This two-disc set is part of the 25-disc box set Un siècle de musique fracaise, which explores French music from the mid-19th to the mid-20th century. These discs profile French composer Olivier Messiaen, and include his famous Turangalila Symphonie, and Quatuor pour la fin du temps.

Classical Music

Classical Music

The latest release in hänssler CLASSIC's Historical SeriesNicolai Gedda was one of the most famous singers of the 20th centuryA valuable compilation of recordings of the great Nicolai Gedda from the SWR archives

Composer Harvey Schmidt and his writing partner, Tom Jones, created some of our most iconic musicals. Their first, "The Fantasticks", is a perfect musical and one of the most performed pieces in the United States and throughout the world. The team of Jones & Schmidt also wrote the smash hit "I Do! I Do!" as well as "Celebration" and a host of others. But what many people don't know is that in addition to being a wonderful composer and a professional visual artist as well, Schmidt was a brilliant pianist with his own inimitable style. Which brings us to "Merry Xmas 1975". The title tells it all: it's an audio Christmas card! Schmidt played solo piano on a variety of songs from the Golden Age of Hollywood and Broadway. Originally released on LP as a gift to lucky friends of his, the record has been a collectors' item for decades, and now, with the late composer's approval and encouragement, it can be enjoyed and savored by everyone. Don't be fooled by the title, though. There is just one bona fide Christmas standard, Hugh Martin's perennial hit, "Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas," introduced by the radiant Judy Garland in M-G-M's Meet Me in St. Louis. But there are many, many more terrific songs by the masters of the Great American Songbook: Everyone from Cole Porter to Rodgers & Hammerstein, from George and Ira Gershwin to Arthur Freed and Nacio Herb Brown. DeSylva, Brown and Henderson share grooves with Harry Warren. It's a delightful grouping of unforgettable music.

Donizetti’s Messa da Requiem was composed after the composer received the news of Vincenzo Bellini’s death. Soprano Leyla Gencer performs beautifully in this rare recording. This recording was made in 1961 by the Orchestra Sinfonica e Coro di Milano della Rai with conductor Gianandrea Gavazzeni.

Brass instruments are a vital part of the festive fabric of Christmas, and Tchaikovsky’s iconic ballet The Nutcracker is made even more joyful with the brassy brilliance of Septura. Narrated by preeminent actor Derek Jacobi, The Nutcracker is set on Christmas Eve, with music both rapturous and fantastical. It tells the story of how young Clara’s favorite present, a nutcracker shaped like a little man, turns into a handsome prince at midnight. Septura has been acclaimed by Brass Band World for its ‘stylistic perfection’ and ‘beautifully portrayed artistry.’

Classical Music

Andrew Parrott and his Taverner Consort and Choir honour the 400th anniversary of 16th-century Italian composer Carlo Gesualdo with a reissue of their seminal recording of Tenebrae Responses for Good Friday. Honouring the 400th anniversary of Carlo Gesualdo, the harmonically adventurous and experimental 16th-century Italian composer, Prince of Venosa, Andrew Parrott and his Taverner Consort and Choir offer a newly repackaged reissue of their seminal recording of Tenebae, the composer's final group of sacred madrigals devoted to Good Friday. The Taverner singers navigate Gesualdo's highly symbolic polyphonic structures with idiomatic first-rate performances and incisive scholarship.

This album of guitar concertos from the Americas features pieces composed for David Tanenbaum. Building on a tradition of prominent guitarists generating repertoire through new commissions, these works present the guitar in a variety of settings. Kernis's concerto dips with ease into the world of pop music, whereas his Lullaby and Soliloquyare reflective, lyrical and romantic. Sierra's concerto asserts a rhythmic and percussive character, while Piazzolla's dark and sentimental double concerto is one of his least-known works.

This collection of rarely recorded Wagner repertoire, the master’s work for voice and piano, includes the famed Wesendonck-Lieder in both its original German and an Arrigo Boito Italian version. Also featured are the famed ‘Gretchen am Spinnrade’, ‘Melodram’, the complex ‘Dors, mon enfant’ and further works with texts by writers including Hugo, Heine, de Ronsard and Scheurlin. Michela Sburlati - ‘a fine dramatic soprano’ (NYT) and fellow Italian maestro Marco Scolastra perform. Booklet includes liner notes, sung texts and artist biographies.

