This studio recording of Alexander Glazunov's Raymonda was captured in October 2022. The arrangement was created for the ENB's 2022 production, with a score specially adapted and edited by Gavin Sutherland and Lars Payne. The lavish orchestral adaptation retains the best of the composer's original score, updating it to match the dramatic new narrative devised by Tamara Rojo.

Olcay Bayir gives voice to the hardships of the valiant people of Anatolia, who, despite innumerable injustices, continue to preserve their language, culture, and customs. "Tu Gulî," a collection of Kurdish Alevi soul-infused songs, honors her multicultural and multilingual background. While blending her own personal memoirs with London's modern cosmopolitan sounds, she also pays tribute to the strong, devoted women of her Anatolian geography, including her own grandmothers and her mother.

Philzuid's sixth album includes works by Louise Farrenc and Robert Schumann. This brave and welcome attempt to rewrite or at least re-evaluate music history features live recordings of Louise Farrenc's Third Symphony and Robert Schumann's Third (Rhenish) Symphony under chief conductor Duncan Ward. Female composers in the 19th century were not expected to pursue a career, let alone compete with the great symphonists of the period; Schumann, however, had all eyes and ears on him whenever he premiered a new work or took up a new position.

Award-winning Baroque violinist Rachel Podger takes the resurgence of the Arts in England post -1660 as the compelling inspiration for her new album, The Muses Restor’d. Adopting its title as its theme, Rachel and her vivacious Brecon Baroque take the listener on a journey of captivating violinled chamber music from Jacobean to Early Georgian England. Ranging from the gentle intimacy of consort idioms to the full-blown instrumental virtuosity of the evolving Baroque period, this album uncovers little known glories of English instrumental music and its influences. This refined and intimately chiselled chamber music celebrates a rich tradition where the violin joins a plethora of keyboards, lutes, viol and continuo cello reinstating these sonatas, fantasies, suites, grounds and popular tunes to the mainstream of English cultural life of the time. Together with four musicians from Brecon Baroque, Rachel Podger performs works by Handel, Lawes, Blow, Locke, Purcell, Schop, Jenkins, Baltzar and Jones.

“This oeuvre provides a deeply satisfying kaleidoscope of musical expression over a century of British
musical life."
- Rachel Podger

These world premiere recordings of Rieti's Piano Concertos Nos. 1-3 are performed by the award-winning pianist Alessandro Marangoni, accompanied by the Orchestra Sinfonica di Milano and conducted by Guiseppe Grazioli. Marangoni is joined by Orazio Sciortino in the first stereo recording of the Concerto for Two Pianos and Orchestra.

La Scena Musicale hails Montreal-based pianist David Potvin as a rising star of 2022. As winner of the 45th Eckhardt-Gramatté National Music Competition, he toured across Canada in the fall of 2022 with a diversely curated program of Canadian repertoire and quickly established himself as one of Canada’s most exciting contemporary pianists. "Catharsis" is an album that expresses an emotional release experience, often of complex, deeply held, or repressed emotions. The experience later transforms into peace, tranquility, and, most importantly, a shift of perspective. This album’s pieces were selected on his tour across Canada, where Potvin performed music exclusively by Canadian composers. These compositions include works from Chris Derksen’s "Growing Forgiveness," Keiko Devaux’s "murmuration," and Jean Coulthard’s "Preludes for Piano" and "Canada Mosaic: The Contented House" (arranged for piano by David Potvin), which has never been recorded before. The album starts with Derksen’s "Growing Forgiveness," an artistic response to the tension she felt in certain relationships during the pandemic; a truly serene ending follows the piece’s driving climax. Followed by Coulthard’s 13 Preludes, they are all imbued with deep emotional expression, and over the complete set, tension peaks near the end. Then Devaux’s "murmuration" is not explicitly an exercise in emotional expression: pianistic gestures describe the movement of small birds moving in large flocks. "Catharsis" concludes the album with a piano arrangement of Coulthard’s "Canada Mosaic: The Contented House," a meditative reflection that gives the listener a moment to contemplate the churning passion.

Franz Clement was a composer and violin virtuoso who premiered Beethoven's Violin Concerto. Clement's solo violin works heard here display a lexicon of technical demands, suave lyricism, wit and imaginative writing. The award-winning violinist Haoli Lin performs this programme of world premiere recordings.

