Although Girolamo Frescobaldi's organ works draw on the polyphonic tradition of the Renaissance, few virtuosos of the early 17th century tackled with as much originality the expressive movement that opened the way for what we consider 'Baroque music'. He transposed for the keyboard this sense of the affect and virtuosity that, in the sphere of opera, overturned all the conventions of vocal music. He recommended flexible playing, freed of any overly strict constraints, insisting on the fact that the musician must play 'con affetti cantabili' (with the affects of singing). Belgian organist, composer, conductor, and opera director Bernard Foccroulle performs these works beautifully. He is currently the director of the Theatre royal de la Monnaie.

OVERTURES, POLKAS, VALSES

4CD box set of the radical later music of Igor Stravinsky. In 1944 Stravinsky met 20-year old music student Robert Craft, forging a deep friendship and creative partnership that would prove to be decisive in determining the composer's musical direction. With his career at an impasse, Craft encouraged Stravinsky to re- evaluate the possibilities of 12-tone writing; introducing him to works by Schoenberg and Webern and to a generation of young composers with which he was scarcely familiar.

Classical Music

The Pfeiffer Trompeten Consort presents this lovely program of works by Telemann, Charpentier, Holborne, Frescobaldi, and more. Pfeiffer-Trompeten-Consort was founded by the brothers Joachim, Martin, and Harald Pfeiffer in 1985. They were soon joined by Dale Marrs, who has decisively put his stamp on the musical style of the group. Mathias Muller, tympanist, joined in 1992. Through Peter Schumann, organist, the group's musical home has always been the Heiliggeistkirche (Church of the Holy Spirit) in Heidelberg, Germany. Most of the works performed by the Pfeiffer-Trompeten-Consort, famous, as well as less-well-known pieces, are presented in new, festive arrangements, most of which (with the exception of a few original compositions) have been revised and adapted by members of the ensemble. These arrangements are unique in their style. It is always easy to recognize the concern for combining Baroque trumpet artistry with modern playing techniques. In addition to the original trumpet parts, the Pfeiffer-Trompeten-Consort tries to include as many of the other instrumental parts as possible, and thus to consider the musical compositions in their entirety. The possibilities of modem trumpets combined with the splendid sound of the instruments transform familiar compositions into a new listening experience.

Hungarian born Gyorgy Cziffra was one of the most celebrated virtuosos of the post-war decades in Europe, noted for his powers of improvisation as a Liszt pianist. The Grieg Concerto is typical of Cziffra's 'mercurial quality' while the Liszt Concerto and Fantasy on Hungarian Folk Themes are very much in the style with which Liszt 'loved to astonish his adoring audiences'. (Bryce Morrison)

A CHRISTMAS FESTIVAL is that rarity when it comes to holiday music: an album driven by more than the common theme of the music. While it does feature a host of seasonal favorites, the show stars remarkable performances, making it a joy any time of year.
The album has been digitally remastered from original recordings made in the late 1960s. The first half of the album features the organ of St. Michael's Church in New York City, played by E. Power Biggs. The majesty of the room can be felt in both the rich organ tones as well as in the chorus' delivery. The second half of the album features the vocals of soprano Phyllis Curtin. In contrast to the all-male vocals of the St. Michael's performances, Curtin gives the album a refreshing female presence. Even when singing with full orchestra, her voice gives intimacy to the music.

CONCERTOS & CAPRICCIOS

For TRACKLIST/PERFORMERS SUMMARY, please expand note below:

Named as one of the world’s finest choirs by Gramophone, Wells Cathedral Choir and their director Matthew Owens make their Resonus Classics debut with a programme of carols typically performed during the Christmas season in Wells – A Wells Christmas. With an irresistible array of popular carols and more recent offerings this scintillating and varied programme is vividly realised by the combined boy and girl choristers and Vicars Choral that continue the 1100-year-old tradition of music in Wells Cathedral. Included in this compelling programme are works by David Willcocks, Andrew Carter, John Rutter, and Kenneth Leighton, Thomas Hewitt Jones. Also included are world premieres by Bob Chilcott, Jefferson McConnaughey & Matthew Owens.

