In celebration of Norrington's 75th birthday, this special DVD is released featuring performances of these Haydn symphonies plus a newly produced portrait of conductor Norrington, an invaluable contribution to understanding this modest man.

The celebrated actor Elisabet Vogler has fallen silent. She doesn't speak anymore. Together with her nurse Alma the two unequal women spend a carefree summer - until the situation between them shifts. Where is the line between one's own identity and assigned roles? How is it possible to slip into a different life? Director Anna Bergmann raises questions about power, trust and role images and shows an excellent adaption of Ingmar Bergman's experimental film "Corinna Harfouch renders her roles believable and compelling." (New York Times)

Blu-ray pressing. Paul Anka is known as the last great crooner. On this live release, Anka promotes his successful Rock Swings project by performing many of the tracks live alongside his own classics including 'Diana', 'My Way', 'New York New York', 'Put Your Head on My Shoulder' and more.

A 2020 Grammy nominee for best opera recording!

This Blu-ray Disc is only playable on Blu-ray Disc players and not compatible with standard DVD players.

Also available on standard DVD
Based on Oscar Wilde’s story The Birthday of the Infanta, Zemlinsky’s single-act opera Der Zwerg is the tragic tale of a dwarf who is presented at court, falls in love with the beautiful Donna Clara, but is ultimately forced to see himself as others see him and to die of a broken heart. Preceded by Schoenberg’s Accompaniment to a Cinematographic Scene, Op. 34 (1930), Zemlinsky’s Romantic score is full of psychological intrigue. Is Der Zwerg a critique of society’s superficiality? Is it the composer’s self-portrait in his doomed affair with Alma Schindler? Director Tobias Kratzer’s stunning, transparent production creates a space in which each character is thrown into sharp relief in this ‘fine, noble and melancholy work’. (Bachtrack.com)

When lockdown was imposed in 2020 many artists began streaming performances from their own homes. In response, pianist Francesco Piemontesi and director Jan Schmidt-Garre launched a concert series to showcase artists living in Berlin. This collection of performances is a testament to the resilience and solidarity of these artists during the pandemic. (Naxos)

This tour starts with the ancient walled city of Pingyao, with visits to the Qu and Wang courtyard houses and the Shuanglin Temple. There are views of Mount Wutai, as well as the Hanging Monastery at the foot of Mount Heng.

The All-Star Orchestra gives you a front row seat to the world's greatest music, performed by top players chosen from over 30 great American orchestras. The programs feature complete performances of popular masterpieces and world premieres of new works by leading American composers. Filmed in High-Definition with 19 cameras during a once-a-year 'summit' in New York's historic Grand Ballroom at Manhattan Center, the All-Star Orchestra celebrates the symphonic experience in the 21st century. Program #5 Relationships in Music Robert Schumann's wife Clara was herself a gifted pianist and composer. She became a lifelong friend and source of inspiration for Schumann's prot�g� Johannes Brahms. This program will explore the turbulent musical and emotional relationships between these three, and the masterpieces that they produced. Program #6 the Living Art Form This program explores the creation of new concertos and the artistic process. Outstanding young soloists and leading American composers are featured in performance and in interviews.

This is the accomplished and stylish Russian debut of Tianwa Yang – one of the most unusual and energetic violinists of our time. To an enthusiastic audience within the walls of the beautiful Court Capella in St Petersburg, she performs the much-loved concertos of Tchaikovsky and Brahms with the St Petersburg State Symphony Orchestra under the sensitive direction of Vladimir Lande. The remarkable intensity of her playing is just as apparent in both her encore– Ysaÿe’s Violin Sonata No. 3 – and her separate performance of Bach’s solo Partita No. 2. Tianwa Yang has quickly established herself as a leading international performer and recording artist. She has recorded critically acclaimed interpretations of the complete music for violin andpiano, and for violin and orchestra, by Sarasate. Her recording of Mendelssohn’s two violin concertos (8572662) has won the highest praise.

