This repertoire spans almost eighty years of classical composers' excursions into blues, folk, hip-hop, jazz, musical theater, samba, tango, techno and other genres. Each piece goes beyond mere stylistic imitation, cultivating an authentic expressivity within a transcribed musical language rooted in the Americas. ___Alexander Crosett

Pianist Mira Gill is of East-Indian descent. Born in Salt Lake City, she is now based in New York City. The piano works of Samuel Barber are a specialty of hers, and it shows in these superb performances.

This is a wonderful program of works for cello and piano by composers such as Libby Larsen, Samuel Barber, and George Walker.

American Tapestry by the Calidore String Quartet weaves together a panoramic portrait of American musical expression across the 20th and 21st centuries. The programme spans Samuel Barber's lyrical String Quartet No. 1, featuring the iconic Adagio; Wynton Marsalis's jazz-inflected At the Octoroon Balls; and John Williams's With Malice Toward None-here in it's world premiere string quartet version. The album concludes with Erich Korngold's radiant String Quartet No. 3 in D Major, written in postwar Los Angeles. Together, these works reveal a vibrant continuum of American artistry-a sound world both richly diverse and deeply unified in spirit.

Featuring a stellar cast of performers, and curated by pianist Dylan Perez, this complete anthology of Samuel Barber's songs present those works published during his lifetime, together with those published posthumously, some of which are recorded here for the first time. Barber was clear as to what he wanted from very early in his life, and this strength of character and courage to follow his path is heard throughout Barber's significant contribution to the genre. At a time when American classical music was heavily influenced by experimentalism, Barber's inclination for 'traditional' harmony and melody helped set him apart. Barber's vocal music demonstrates the ease he finds in the marriage of text and music. The Navarra String Quartet join the line-up for Dover Beach, Op. 3.

Her fifth recital album on Signum Records, celebrated soprano Mary Bevan returns with a selection of French songs, featuring works by composers including Britten, Ravel, Debussy and Faure.

- The 20th century saw an immense and revolutionary development in musical styles and language, some radically parting from the fundamental musical traditions. This CD presents works for flute and piano by composers who adhered to their own, personal musical language, expressing only their own feelings of beauty, emotion and esthetics, without following current trends or theories. - Presented are the following composers: Rhene Baton, Francis Poulenc, Albert Roussel, Darius Milhaud, Ernst Krenek, Paul Hoffer, Samuel Barber, Ferenc Farkas, Franco Margola, Giuseppe Mule, Jean Michel Damase, Luciano Michelini: a very diverse selection of accessible, highly enjoyable music. - Gian-Luca Petrucci has been first flute in several of the top orchestras of Italy. He was professor at the Santa Cecilia Conservatory in Rome. As a scholar he published monographs on several (Italian) composers: Mercadante, Briccialdi, Gazzelloni, de Lorenzo and Mozart. His previous recordings for Brilliant Classics include works by Frederick The Great (BC 96538), Bohm (96862) and Mercadante (BC 96152).

Step back to a time when the night was an antithesis to the clarity of illumined day. In the especially fertile imaginations of the 19th-century Romantic composers, this was a time when the world gave itself over to mystery and magic. These works explore the “otherness” of night and its potential for strangeness. The album also focusses on the theme of passion, mostly from the Romantic period. In the especially fertile imaginations of the 19th-century Romantic composers, this was a time when, shielded from the gaze of the Almighty, the world gave itself over to mystery and magic: lovers met for forbidden trysts, revelers drank and cavorted through the small hours, and spirits walked the earth. In this album, Brownell hopes to transport you out of our sterile, modern understanding of night and into the stranger, more interesting reality it must have been for most of human history.

Described by Musical Opinion as “potentially one of the most significant pianists of his generation, since winning 1st Prize at the 2005 J.N. Hummel Competition (Bratislava), he has achieved widespread recognition as “one of the foremost Hummel interpreters of our time” (Hudobný Život). Brownell’s performances have been seen and heard on BBC radio and television, Classic FM, NPR, CBC, ORF, and RBB KulturRadio. He has been soloist with orchestras such as the Hallé, Royal Liverpool Philharmonic, and Calgary Philharmonic.

Featuring the first recording of BRITTEN's Les Illuminations, Op. 18 sung in English, from a brand new translation by Timothy Ades. Also includes the original French version. Coupled with Samuel BARBER's dramatic masterpiece Knoxville: Summer of 1915, Op. 24, written just a few years after Les Illuminations. Among the most personal and powerful music ever written for the human voice, Britten and Barber's masterpiece settings of texts by Rimbaud and Agee continue to resonate intensely. Taken together, they form bookends to the cataclysms of the 20th century, with it's two life-shattering world wars. The colours, verbal and harmonic, of such human drama are a dazzling mix, running the gamut of life in dramatic flux. Mild mannered it is not, though parts are hauntingly beautiful.

