Rusalka, a water spirit, lives with her family in the pure waters of the forest lake. When she falls in love with a Prince, she sacrifices her voice and leaves her home in the hope of finding true love in a new world - a world that does not love her back.�Natalie Abrahami and Ann Yee create a poetic, contemporary new staging of Dvorak's lyric fairy tale, revealing our uneasy relationship with the natural world and humanity's attempts to own and tame it. Semyon Bychkov conducts an all-star cast featuring Asmik Grigorian in the title role.

Distinguished British music interpreter Sir Andrew Davis joins forces with the BBCSO once again, this time with acclaimed soloists Dame Sarah Connolly and Andrew Staples, in this thoughtful presentation of the last two substantial choral works of Sir Edward Elgar. The matury of Elgar as an orchestrator is obvious in both works on this album, notably, in ‘The Music Makers’ (1912), during passages in which he quotes from ‘Sea Pictures’ and the Violin Concerto, and in representing the sound of aircraft in ‘The Spirit of England’ (1917). Elgar uses self-quotation to reflect: ‘The Music Makers’ is a canvas of self-reflection, written quickly following a period of illness. The orchestral introduction is introspective, melancholic, and noble, before the words of Arthur O’Shaughanessy’s poem and much self-quotation within the music offer an insight into the sense of nostalgia and awareness of the loneliness of the creative artist felt by the composer. ‘The Spirit of England’ reflects on the sadness and desolation of war felt by a nation, with the inclusion of quotations from ‘The Dream of Gerontius’ in some of the more negative stanzas that Elgar found harder to set. Specified in the score for tenor or soprano, all three movements are sung here by a tenor in a recording first.

Rusalka, a water spirit, lives with her family in the pure waters of the forest lake. When she falls in love with a Prince, she sacrifices her voice and leaves her home in the hope of finding true love in a new world - a world that does not love her back.�Natalie Abrahami and Ann Yee create a poetic, contemporary new staging of Dvorak's lyric fairy tale, revealing our uneasy relationship with the natural world and humanity's attempts to own and tame it. Semyon Bychkov conducts an all-star cast featuring Asmik Grigorian in the title role.

Recorded in the recently restored 1875 Victorian Theatre at Alexandra Palace, Crouch End Festival Chorus and David Temple present Elgar's The Kingdom. Joined by London Mozart Players the soloists include Francesca Chiejina, Dame Sarah Connolly Benjamin Hulett and Ashley Riches. Arguably Elgar's least well-known choral work, The Kingdom is a mixture of gentle conversational sections and astonishing dramatic passages, and David Temple believes it is the quality of the orchestral writing that elevates it to justifiably sit alongside Elgar's other notable works. "I am so taken with it It is a gem from the first note to the last, and my desire to share this as widely as possible is reinforced by the present recording One thing that cannot happen in a concert performance is 'repeated listening'. A recording, by contrast, holds an open invitation at the end to return to the beginning! This drip-feed allows the music to be deeply absorbed, and it is this which I believe will enable The Kingdom's true quality to be more widely appreciated" - David Temple.

Dame Sarah Connolly and Joseph Middleton present a richly rewarding programme of art songs from a variety of composers. The recital opens with Chausson's Po�me de l'amour et de la mer, which took almost a decade to compose and shows Wagner's influence on the younger composer. Composed in 1935 on a study trip to Rome, Barber's Three Songs set poems by James Joyce and portray three love affairs. Debussy's Trois Chansons de Bilitis set the erotic poems of Pierre Lou�s, which were all the rage in Paris at the turn of the century. Aaron Copland completed his Twelve Poems of Emily Dickinson in 1950, but declared that they should not be seen as a set but as twelve individual works. Connolly here includes 'I've heard an organ talk sometimes' and 'The world feels dusty', the latter giving the album it's title. The programme concludes with the premi�re recording of Errollyn Wallen's Night Thoughts: a cycle of four songs commissioned by Leeds Lieder, and first performed by Dame Sarah and Joseph, the cycle's dedicatees. Setting two of her own poems alongside one by Emily Dickinson and lines from Shakespeare's MacBeth, the cycle took it's inspiration from Howard Hodgkin's painting Night Thoughts.

One of the finest Mahlerians of our time, Dame Sarah Connolly brings her fierce intellect and glorious voice to the music she has spent a life-time studying and performing. In the first release of series curated and performed by Joseph Middleton that will champion the complete piano accompanied Lieder of Mahler, the ‘superlative’ (New York Times) duo of Connolly and Middleton, present the three great song cycles of Mahler: Lieder eines Fahrenden Gesellen, Fünf Rückert Lieder and Kindertotenlieder. This is the first time Sarah has performed all three cycles on one album, which she is justly famous the world over for performing with rare insight and consummate artistry. Her voice is the perfect Mahlerian instrument.

“It is such an enormous honor to have made this recording for Signum with Sarah. Mahler’s music can teach us so much about the human condition, our connection with nature, and our empathy towards other humans. A deep spirituality is built into every bar he writes. - Joseph Middleton

Malcolm Martineau follows up his acclaimed complete song collections of Poulenc and Faure with an album celebrating the solo songs of Henri Duparc, performed by an acclaimed roster of British singers – Dame Sarah Connolly, Huw Montague Rendall, Nicky Spence & William Thomas. An iconic figure in the world of French music – his songs described as being ‘imperfect...but works of genius’ by Ravel and ‘perfect’ by Debussy – Duparc only composed a handful of works during the first half of his life: following a nervous disorder in 1885 at age 37 he lived for a further 48 years, orchestrating and tinkering with his songs, but publishing nothing new.

Scottish pianist Malcolm Martineau is recognized at the highest international level as one of the UK’s leading accompanists, performing worldwide alongside the world’s greatest singers and with a discography of over 100 albums, including a number of award-winning recordings.

REVIEW

With four singers in the line-up, there is plenty of vocal variety. The lion’s share of the songs is allotted to Sarah Connolly who still has her voice in fine fettle. She perhaps displays a wider vibrato than in past, but the tone is beautiful and her expressiveness is undiminished, and her high notes ring out gloriously. She is allotted seven songs, while her three male colleagues have three each. But we shouldn’t forget the fifth participant, Malcolm Martineau at the piano. His role is just as important as the singers’, since these songs are no mere melodies with accompaniments but rather dramatic or narrative scenes, where the piano sets the scene and propels the action forward. In that respect Duparc is Wagnerian in his approach. Obviously we focus on the singer, but the piano part mustn’t be suppressed. Malcolm Martineau shows that he is a born director and keeps the proceedings on a tight rein.

-- MusicWeb International

Pianist Malcolm Martineau is the brilliant initiator of this new one-of-a-kind series on Linn. The Brahms Songbook has set the unprecedented goal to record Brahms's lieder by complete opus number. In this second instalment, Malcolm is joined by star mezzo-soprano Dame Sarah Connolly and bass-baritone Hanno Muller-Brachmann in five sets that were composed and published over a period of thirty years: Op. 72, Op. 105, Op. 43, Op. 48 and Op. 57. In a time when the middle-class was growing, song-writing was both lucrative and pleasurable, offering a myriad of ways to explore perennially popular topics like unrequited love. Yet, in the lieder recorded here Brahms immerses us in a heightened emotional world, distant from the drawing rooms and concert halls of the bourgeoisie.