CHRISTMAS WITH WINCHESTER COLLEGE CHAPEL CHOIR

Sara Macliver, soprano
Winchester College Chapel Choir
Hong Kong Philharmonic Orchestra
William Lacey, conductor
Recorded live at the Hong Kong Cultural Centre Concert Hall, 22-23 December 2004

Picture format: NTSC 4:3
Sound format: PCM Stereo / AC3 5.1 / DTS
Region code: 0 (all)
Booklet notes: English, German (sung text included)
Running time: 102 mins
No. of DVDs: 1

* This selection of music for Christmas brings together East and West in the collaboration of Winchester College Chapel Choir and the Hong Kong Philharmonic Orchestra. Recorded live in Hong Kong in December 2004, this disc features a selection of perennial favourites from the Baroque period, including Bach cantatas and Handel’s Messiah, and three exquisite modern carols.

Chapter 1:
Arcangelo Corelli: Concerto Grosso, Op. 6 No. 8 ‘Christmas Concerto’

Chapter 2:
From Praetorius to Weir
Michael Praetorius: Come, thou Redeemer of the earth
Richard Rodney Bennett: Out of your sleep
John Tavener: The Lamb
Judith Weir: Illuminare, Jerusalem

Chapter 3:
O Come All Ye Faithful
Anonymous, arr. Willcocks: O come all ye faithful

Chapter 4:
Works by Johann Sebastian Bach
Sinfonia from Cantata, BWV 42
Kyrie from Mass in G, BWV 236
'Herr, der du stark and mächtig bist' from Cantata, BWV 10
'Jesus bleibet meine Freude' from Cantata, BWV 147

Chapter 5:
George Frideric Handel: Concerto Grosso in F, Op. 6 No. 2

Chapter 6:
G.F. Handel: Messiah (excerpts)

Chapter 7:
Joy to the World and The First Noel
Lowell Mason, arr. Rutter: Joy to the World
Anonymous: The First Noel

“Dvořák's New World Symphony - A Lens on the American Experience of Race”
A PostClassical Ensemble “More than Music” film
Written and produced by Joseph Horowitz
Visual presentation by Peter Bogdanoff
Film one in the six-film Naxos series:
“Dvorak’s Prophecy: A New Narrative for American Classical Music”

The six documentary films in this series align with Joe Horowitz's new book 'Dvořák’s Prophecy and the Vexed Fate of Black Classical Music'. Like the book, they explore a “new paradigm” for the history of classical music in the United States. Why classical music in America “stayed white” is a central concern of Dvořák’s Prophecy." The films incorporate Naxos recordings as well as live performances, including William Sharp singing Ives, Kevin Deas singing Harry Burleigh, and Dennis Russell Davies conducting Harrison’s Piano Concerto. Participating commentators include critic Alex Ross, Black Classical Music pioneer George Shirley, music historians Bill Alves, Beth Levy, and Judith Tick, and the African-American conductors Roderick Cox and the late Michael Morgan.

 This first film in the series keys on Dvořák’s prophecy and explores its present-day pertinence. In New York City and Spillville, Iowa, Dvořák boldly chose to regard African-Americans and Native Americans as representative Americans. That decision was both acclaimed and ridiculed at the time. It remains inspirational. His New World Symphony, still the best known and best loved symphonic work conceived on American soil, is saturated with the influence of plantation song, and also with Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s The Song of Hiawatha. This act of appropriation, the film argues, was an act of empathy performed by a great humanitarian. The musical selections here are mainly taken from the Hiawatha Melodrama, which Joe Horowitz co-composed with the music historian Michael Beckerman with orchestrations by Angel Gil-Ordonez. It mates Dvorak with Longfellow. The participating commentators include the music historians Mark Clague and Lorenzo Candelaria, the literary historian Brian Yothers, the conductor JoAnn Falletta, faculty members from Howard University – and also (sagely commenting on cultural appropriation) the bass-baritone Kevin Deas, and the late Michael Morgan.

"Horowitz's six beautiful films reveal a compelling inclusive tradition in American classical music, open to influences from popular, Black, Native American, and world music, this music is deeply interwoven with American culture." – J. Peter Burkholder, author of A History of Western Music and Listening to Charles Ives.