Felix Mendelssohn was a passionate organist. Whether in small churches or in majestic cathedrals - wherever he encountered one of these instruments, he had everything he needed. The complex pipe works enabled him to revel in the music of the past on the one hand, which was connected in a special way to the name and output of Johann Sebastian Bach, and on the other hand to let his own ideas have free reign just as his heart desired and to see what would come out of it. Christian Schmitt has recorded the results in impressive completeness on two instrumental works of art from Mendelssohn's time. Each of the three CDs contains two of the six sonatas, and also feature numerous miniatures with which the eternally young Felix mapped out his broad musical horizons.

On the war cruiser Le Montesquieu, the unexpected arrival of a high commissioner accompanied by his daughter suddenly rocks the balance of the ship and the hearts of the sailors... What will happen to all this fine crew? You'll find out when you listen to Coups de roulis, a classic French musical exhumed by Les Frivolites Parisiennes with their characteristic blend of enthusiasm and high standards.

A unique combination on record of chamber music by the Swiss composer, surveying the development of his voice and career through the medium of the flute. One of music's late starters, Martin grew up as the tenth child of a Swiss pastor and his wife, surrounded by the music of Bach and Mozart. Only once Ernest Ansermet had founded the Orchestra de la Suisse Romande in 1918 did the 28-year-old Martin begin to discover and become captivated by the sensuality of Debussy and Ravel, and this stylistic dichotomy continued to play out in his own music. Among the most polished and individual of his early works is the set of four love-sonnets composed in 1921 to poems by the 16th-century balladeer Pierre de Ronsard. Already the influence of modernism is apparent on the angular and even ascetic shape of Martin's melodic invention, and yet a gentle, atmospheric mood pervades the cycle; this, too, would become a hallmark of his sound-world. In 1939, Martin began what would become a series of instrumental ballades with the competition piece which is still his best-known work for flute. In the same year, he followed it up with a Ballade for alto saxophone which he then arranged for flute; both works are fine examples of Martin's ability to reconcile serialism with tonality. A neoclassical (or rather, neo-Baroque) spirit infuses the Sonata da Chiesa of 1940 with solemn, Protestant gravity, yet the flute part still sings with the lyricism of the early Sonnets. From after the war, the Trois Chants de Noel (1947) distil the mystery of Christmas into three brief settings of texts by the Swiss poet Albert Rudhardt (1894-1944). A trio of Minnelieder (1961) masterfully strips Martin's language to the bone in a distinctive 'late style', where flute and guitar support and punctuate the sung line with an archaically flavoured modernity. Almost all these works have attracted no more than one or two recordings, but gathered together by these expert Italian musicians, they paint a new and compelling portrait of Martin as a spiritually engaged modernist. - Frank Martin (1890-1974) was a Swiss composer, who lived for most of his life in The Netherlands. Hs oeuvre spans orchestral works, oratorios, and chamber music. Martin's style defies easy categorization, blending elements of neoclassicism, serialism, and Gregorian chant. His vocal works reflect his spiritual depth and musical mastery. - Frank Martin wrote a not a large but a significant number of works for flute, including the Ballade for flute and piano (1939), the Deuxieme Ballade for flute and piano (1939) and the Church Sonata for flute and organ (1941). Of these three, only the Ballade is an original work for flute, as the Deuxieme Ballade and the Church Sonata are the author's transcriptions of earlier scores. Also included in this new recording are works for soprano and instrumental ensemble, featuring flute, oboe, harp, viola and cello. - A fascinating collection of a highly original voice in 20th century music! - Played by Daniele Ruggieri, Monica Bacelli and several excellent Italian instrumentalists.

After her first b records album, the result of her residency at the Royaumont Foundation, Claudia Chan, ambassador of the contemporary pianistic repertoire, presents her new record dedicated to the Italian school. From the masters Salvatore Sciarrino and Sylvano Bussotti to the new generation led by Francesco Filidei, Simone Cardini and Giulia Lorusso, the performer reveals the richness of a national heritage marked by a free spirit and the sensuality of the sounds that resonate under her fingers, sometimes even before they activate the keys. A program with a high potential for discovery!

On the 1710 Stradivarius known as the "Vieuxtemps, Hauser", violinist Ning Feng plays two monumental Russian violin concertos with the Bochum Symphony Orchestra conducted by Tung-Chieh Chuang. In the First Violin Concertos of Prokofiev and Shostakovich, the soloist is confronted with technical acrobatics and many contrasting moods, all of which Ning Feng navigates expertly and interprets in such a way that "the more you listen, the more you want to listen", as Gramophone put it.