SLAVONIC DANCES

With this release of Filippo Ruge (1725-1767), Brilliant Classics brings another forgotten name from the Baroque era to the attention of record buyers: there is not another disc of his music in the catalogue, making this an indispensable purchase for all lovers of Italian Baroque. Ruge was a Roman by birth, and a flautist by training: hence the concentration in this survey of his output on works which feature the instrument in a soloistic capacity: not only a G major concerto and sonata but a D major duet, for two flutes, and an arietta in which a pair of sopranos is accompanied by a pair of flutes. The release is completed by a solo soprano aria and a dramatic three-movement sinfonia which concludes with the tone-painting of a violent storm. Ruge was highly regarded in his day, and the lively imagination at work in the pieces on this disc gives ample reason for such admiration. He became a solo flautist at the prestigious series of Concerts Spirituelles in Paris, and his Op.3 collection of concertos was published in London by John Walsh, who handled music by all the significant European composers of the day. After the publication of the set of Duets from which the present D major example is taken, Ruge vanishes from the records; his exact date and location of death are presently unknown. Leader of the Swiss-based Flatus Ensemble, Enrico Casularo also trained in Rome – at the Accademia di Santa Cecilia, where he is now a professor of Baroque flute – as a flautist, musicologist and organologist. He has played, recorded, studied and lectured on flute music of the Baroque era for international organisations and produced an authoritative treaty on the history of the transverse flute.

Famed worldwide as a film composer, Ryiuchi Sakamoto began his career as a pianist, creating patterns, phrases and innovative arrangements before joining his first commercial electronic pop band in 1978, the Yellow Magic Orchestra. Around the same time, he worked on his first solo album, the Thousand Knives of Ryuichi Sakamoto (1978), which blends up-to-date electronic techniques with an old-fashioned gift for good tunes. Riot in Lagos brought him fame beyond Japan, and he went on to work with many top producers of pop, dance and electro. In 1983, Nagisa Oshima's Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence launched Sakamoto's career as a film composer, which has gone from strength to strength with scores for The Last Emperor (1987) and The Revenant (2015). All these pieces feature in Jeroen van Veen's survey, which is based on the best modern edition of these scores and often differs from Sakamoto's own, partly improvised recordings. Classical listeners will appreciate Sakamoto's breadth of reference: to Chopin (Ubi), Bach (Andata, Solari), Glass (Bibo no Aozora), Satie (Opus), Brahms (Intermezzo) and Ravel (Bachata), for example. But his language of minimalist jazz is one enjoyed around the world as music that gives listeners the space to think and work and create for themselves.

The Seven Last Words of Christ refers to the seven short phrases uttered by Jesus on the cross, as gathered from the New Testament. Over the centuries the crucifixion has served as inspiration to countless composers, and settings of these utterances have become something of a subgenre, beginning in the Renaissance with early motets and continuing into our own time. By way of Cesar Franck and Sofia Gubaidulina, composers ranging from Heinrich Schutz to Tristan Murail have contributed versions using various combinations of voice and/or instruments. One of the best known of these settings is probably the one by Joseph Haydn. The one – or rather the four… A rather complicated story begins in 1785, when Haydn received a commission from Cadiz in Spain, at the other end of Europe. He was asked to compose seven slow movements, each ca 10 minutes long, to be played by an orchestra in alternation with the priest expounding on each of the seven words. Relishing this unusual challenge, Haydn accepted and ended up so pleased with the result that he immediately made a version for string quartet as well as authorising another one for keyboard. The work became so popular across Europe that ten years later the music was used one final time, in an oratorio for choir and orchestra. The work is here heard in the version for keyboard, performed by the French pianist Nicolas Stavy. He closes the disc with another unusual work in Haydn’s oeuvre, the Andante con variazioni, Hob. XVII/6, which has been described as ‘the deepest and most profound set of variations for piano composed between Bach and Beethoven’.