“The Souls of Black Folk and the Vexed Fate of Black Classical Music”
Written and produced by Joseph Horowitz
Visual presentation by Peter Bogdanoff
Film three in the six-film Naxos series:
“Dvorak’s Prophecy: A New Narrative for American Classical Music”

If George Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess – the highest creative achievement in American classical music – embodies a glorious (and controversial) fulfillment of Dvořák’s prophecy, there also exists a buried lineage of exceptional compositions by Black composers following in Dvořák’s wake. Coming first was his assistant Harry Burleigh, whose seminal settings of “Deep River” are – as our film illustrates – as much compositions as transcriptions. Burleigh’s initiative was sealed by singers like Paul Robeson and Marian Anderson. But William Levi Dawson’s oracular Negro Folk Symphony, though triumphantly premiered by Leopold Stokowski and his Philadelphia Orchestra in 1934, gathered dust – and Dawson was never to create the symphonic catalogue he seemed destined to undertake. Commentators include George Shirley, the most legendary name in present-day Black classical music, also Kevin Deas, music historians Gwynne Kuhner Brown and Michael Cooper, and conductor Michael Morgan. This film includes performances by pianist Benjamin Pasternack, The Fort Smith Symphony conducted by John Jeter, The Vienna Radio Symphony conducted by Arthur Fagen and Kevin Deas recorded in live performance.

“The disconnection between the rich history of Black American music and the classical music we typically hear has proved impoverishing. Because of our current conversation about race we now observe a seemingly desperate effort to make up for lost time, to present Black faces in the concert hall. I think that's only fair. But if it's going to become a permanent new way of thinking, there has to be new understanding. Dvořák's Prophecy is on time, it's a bull's-eye. We have been left unprepared for the current cultural moment. Joe Horowitz's book explains how we got there. . . . Dvořák's Prophecy proposes a bigger world of American classical music than what we have known before. It is more diverse and more equitable. And it is more truthful.” –from George Shirley's Foreword to Dvořák's Prophecy

“Lou Harrison and Cultural Fusion”
A PostClassical Ensemble “More than Music” film
Written and produced by Joseph Horowitz
Visual presentation by Peter Bogdanoff
Film six in the six-film Naxos series:
“Dvorak’s Prophecy: A New Narrative for American Classical Music”

Joe Horowitz writes of this film: "No non-Western musical idiom has so impacted on the Western concert tradition as Indonesian gamelan, beginning with the Javanese Pavilion at the 1889 Paris Exposition: an epiphany. Sampling gamelan-inspired works by Debussy, Poulenc, Messiaen, and McPhee, we arrive at a paragon exemplar of cultural fusion – Lou Harrison – and a pair of concertos, for violin and piano, unsurpassed by those of any other American. The composer/scholar Bill Alves demonstrates the layered complexity of Javanese gamelan, and how it translates into keyboard textures composed by Harrison for Keith Jarrett. For Harrison’s Concerto for Violin and Percussion, we tour the “junk percussion” – including flowerpots and washtubs – that Harrison made sing and dance."

He goes on to write "We now inhabit a “postclassical” musical aesthetic that, rather than piling on modernist complexity, draws inspiration from a variety of sources, Eastern and Western, “high” and popular. The prophetic figure, it seems to me is Lou Harrison, who practiced world music before there was a name for it. Harrison was certainly a composer who discovered a usable past – including music from Indonesia, China, and Japan. In the New World, a usable starting point was and remains the sorrow songs of African Americans, so eloquently celebrated around the turn of the twentieth century by W. E. B. Du Bois and Antonin Dvořák. Dvořák’s 1893 prophecy that “negro melodies” would foster a “great and noble” school of American music has never seemed more pertinent.”

"These six beautiful films reveal a compelling, inclusive musical tradition, deeply interwoven with American culture." – J. Peter Burkholder, author of 'A History of Western Music' and 'Listening to Charles Ives'.