This album features two compositions by Jean Sibelius from different moments in the Finnish musician's life. The Impromptu Op.5 for string ensemble is an early work from 1894, in which Sibelius uses some thematic materials from his solo piano impromptus Nos. 5 and 6 from the Op.5 set. The Romance in C Op.42 (1903) was composed during a difficult phase in the composer's life caused by excessive alcohol consumption, which prompted him to leave Helsinki and move with his wife near to Lake Tuusula, where he could dedicate himself to composition far from the temptations of the Finnish capital. The piece is divided into short sections in which the melodic ideas arise from fragments of the octatonic, or diminished, scale of alternating whole and half steps supported by dissonant harmonies that add further tonal instability. Samuel Barber's typically inspired melodic vein emerges from the very beginning in his Serenade Op.1 for String Quartet or String Orchestra, dating from 1928. Featuring chromaticism's and dissonant passages, a duality is established between a first, rhythmic and impetuous thematic idea and a lyrical melody. The final movement brings greater serenity and joy through the choice of a major mode and the adoption of a graceful and leaping theme whose fragments pass in counterpoint between one voice and another. When Benjamin Britten composed his Simple Symphony Op.4 he was just 20 years old, and he describes the idea in an introduction to the score: 'This "Simple Symphony" is entirely based on material from works which the composer wrote between the ages of nine and twelve [.]. Although the development of these themes is in many places quite new, there are large stretches of the work which are taken bodily from the early pieces - save for the re-scoring for strings'. In effect, Britten extrapolates eight themes from his juvenile compositional production, associates two of them with each movement and creates a structural mix between the four movements of a Classical symphony, the dances of the Baroque suite and popular folklore. Da pacem Domine is a Gregorian style piece composed by Arvo P�rt in 2004 to commemorate the victims of the Madrid terrorist attacks on trains, which killed 192 people. P�rt first composed a version for four voices on the text of a Latin prayer. That atmosphere of contemplation is preserved in his subsequent edition for chamber orchestra. The modal composition, in D Dorian, conveys the feeling of a search for calmness, a request from man to God for peace in the wake of such a tragedy. Scattered appearances of B flat and the leading tone (C sharp) mitigate and add a piquancy to the modal atmosphere.

For two decades, Cologne's TRIO 1790 has been dedicated to classical chamber music in general and the piano trios of Mozart's contemporary Leopold Kozeluch in particular. The result is a series of precious finds that do not lose any of their impact from the fine, slender tone of historically accurate instruments. On the contrary, they gain an unexpected wealth of subtle shadings and depth in the playful music of this inventive and versatile Bohemian. Again and again, the light-footed, distinctive sounds and lines are interspersed with dramatic flourishes that the attentive ear will recognise as the "modern music" of Ludwig van Beethoven, who came from Bonn on the Rhine to Vienna on the Danube to shake up the music world.

With this new b�records release, Victor Julien-laferriere and the Orchestre Consuelo lay the foundation for a titanic edifice: the complete nine symphonies of Ludwig van Beethoven. Supported by the Festival de la Chaise-Dieu, which lends the exceptional acoustics of it's abbey church, this four-year project marks a decisive step for the young orchestra of variable geometry. Composed mainly of chamber musicians, the ensemble forges a meticulous and passionate collective identity in this first opus dedicated to Symphonies no. 1, no. 2 and no. 4, which already bear witness to the search for comprehensibility and universality of language characteristic of Beethoven's symphonic corpus.

Rachmaninoff's Third and Second Symphonies are distanced from each other not only by thirty years but also by the turning point in history that bisected the destiny of the Russian intelligentsia. Rachmaninoff was full of creative energy and aspirations while writing the Second Symphony, in 1906-1907, even though he sought solitude in Dresden to feel the breath of his Motherland from a distance and to relate his own destiny to it. He was already a different person by the mid-1930s, struggling with the aftermath of his fate as an exile and summing up his life. He wrote this new work about Russia and himself - which was to become the Third Symphony - at villa Senar in Switzerland. The geographical distance was aggravated by the distance in time: a gravitation towards the cherished past, to which it was impossible to return. The Ural Philharmonic Orchestra under Dmitry Liss has repeatedly performed the Third Symphony in both Russia and abroad; they also performed it in La Folle Journee festival in Nantes in 2018. The orchestra's interpretation of Ravel's La Valse is similarly iconic; this gained particular recognition from European critics and opened the doors to the world's leading stages.