TRACKLIST:

1 Bob Chilcott: Sussex Carol
2 Andrew Carter: A maiden most gentle
3 Jefferson McConnaughey: In the bleak midwinter
4 Malcolm Sargent: Zither Carol
5 Matthew Owens: Lullay, my liking
6 David Willcocks: Deck the hall
7 John Rutter: Donkey Carol
8 David Willcocks: Tomorrow shall be my dancing day
9 Ralph Vaughan Williams: This is the truth sent from above
10 John Rutter: Sans Day Carol
11 Alfred Hollins: Christmas Cradle Song
12 Bob Chilcott: The Sparrow's Carol
13 Thomas Hewitt Jones: What child is this?
14 John Rutter: Jesus Child
15 John Rutter: I saw three ships
16 Kenneth Leighton: O leave your sheep
17 David Willcocks: Jingle, bells
18 Richard Elliott: I Saw Three Ships
19 Arthur Warell: A Merry Christmas
20 Peter Gritton: Have yourself a merry little Christmas

LSO LIVE - Strauss: Also Sprach Zarathustra; Debussy: Jeux - Francois Roth - Xavier - Works: Debussy: Jeux - Po�me dans� - Strauss, R: Also sprach Zarathustra, Op. 30 2023 release.

The highly distinguished conductor Rudolf Kempe (1910-1976) started as an oboist with the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra. During the Second World War, he was chief conductor of the Chemnitz Opera until 1946. He then worked at Weimar for the 1948-9 season, before joining the Dresden Opera and becoming chief conductor. From 1952 to 1954, he was chief conductor of the Bavarian State Opera, which he conducted at Covent Garden in 1953 to great acclaim. Mahler's Symphony No.4 is a new addition to the Kempe discography. The recording, which was discovered in the Music Preserved archive in York, is a real rarity. Similarly, Mendelssohn's Ruy Blas Overture is a new addition to the conductor's discography. It is heard here in a fiery performance captured live from the Royal Festival Hall in 1967 with the LSO. Kempe's account of the Prelude to Act I of Wagner's Parsifal, recorded in 1965, confirms his status as one of the greatest Wagnerian conductors of the 20th century. His Covent Garden performances of Parsifal in 1959 were landmarks for the company.

Leoš Janáček was an authority on his native folk-music, and the Lachian and Moravian Dances preserve and celebrate culture and traditions which were vanishing even in his own lifetime. Based on Gogol’s historical novel, Janáček’s inspired orchestral rhapsody on Taras Bulba depicts three moving and dramatic episodes in the violent life of the Cossack leader, climaxing in his stirring and triumphant prophecy of liberation. This release follows Antoni Wit’s acclaimed Warsaw recording of Janáček’s Glagolitic Mass and Sinfonietta (8.572639). Antoni Wit, one of the most highly regarded Polish conductors, studied conducting with Henryk Czyz and composition with Krzysztof Penderecki at the Academy of Music in Kraków, subsequently continuing his studies with Nadia Boulanger in Paris. In 2002 he became managing and artistic director of the Warsaw Philharmonic Orchestra.

REVIEWS:

Everything about this disc is fabulous: the performances, the coupling, and the sonics. Antoni Wit’s Taras Bulba sounds like no other. It’s full of details that you won’t have heard before, particularly in the layering of textures and shades of woodwind color. This is particularly obvious in the second movement, “The Death of Ostap”, but these personal touches never get in the way of an idiomatic, indeed visceral response to the music’s high drama. Wit builds the tension in the first movement’s successive episodes as well as anyone ever has, and releases it in a truly menacing battle sequence, with vicious contributions from the low brass. In the finale the Naxos engineers balance the organ and orchestra uncannily in the concluding apotheosis, which Wit conducts with a wholly individual combination of grandeur and serenity. It’s just plain wonderful.

Wit’s first Janácek disc contained the Glagolitic Mass and the Sinfonietta, and finding appropriate couplings for the composer’s scant orchestral output is never easy. There are the two other symphonic poems (The Ballad of Blaník and The Fiddler’s Child), some assorted overtures, the Schluck und Jau incidental music, the early works for string orchestra, and very little else. Wit’s choice of the two dance suites turns out to be an inspired decision, since they offer music that marries very well with Taras Bulba. The Lachian Dances are somewhat well known from recordings, though still a rarity in concert, but the Moravian Dances of 1891, a five-movement suite lasting about nine minutes, remains the preserve of Janácek specialists. They are delightful, and I offer a sample of No. 2 (“Kalamajka”). For the record, Wit omits the optional organ part in the Lachian Dances (the score refers to it as “inobligato”), a smart idea as the orchestration is already somewhat thick. Strongest recommendation.

– David Hurwitz, ClassicsToday.com

Following up from his most recent classical, The Agnostic, composer David Chesky uncovers the second half of his acclaimed 1998 release, Three Psalms For String Orchestra entitled Psalms 4, 5 & 6: Rememberance For The Victims of the Modern Holocausts.