Both Beach and MacDowell were formidably accomplished pianists who wrote concertos in barnstorming virtuoso style, for themselves and their contemporaries to play, but they could also turn their hand to the lucrative domestic market for piano-duet music. In doing so they also tapped into the 19th-century, Romantic preoccupation with childhood which Schumann had encapsulated in his Kinderszenen of 1838.

MacDowell wrote his Moon-Pictures Op. 21 in the winter of 1884–5 and subtitled them ‘after H.C. Andersen’s Picture-Book without Pictures’, referring to an 1848 collection of short bedtime stories.

Published in 1901 and dedicated to the composer’s niece, the six duets of the album’s title collection, Summer Dreams by Beach, are shorter and technically simpler than the Moon-Pictures, but they are prefaced by literary quotations which once more indicate that this is not music for children so much as music for adults to play to children, and for adults to play at being children. In any case, simpler means and fewer notes need hardly imply naivety of expression, and Beach’s self-taught technique was too rigorous to allow anything less than the most deftly fashioned work to escape her desk.

Composed in 1883, Beach’s brief 3 Movements for piano duet are the work of a prodigiously talented teenager who knows her early-Romantic piano literature – including Kinderszenen – inside out, but who also understands at this stage how to emulate rather than merely copy her models.

In the following year of 1884, the 23-year-old MacDowell wrote his 3 Poems Op. 20. Strictly speaking, Hamlet and Ophelia is the outlier in this collection, since MacDowell composed it in 1894 as a tone-poem for orchestra in the Lisztian manner, and then made this two-piano transcription rather than leaving the work to the kind of professional arranger habitually commissioned by publishers for such work. Nevertheless, he took the kind of care over it that Brahms did in arranging his symphonies, and the piano-duet version retains the brooding tension of the opening and effectively transfers the violinistic surges of Hamlet’s main section to the keyboard.

The album’s final collection takes a chronological leap forward to 1952, but its nostalgia-drenched mood belongs to an intermediate age. ‘One might imagine a divertissement in a setting of the Palm Court at the Plaza Hotel’, Barber explained in a letter to his publisher, ‘the year about 1914, epoch of the first tangos. Souvenirs – remembered with affection, not in irony or with tongue in cheek, but in amused tenderness.’ Barber, it should be noted, would have been four years old at the time, and so these are ‘souvenirs’ in the manner of sepia-tinted postcards.

A fantastic collection of American choral classics ranging from Thompson’s sublime Alleluia to the terrific choral arrangement of Gershwin’s Summertime from Porgy & Bess. Conductor Robin White’s excellent arrangement of the traditional Shenandoah balances the programme nicely along with Copeland’s "I bought me a cat". This is a surprising and entertaining collection. Alban Voices is a chamber-choir formed over 20 years ago by Robin White and his late wife, Freda, originally as a relief choir for services in St. Albans Abbey. It has always been an ad-hoc grouping, drawn together as and when required: many of the current members sing regularly in London’s top symphonic choirs. Among other appearances, it featured most notably in a pivotal episode of the BBC TV soap opera EastEnders in December 2003. More recently, the group’s recording of Robin’s original Christmas song, Light of the World, accompanied by the Royal Ballet Sinfonia, has been well received, and was played on Scala Radio and Classic FM in the run-up to Christmas 2022.

Robin White trained at Imperial College, London and the Royal College of Music, studying conducting with Vernon Handley and orchestration with Bryan Kelly. He has conducted open-air, pop-classics concerts at National Trust and other venues across the south-west of England and the midlands. He has also worked with leading soloists such as John Lill, Christopher Warren-Green, Alexander Baillie and Emma Johnson in concerts in Bristol and the Channel Islands. His 1992 recording of Edwardian light music for Chandos Records was played extensively on Classic FM.

SOMM Recordings is delighted to announce a thrilling first collaboration between long-time SOMM stablemates, baritone Roderick Williams and the Coull Quartet, joined by tenor James Gilchrist and soprano Sophie Bevan. With six world premiere recordings, On This Shining Night is a ravishing recital focusing revealingly on a 20th-century phenomenon: works for voice and string quartet. It takes its title from a James Agate setting by Samuel Barber (whose masterly "Dover Beach" is also heard), here in a sublime arrangement by Roderick Williams. Williams also provides arrangements of Barber’s "Sleep Now" and three Frederick Delius pieces from his Seven Songs from the Norwegian: the evocative "Twilight Fancies," vivacious "Young Venevil" and exotic "I-Brasil." They serve, as Robert Matthew-Walker’s erudite booklet notes observe, as companions to 11 songs by Delius’s close friend and associate, Peter Warlock, including the gentle intimacy of "Corpus Christi," the “mini-cantata” "Sorrow’s Lullaby," and unique free-recitative of "My gostly vader."