The latest innovative release from The Orchestra Now and their founder-conductor Leon Botstein evokes the age-old practice of transcribing music from one set of instruments or voices to another. Transcription as Translation brings together two symphonic transcriptions by two major 20th-century conductors who were eager to perform from the podium some of their favourite non-orchestral works and present them to a wider audience. Turn of the 20th century Austrian composer and conductor Felix Weingartner had an illustrious international career that included the directorship of the Vienna Philharmonic and regular guest conducting of the Boston Symphony. He was at the vanguard of the era of acoustic recording and was the first conductor to make commercial recordings of all nine Beethoven symphonies. Weingartner's Beethoven credentials informed his orchestral transcription of Beethoven's "Hammerklavier" Piano Sonata. The name of Hungarian-born conductor George Szell remains synonymous with the Cleveland Orchestra, where he was Music Director from 1946 - 1970, to this day. He had previously worked for many years in Prague where he developed a special affinity for Czech music which is attested to his orchestration of Smetana's String Quartet No. 1 ("From My Life").

Four composers, four fates. The stories of the four composers and their work are exemplary for the fate of Polish music in the first half of the 20th century, exemplary for a promising new beginning after the First World War following 123 years of political and cultural oppression and foreign domination by the Russian, Prussian and Austrian empires, exemplary for the unimaginable suffering and indescribable destruction that befell Poland with the Nazi terror on 1 September 1939, exemplary, however, also for the tremendous vigor and vitality that is so typical of Polish music as an expression of an indomitable will to live and survive. The biographies of Szymon Laks (1901-1983), Aleksander Tansman (1897-1986) and Mieczyslaw Weinberg (1919-1996) also confront us with questions about the "identity" of music, about the perspectives of cultural historiography, about the mechanisms of repression, forgetting and rediscovery. Even though we are dealing with composers who never questioned their Polish identity, the centrifugal forces that affected their biographies through persecution, expulsion and exile were so strong that their national "adhesion" was lost. For decades, they found themselves in a kind of limbo from which only a transnational perspective on cultural history could free them. The fate of Ludomir Rozycki (1883-1953) was just as difficult. In 1904 he left Poland for Berlin to perfect his craft with Engelbert Humperdinck at the Royal Academy. During the 19th century and even at the beginning of the 20th century, Polish music was overshadowed by the Russian and, above all, the German "schools". For decades, training at a German academy was a must, with the Berlin institutions being of particular importance. Stanislaw Moniuszko studied at the Berlin Academy of Arts, Mieczyslaw Karlowicz at the New Academy of Music, and Zygmunt Noskowski, Feliks Nowowiejski and Ignacy Jan Paderewski at the Stern Conservatory. In 1906 in Berlin, Rozycki together with Karol Szymanowski, Apolinary Szeluto and Grzegorz Fitelberg - all of whom were students of Noskowski - founded the Spolka Nakladowa Mlodych Kompozytorow Polskich (Publishing Society of Young Polish Composers) with the aim of promoting contemporary, progressive Polish music, which was having a difficult time at home, and publicising it with editions and concerts. Rozycki enjoyed enormous popularity during his lifetime, even beyond Poland's borders. He made substantial contributions to Polish symphonic poems with 'Stanczyk', 'Anhelli' and 'Boleslaw Smialy', and to Polish opera with 'Amor and Psyche', 'Casanova', 'Medusa' and 'Beatrix Cenci'. His ballet 'Pan Twardowski' (a Polish version of the Faust story), which premiered in 1921, was the most popular Polish ballet of the interwar period, with over 500 performances in Warsaw alone until 1939. Rozycki, who also played a central role in Polish musical life as a teacher with professorships in Lviv, Warsaw and Katowice, survived the Second World War in Warsaw, where he was active as a pianist in underground concerts. When the capital was destroyed by the German Wehrmacht in 1944, some of his previously unpublished works fell victim to the flames. 'Sonata for cello and piano' op. 10, written in Berlin in 1906, is Rozycki's first chamber music work. Alongside Zygmunt Stojowski's virtuosically expansive Sonata for cello and piano, premiered a few years earlier, it is one of the first contributions to the genre by Polish composers after Fryderyk Chopin's work written in 1847. Rozycki dedicated it to the cellist Konstanty Sarnecki, with whom he premiered the work. The three-movement work is surprising in many respects. On the surface, it appears to follow an ad aspera ad astra dramaturgy. On closer inspection, however, the relationship between the dark and light aspects proves to be extremely ambivalent in a fascinating way. The tumultuous opening with virtuoso arpeggios and urging appoggiaturas in the piano transports us to a dramatic, ominous night scene. However, the catastrophic climax is already reached in the final group of the 1st theme, a wild outburst in triple

