov described as the "various fairy-tale wonders" he had in mind when composing the work come across in Beecham's live performance with a freshness and brilliance that make for an unforgettable experience. A 24-year-old Steven Staryk became leader of the�RPO shortly before these recordings, earning the title "king of concertmasters" from�The Strad�magazine. About his performance on this concert The Times wrote "the solo playing of the new leader, Mr Steven Staryk, must have due acknowledgment."

A powerful symphony by Zygmunt Stojowski that propelled the composer onto the international stage. Dazzling orchestration, soaring melodies, and an adventurous harmonic language place the work at the crossroads of late Romantic intensity and emerging Modernist boldness-music that was unjustly neglected in concert programs for generations. Under the dynamic leadership of Lukasz Borowicz, the Poznan Philharmonic Orchestra makes a compelling case for this forgotten masterpiece, delivering a performance of sweeping momentum, dramatic impact, and striking expressive range that restores the symphony to it's rightful place in the repertoire.

Felix Mendelssohn's Violin Concerto in E minor, composed over an extended period and in collaboration with it's dedicatee Ferdinand David, was an instant success at it's premiere. The concerto's glorious melodic invention and innovative character have made it one of the most beloved works in the classical canon. Dramatic in mood and troubled in it's history, Robert Schumann's Violin Concerto is regarded by soloist Albrecht Menzel as revealing the composer's inner world, from the deepest anguish to the heights of exhilaration.

PENTATONE's release of the Czech Philharmonic's complete Mahler Cycle under Bychkov brings together one of Europe's most historically resonant orchestras with a conductor internationally recognised for his structural command and interpretive integrity. The orchestra occupies a distinctive place within Mahler's geographical and cultural landscape - Mahler was born and brought up in Bohemia and completed his First Symphony shortly after spending a year in Prague. Mahler symphonies have been central to Bychkov's programming with the Czech Philharmonic since 2018, when he opened his tenure as Chief Conductor and Music Director with performances of Mahler Symphony No. 2. Symphonies Nos. 1-5, released by PENTATONE beginning in April 2022, have received universal acclaim. The recordings have been selected as Gramophone Editor's Choice and BBC Music Magazine Recording of the Month. As The Sunday Times writes, "This is turning out to be one of the truly great Mahler sets."

The development of an original classical repertoire for the accordion began with Mogens Ellegaard in his native Denmark and his student, the Scot Owen Murray, in the UK. In 1976 Ellegaard gave the first broadcast performance of Gordon Jacob's pastoral, elegant concerto, which treats the accordion almost as a chamber organ. A generation and more later, two concertos written for Owen Murray open out the possibilities of the accordion much more adventurously, exploiting it's extraordinary range of colour, it's striking range of expression and it's mercurial ability to weave through orchestral textures.