Composed for Williams and the Coull Quartet, Sally Beamish’s five-part Tree Carols offer striking, variegated settings of poems by Fiona Sampson in their premiere recording. Roderick Williams’ SOMM catalogue include the acclaimed three-volume Twelve Sets of English Lyrics by Hubert Parry (SOMMCD 257, 270, 272), Sally Beamish’s Four Songs from Hafez (Birdsong, SOMMCD 0633), and the classic English song cycles A Shropshire Lad and Maud (SOMMCD 0615), which MusicWeb International declared a “game changer… in terms of our appreciation of Arthur Somervell’s songs”. The Coull Quartet has recorded a wide repertoire for SOMM. Their recording of Nicholas Maw and Benjamin Britten quartets (SOMMCD 065) was a Gramophone Editor’s Choice and a BBC Music Magazine Benchmark Recording. Gramophone declared their recent SOMM release with Clélia Iruzun, Treasures from the New World, featuring piano quintets by Amy Beach and Henrique Oswald (SOMMCD 0609), “a delight”.

Founded ten years ago, Ensemble Ouranos is now one of the best French wind quintets in the world. For this new recording, their first for Alpha Classics, Mathilde, Arnaud, Amaury, Philibert, Rafael and Nicolas have brought together composers and works that are particularly close to their hearts: Le Tombeau de Couperin glorifies the French wind school, and Shostakovich is their passion, so recording this transcription (by David Walter) of the famous quartet for the first time was at the top of their wish list. The two works have one thing in common: homage, since Ravel composed in tribute to his friends who died in the war, and Shostakovich to the victims of the Second World War. Another tribute - a lighter one - is paid to summer with Barber's superb Summer Music, the only original piece for wind quintet on this album. Added to this are�Ravel's famous Pavane and an arrangement by Nicolas Ramez of the poignant Elegy from Lady MacBeth of Mtsensk

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.

This album of works by Debussy, Prokofiev and Barber aims to show not only the fascination of the increasing complexity of musical language in the 20th century but also the desire to preserve the ideas and achievements of previous musical epochs. The expansion of tonality and the search for new rhythmic and acoustic solutions in the first book of Debussy’s Préludes are followed by Prokofiev’s Visions fugitives, perhaps his only work that was clearly influenced by Impressionism.

Some pieces from Visions fugitives could seem to be part of Debussy’s cycle, although Prokofiev’s famous Feroce offers electrifying rhythms and sharp dissonances. I have chosen Barber’s Piano Sonata as my final work. This unique masterpiece literally sprouted from the soil of 20th century musical discoveries but still retained Baroque and Classical structures. The stunning fugue that concludes the sonata sounds like a manifesto: no matter how far the creative process takes us, there is always something constant to which we will always return. (Konstantin Emelyanov)