Following on the success of her acclaimed release, Donna Voce, award winning pianist Anna Shelest continues her exploration of works by women composer in Donna Voce Volume 2 - Women of Legend. Featured are Fanny Mendelssohn's monumental feat of imagination and virtuosity Das Jahr (The Year), Melanie "Mel" Bonis' suite of musical portraits Femmes de Legende (Women of Legend), and contemporary Ukrainian composer Olena Ilnytska's evocative Nocturne 1. Hailed by The New York Times as a pianist of a fiery sensibility and warm touch, Anna Shelest is an international award-winning pianist who has thrilled audiences throughout the world.

When young Japanese geisha Cio-Cio-San marries American naval officer Pinkerton, she believes she is entering a marriage for life. Forsaking her religion and community, she dreams of a future with her new husband, only to learn that for Pinkerton, their marriage is merely an illusion - one with tragic consequences. With it's exquisite score, Giacomo Puccini's poignant 1904 opera is as beautiful as it is shattering. Drawing inspiration from 19th-century European images of Japan, Moshe Leiser and Patrice Caurier's production stars Asmik Grigorian with Kevin John Edusei conducting.

The Orchestre National de Lyon and it's new musical director Nikolaj Szeps-Znaider have embarked on a collaboration with Channel Classics, which will involve several recordings combining the great works of the repertoire with lesser-known pieces. Recognised as one of the pre-eminent violinists of our time, Nikolaj Szeps-Znaider has developed an international career as a conductor, now leading some of the world's greatest orchestras. On this album, Strauss & Ibert, violist Amihai Grosz and cellist Jian Wang take on the musical roles of Sancho Panza and Don Quixote in Strauss's virtuoso tone poem Don Quixote. The symphonic suite from Jaques Ibert's Le chevalier errant also depicts moments from Cervantes' Don Quixote, replete with scenes from the knight's adventures including the famous battle in The Windmills, the Dance of the Galley Slaves and various dances including a flamenco.

Friedrich Theodor Frohlich: Johannes & Esther (Ian Bostridge, Julius Drake) Friedrich Theodor Frohlich (1803-1836), long disregarded, is now seen as the most important Swiss composer of the Early Romantic era. He left a large number of music manuscripts, which disappeared into private hands and were soon forgotten, though most of them have survived. His works are now being increasingly rediscovered and made available to listeners.

César Franck considered Les Béatitudes, for soloists, choir and orchestra, to be his greatest work. It was perhaps Johann Sebastian Bach's St. Matthew Passion that prompted him to begin a work in 1869 that too would be dominated by the voice of Christ. Franck worked on Les Béatitudes for ten years and created an original and deeply personal renewal of the oratorio form in 19th-century France. This is no simple musical depiction of a subject taken from the Gospel: Franck, a firm believer in the precepts of the Beatitudes, was here inspired to write a bold and personal work, driven by the ideal of justice that its music unforgettable portrays.

Combining the alpha and the omega of Richard Strauss’s music, Trio Arnold, Nathanaël Gouin and their partners from the budding French chamber music scene invite us on a journey as astonishing as it is sublime to the end of German Romanticism, from the radiant energy of the Piano and String Quartet to the twilight elegance of Metamorphosen.

Gates of Dream features a selection of solo and chamber works for the flute family by the Romanian composer Doina Rotaru as performed by Serbian flutist Iva Ugrcic.
Rotaru works with archetypes and symbols that she carefully weaves into liquid-like heterophonies, blending archaic Romanian influences with contemporary techniques and structures. With the flute as her chisel, she sculpts inventive sonorities while drawing from the past evoking a melancholic atmosphere and feeling of a painful beauty.

Award-winning flutist Iva Ugrcic (pronounced Ooo-gr-cheech) is one of the most exciting and adventurous flutists in the international pantheon. Winner of The American Prize in Woodwind Performance 2023, named BRAVA Magazine’s 2022 “Woman to Watch” and “Musician of the Year for 2018” by The Well-Tempered Ear, Ugrcic is known for her technical brilliance, expressive musicianship, and remarkable versatility. She has garnered international acclaim for her performances, both as a soloist and a collaborator in chamber and orchestral settings in venues across the world.

Three world premiere recordings!