“Aaron Copland: American Populist”
A PostClassical Ensemble “More than Music” film
Written and produced by Joseph Horowitz
Visual presentation by Peter Bogdanoff
Film four in the six-film Naxos series:
“Dvorak’s Prophecy: A New Narrative for American Classical Music”

Buffeted by social and political currents, Copland can seem unmoored: a cork in a stream. He was politicized by the Depression- and by the example of Mexico, whose artists galvanized national identity and progressive thought. He wrote a prize-winning workers’ song and addressed a Communist picnic in Minnesota. Twenty years later, the Red Scare targeted him as a traitor. Can his odyssey be read as a parable illuminating the fate of the American artist?  This film features a reenactment of Copland’s grilling by Senator Joseph McCarthy (played by Edward Gero). It also highlights the most consequential Copland score we don’t know: his ingenious music of Lewis Mumford’s 1939 World’s Fair film The City, itself a complex product of the Popular Front. We reconsider the valedictory Piano Fantasy, in which Copland refreshed his modernist roots- a galvanizing performance by Benjamin Pasternack, who also recalls a telling encounter with the composer. The other commentators include the American historians Michael Kazin and Joseph McCartin, who ponder the tangled legacy of American populism of the left and right.

"The 'Dvořák’s Prophecy' film series makes an essential contribution to our understanding of the history of music in America, and of the role that music has played, and must continue to play, in American culture as a whole. The films are both enlightening and entertaining. I can readily envision their use in classrooms, in both introductory and advanced-research contexts. Non-specialists will also enjoy them thoroughly. Because Horowitz does not shy away from political, racial, and gender issues of intense contemporary relevance, these films are especially important right now." – Larry Starr, Emeritus Professor of Music, University of Washington

Also available on Blu-ray

Stefano Landi was an influential early opera composer, and La morte d’Orfeo is regarded as a milestone in the development of the genre. The narrative starts where Monteverdi’s L’Orfeo ends, taking us through the remaining adventures of Orpheus in the underworld. Beaten to death and torn apart by the fearsome maenads, Orpheus survives as a wandering soul and is finally reincarnated as a star in the sky. Landi succeeded in turning Greek tragedy into timeless music-drama, the starting point of all opera, and Seen and Heard International declared that it had ‘never before encountered such technical perfection’ in Pierre Audi’s Amsterdam production.

Lost after its material records were destroyed by fire in 1883, the spectacular ballet La Source originally portrayed the idealistic vision of a magical domain in which a complex but beautiful love story of mythical figures unfolded. Jean-Guillaume Bart has long been captivated by La Source, and his new choreography retains the ballet’s romantic fascinations and its glorious music by Delibes and Minkus. Filled with exotic colour and atmosphere, Bart takes the narrative on an odyssey through near- and far-flung realms of classical dance in a brilliant production, further elevated by Christian Lacroix’s gorgeous costumes and Éric Ruf’s imaginative set designs.

A 2020 Grammy nominee for best opera recording!

Also available on Blu-ray

Based on Oscar Wilde’s story The Birthday of the Infanta, Zemlinsky’s single-act opera Der Zwerg is the tragic tale of a dwarf who is presented at court, falls in love with the beautiful Donna Clara, but is ultimately forced to see himself as others see him and to die of a broken heart. Preceded by Schoenberg’s Accompaniment to a Cinematographic Scene, Op. 34 (1930), Zemlinsky’s Romantic score is full of psychological intrigue. Is Der Zwerg a critique of society’s superficiality? Is it the composer’s self-portrait in his doomed affair with Alma Schindler? Director Tobias Kratzer’s stunning, transparent production creates a space in which each character is thrown into sharp relief in this ‘fine, noble and melancholy work’. (Bachtrack.com)

ENTRE ELLE & LUI (DVD) - LIVE

The Teatro La Fenice opened in 1792 and is one of the most renowned and most beautiful theaters in the world. Since nearly 20 years it has celebrated the traditional New Year‘s concert every year, which became immediately vast popularity in Italy and abroad making it one of the best-known and desired New Year's events. The orchestra of Teatro La Fenice, conducted by Daniel Harding, presents a colourful array of arias and orchestral pieces. As soloists soprano Federica Lombardi and tenor Freddie De Tommaso sing famous arias as Casta Diva and Nessun dorma among others from the operas Carmen, La traviata, La bohème, Turandot, William Tell and La clemenza di Tito. On top Jacopo Tissi, now principal of the Dutch National Ballet, is dancing a scene from Tchaikovsky´s ballet The Sleeping Beauty in this thrilling and exhilarating concert.