The MIT Wind and Festival Jazz Ensembles' recording Infinite Winds presents a wonderfully broad range of musical styles from composers who have surpassed the limits of jazz and modern classical composing. The pieces by Klein, Corea and Byron differ greatly but are performed skillfully by the two ensembles, highlighting all their nuances and dynamic vitality. On their new and musically diverse release Infinite Winds, the MIT Wind Ensemble and the MIT Festival Jazz Ensemble present three long form compositions by three innovative and highly regarded composers: Guillermo Klein, Chick Corea and Don Byron. The Corea and Byron pieces are world premi�re recordings on this Sunnyside release. Klein's Solar Return Suite and Byron's Concerto For Clarinet and Wind Ensemble feature special guest soloists, saxophonist Bill McHenry and clarinetist Evan Ziporyn, respectively.

Classical Music

Barbirolli made two earlier recordings of Berlioz's Symphonie fantastique in 1947 (mono) and 1958 (early stereo), both with the Halle Orchestra. This new live recording with the SWF orchestra in Baden-Baden from 1969 is in state-of-the-art stereo sound and does full justice to Berlioz's wonderful score. Likewise, Haydn's Symphony No.83 the Hen always remained a Barbirolli favorite. He first recorded it in 1949 in mono but here it is captured in excellent stereo 20 years later and released in 2013 for the first time.

Obscurus is an exploration of the obscured, in a program which showcases some of the most incredible trumpet writing of the 20th and 21st century, as well as several reimagining's of older, more mainstream works for other instruments, arranged for trumpet. "I wanted this album to have some thread that ran through the program - I love piecing together works which complement each other in new and interesting ways, and the concept of obscurity; things being hidden or veiled in some way, is a commonality with every piece." All of these works have their own very distinctive voice and presence, whether representing dim shapes shrouded in mist; a usually clear voice distorted and changed by grains of sand; a wordless song; ruins and dances lost to time and memory - or simply the line beyond which we cannot see; that of death.

Alexander Pushkin (1799-1837) effectively founded Russian literature, elevating his mother tongue to match the wit and penetrating observation of the French, Spanish and English writers he admired. He was revered even through the Soviet years, the hundredth anniversary of his death being grandly commemorated in 1936 during Stalin's reign. It was for that occasion that the two sets of Pushkin songs by Russia's leading composers of that time - Prokofiev and Shostakovich - were originally composed. In later life, Shostakovich became friends with the English composer, Benjamin Britten, who also befriended the cellist and pianist Mstislav Rostropovich (a sometime pupil of Shostakovich's) and his wife the soprano Galina Vishnevskaya. It was specifically for the latter two artists that Britten in 1965 composed The Poet's Echo.

"Previously unreleased. This small trove of live recordings from conductor Claudio Abbado from the Lucerne Festival, approved for release by the conductor himself, is being issued in memory of his recent passing (Jan. 2014). The extensive multi-language booklet contains a portrait of Claudio Abbado by Peter Hagmann tracing the conductor’s long-standing activities in Lucerne; also included are previously unpublished photos from the Lucerne Festival archives."

This new release is the recording of the first part of the 2015 Adelaide International Festival. Lento, the first track, was commissioned by the BBC Symphony Orchestra to precede a performance of Wagner’s prelude to Parsifal and uses the same instrumentation. It consists of a sequence of major and minor triads and an implacably steady tempo, rather like Satie’s Les Pantins Dansent. Most of Lento is scored for just strings with a central section for winds alone. Those familiar with Howard Skempton’s work as a whole will recognize the same spirit, clarity of purpose and rigour that appears in his earliest works, though here transposed into a much grander environment. This release also features Gavin Bryars “The Porazzi Fragment,” “Ennelina’s Aria from ‘G,’” and “Epilogue from G,” as well as Arvo Part’s “If Bach had Been a Bookkeeper.”

For Gianandrea Noseda, the Ninth is Shostakovich at his most 'classical', but a modern statement nonetheless. "Stalin wanted a celebration of the victory of Russia, and Shostakovich came out with a sort of opera buffa symphony," the LSO's Principal Guest Conductor says. "Short, witty, lots of sarcasm. I can really feel his wish to go against what was expected of him." The Tenth Symphony was written after Stalin's death and allegedly portrays the tragedy, despair, terror and violence of his tenure. The second movement is a musical portrait of Stalin, a march of unremitting terror and frenzied violence, while the finale contains some of the slowest music of the whole symphony, a reminder of the desolation of the Gulag prisoners.

Classical Music

STRAVINSKY: SYMPHONY OF PSALMS

Classical Music

This project comes into the category of a 'reconstruction', inspired by studying Dalmatian, Gregorian, and Glagolitic sources. This repertory, sung in the local vernacular though it belonged to the Roman rite, was preserved in manuscripts written in the Glagolitic alphabet used in medieval Croatia. The archaic beauty of the text is fabulously illustrated here by images of incredible aesthetic refinement.