Andrew Lloyd Webber is world-famous as the composer of the musicals Cats and The Phantom of the Opera, but his Requiem has also achieved international acclaim. Winner of a Grammy Award, this grand-sounding masterpiece of contemporary classical music, written in 1985, is dedicated to the memory of Webber's late father. The recording of a concert by the Munchner Rundfunkorchester on June 15, 2023, a tribute to the British composer who celebrated his 75th birthday in March 2023, is now presented on CD by BR-KLASSIK. This live recording from the Herz-Jesu Church in Munich features the Bavarian Radio Chorus accompanied by a select ensemble of soloists, under the baton of principal guest conductor Patrick Hahn. There was much surprise when Andrew Lloyd Webber presented his Requiem to the public in 1985. Although classical composers had repeatedly ventured into the spheres of the so-called "light muse", hardly any path led in the other direction - from musicals or operettas to the sublime heights of sacred music. The fact that a composer like Franz von Suppe also wrote a requiem as well as operettas is a rarity. Lloyd Webber's career in the "serious" genre, however, was laid in his cradle: his father, William Lloyd Webber (1914-1982), had worked his way up from humble beginnings to become one of the leading church musicians of his day. He encouraged the classical training of his sons Andrew (b. 1948) and Julian (b. 1951), an excellent cellist. Andrew found his niche in the entertainment industry. His song "Try it and see", written for the 1969 Eurovision Song Contest, was not yet a hit, but from a pop cantata he developed his first successful piece Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat (1968), and from the concept album Jesus Christ Superstar, in which "Try it and see" also found a new home, he created the rock musical of the same name (1971). With Evita (1976), Cats (1981), Starlight Express (1984) and The Phantom of the Opera (1986), Lloyd Webber repeatedly demonstrated his flair for contemporary material that lent itself to a new kind of treatment and appealed to a wide audience. By the mid-1980s, he was the most commercially successful composer of musicals. As Requiem Masses had been abolished in Anglican England since the Reformation, the composer did not have to consider liturgical functionality or ecclesiastical suitability. Verdi had demonstrated that the texts of the Latin Requiem Mass provided an excellent model for grand opera. And Lloyd Webber found inspiration for the lyrical dimension with hit potential in composers such as Gabriel Faure. The texts of the Requiem were rearranged with a sense of dramaturgy. The repeated insertion of the pithy lines "Requiem aeternam" and "Dies irae" gave them a fundamental, leitmotif-like character. The theatrical potential of the sequence ("Dies irae") was expanded, as it had been with Verdi, into a kaleidoscope of human emotions in the face of death and the Last Judgement. In a poll conducted by BBC Radio 4 a few years ago, listeners voted Barber's Adagio for Strings the "saddest piece in the world". There is no doubt that it's broad musical lines have an elegiac, almost religious tone - something the composer himself emphasised in the choral version, written as an Agnus Dei. However, the Adagio's association with farewell and mourning was not intended by Barber, who conceived of his work as purely instrumental. It has however been used on repeated occasions to mark the deaths of prominent Americans, including Alfred Einstein, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and John F. Kennedy. As funeral music, the Adagio has also been a feature of several films since the 1980s, and two lines of tradition have emerged. On the one hand, the Adagio is often associated with the death of a main character, as in the final transfiguration of the Elephant Man in David Lynch's film of the same name (1980) or, in a light-hearted alienation of the theme, in The Fabulous World of Amelie (2001), where the heroine imagines her own death being televised. On the other hand, the austere serenity of the Adagio is contrasted with images of violence and suffering, most emphatically in Oliver Stone's anti-war film Platoon (1986). All these traditions came together in the days after September 11, 2001, when Barber's Adagio was played over and over again by American radio and television stations - both as a tribute to the victims of the attacks and as a musical expression of American patriotism. Particularly memorable was the live performance on September 15, 2001, when the American conductor Leonard Slatkin conducted the BBC Symphony Orchestra at the Last Night of the Proms in London, leaving the hushed audience deeply moved. Thanks to it's melancholic yet comforting sound, the Adagio for Strings was often the piece of choice internationally during the Covid-19 pandemic to commemorate the many victims - online or "open air", on radio and television, and at concerts and other events.

Winner of the 14th Banff International String Quartet Competition in 2022 and an Avery Fisher Career Grant in 2023, the Isidore String Quartet makes it's recording debut on Delos. Formed at The Juilliard School and coached with members of the Juilliard String Quartet past and present-the name Isidore comes from the legendary violinist Isidore Cohen, one of the Juilliard Quartet's early members-the quartet is rapidly making a name for itself on the international concert scene. The album Adorations is a celebration of chamber music at it's essence: a tapestry of joy, human connection, and the enduring resonance of lives intertwined. Each work on the album reflects a unique form of adoration, offering it's own expression of wonder, reverence, and the profound beauty of shared musical experience. Comprising Joseph Haydn's String Quartet in C major, Op. 20, and Felix Mendelssohn's String Quartet in E-flat major, Op. 44, the recital also features Samuel Barber's celebrated Molto adagio and Florence Price's Adoration.

Marcy Rosen and Diane Walsh present fresh readings of three masterpieces from the cello repertoire. Ms. Rosen studied Barber's cello sonata with Orlando Cole, who worked closely with Barber on the editing of the composition, later premiering the work with Barber at the piano at New York City's Town Hall in 1933.

Today one of the most highly respected string quartets, the Belcea were established in 1994 at the Royal College of Music in London and studied with the Chilingirian, the Amadeus, and later the Alban Berg quartets. Today one of the most highly respected string quartets, the Belcea were established in 1994 at the Royal College of Music in London and studied with the Chilingirian, the Amadeus, and later the Alban Berg quartets. They recorded for EMI Classics across nearly a decade, between 2000 and 2009, bringing about tremendous versions of quartets by Schubert, Britten, Bartók, and Mozart, to name a few.

"The Belcea Quartet throw every fibre of their beings into the most vivid projection of the masterpieces they undertake." - The Independent "These recordings form a crucial part of our life as a quartet and we hope that over the ensuing years they haven't lost their freshness and sense of adventure." - Krzysztof Chorzelski, violist of the Belcea Quartet

Classical Music

Recorded in: Orchestra Hall, Detroit 19-20 January 1991 and 29-31 January 1993 Producer(s) Brian Couzens (Executive) Charles Greenwell Ralph Couzens Leslie B. Dunner (Associate) Sound Engineer(s) Ralph Couzens (Consultant) Dan Dene Robert Shafer

Classical Music

Classical Music

Classical Music