Sergei Rachmaninov was one of the twentieth century’s outstanding pianists, but the large body of purely orchestral music he composed is no less an expression of his musical character. His great strength was that he managed to preserve intact a vision he had discovered very early in life. This contemporary of Schoenberg, Scriabin, Ravel and Ives was unconcerned with musical fashions and had no wish to be a pioneer. Instead, and over a period of half a century he refined and deepened a language which derived naturally from his late-nineteenth-century Russian background.

With this four-disc box set, the Singapore Symphony Orchestra and Lan Shui present a comprehensive collection of Rachmaninov’s music for orchestra – from the Scherzo in D minor, his first surviving piece for orchestra, completed just before his fifteenth birthday to the canonical works: the Symphonies and the Symphonic Dances. The recordings were made between 2008 and 2015, with the three symphonies (previously released on separate albums) described as ‘eine formidable Gesamteinspielung’ on the website Pizzicato. But there is much more to Rachmaninov’s orchestral music besides the symphonies, and this box offers the listener opportunity to explore the young composer’s fascination with Gypsy themes (in the excerpts from the opera Aleko and Capriccio bohemien) as well as his lifelong preoccupation with death, in the form of the four notes of the Dies irae plainchant motif. This is heard again and again in Rachmaninov’s music, up until his very last work, the Symphonic Dances, where, at the very end of the third and final dance, this symbol of death is finally laid to rest.

REVIEWS:

It would be difficult to imagine a more compelling or indeed idiomatic account of the First Symphony than Shui’s...this is a first-rate set, with sound to match.

-- HiFi (UK)

A rising star and beloved worldwide, Chloe Chua presents with PENTATONE the vinyl edition of Mozart's complete violin concertos, Rondo in B-Flat Major, K. 269 and Rondo in C Major, K. 373 as well as the Sinfonia Concertante for Violin, Viola & Orchestra in E-Flat Major, K. 364. The latter also features the outstanding young Chinese violist Ziyu He, winner of the 2016 Yehudi Menuhin Competition at just 16. In this performance, he showcases his remarkable artistry alongside Chloe, herself a former winner of the same prestigious competition. The soloists are joined by the Singapore Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Hans Graf, whose connection with the violin virtuoso holds special significance. This project began when Chloe was just 15 years old, when she embraced the challenge of following in the footsteps of the many legendary violinists who have recorded this repertoire. In these refined and fresh interpretations, her deep connection to the music - written by Mozart when he was around her age - is unmistakable. Even without a trained ear, one can appreciate her extraordinary technique, elegance, and effort to capture the vitality of these beloved works. This special vinyl edition complements Chloe's already released and acclaimed Butterfly Lovers & Paganini (2025) and Vivaldi: Four Seasons & Locatelli Harmonic Labyrinth (2024). This release is also available as a physical 3CD album.

Classical Music

Conceived under the sign of the sun, this is a series of works for saxophone and orchestra by French composers with a specific affinity for the Mediterranean, its atmosphere and culture(s). Painting these varied landscapes is Claude Delangle, joined by the forces of the Singapore Symphony Orchestra led by Lan Shui.

Classical Music

This is a hybrid Super Audio CD playable on both regular and Super Audio CD players.

On this disc, Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune – possibly Claude Debussy’s most popular work for orchestra – is framed by two of his greatest achievements in the medium, La Mer and Images pour orchestre. All three works are programmatic, but Debussy’s concern was to create an atmosphere rather than any naturalistic likeness. The Prélude is a case in point – while taking his inspiration from a pastoral poem by Stéphane Mallarmé, Debussy famously told a conductor who wanted a more detailed explanation: ‘It’s a shepherd playing the flute, sitting on his bum in the grass!’ In La Mer, Debussy abstains from the various clichés of so many other musical depictions of water, and instead creates an immediately recognizable seascape, largely through a pioneering use of various instrumental timbres, once described as ‘an impressionism of sounding dots’. Soon after La Mer, the composer started on Images, in which he went even further: although using a large orchestra, Debussy mainly avoids big sonorities, concentrating instead on unusual sound combinations and on transparency. His aim was compose a cycle focusing on the colours of three countries, while as far as possible avoiding the clichés associated with their music. Of its three panels, the expansive middle one, Ibéria, is often performed as an independent piece, but its Spanish colouring takes on new shades when framed by Scottish mists and the freshness of spring in France. The present disc combines new recordings by Singapore Symphony Orchestra and Lan Shui with the team’s acclaimed performance of La Mer, first released in 2007 on Seascapes, a programme of sea-related works. The reviewer in American Record Guide called it ‘the most astounding, effective, and beautiful recording of La Mer I have ever heard’ and in BBC Music Magazine it was described as ‘an unequivocally world-class performance’.

Classical Music

Completed in 1891 and 1895 respectively, the Piano Concerto No.1 and the D minor Symphony were Sergei Rachmaninov's first large-scale orchestral compositions, written by a young man still in his early 20s. The composer, whose self-critical vein was evident from the start, almost immediately decided to revise the concerto, even though he did choose to perform it in its original form when he made his London début as a pianist in 1899. Two years earlier, the symphony had been premièred, an event which has become notorious as one of music's great disasters: the rehearsal time had been completely inadequate, and Glazunov, who conducted the work, was less than sympathetic to it - and may also have been drunk during the performance. The scathing reception caused Rachmaninov to doubt not only the quality of the work, but his own gifts as a composer, and he didn't write anything of importance for three years. In 1917, he did revise the piano concerto, making use of the experience gained from having in the meantime composed the immensely successful 2nd and 3rd piano concertos and performing them numerous times himself. Rachmaninov also repeatedly expressed the wish to return to his first symphony, but the score was lost in the upheavals of the Russian revolution and the composer's move to the USA. Not until after his death in 1943 was a set of the original orchestral parts rediscovered. That Rachmaninov never forgot the work is however proven by the fact that he quoted it in his very last orchestral composition, the Symphonic Dances from 1940. The Singapore Symphony Orchestra and Lan Shui have previously impressed critics worldwide with their performances of Rachmaninovs Second and Third Symphony, and are once again joined by the piano soloist Yevgeny Sudbin, with whom the team recently recorded what the reviewer in American Record Guide described as 'the most stunning performance of the Rhapsody [on a theme of Paganini] I've ever heard.'

The sea and Singapore are inextricably bound together - indeed, the first records of a settlement here give it the Javanese name Temasek ('sea town'). Ever since, these islands have provided a base for traders and fishermen, pirates and sailors. With the arrival of the British East India Company in 1819 Singapore quickly developed into one of the most important trading hubs of Asia and, indeed, the world. And although the patterns and methods of world trade and transport have changed, the sea still permeates the daily life of Singaporeans. This also applies to Lan Shui and the Singapore Symphony Orchestra, who on this disc perform four works inspired by the sea by composers as varied as Debussy, Glazunov, Frank Bridge and Zhou Long (b. 1953). The latter was the subject of Rhymes, the orchestra's previous and highly praised disc, of which web site Classics Today wrote: 'Zhou's is a personal, distinctive voice; and his beautifully crafted music achieves a remarkable synthesis of Western and Eastern musical traditions with musically rewarding results.' The reviewer at BBC Music Magazine agreed, calling the result 'utterly compulsive' with the addition: 'Here is orchestral playing of the highest calibre.' Zhou Long's The Deep, Deep Sea has as its title a quotation from Tang dynasty poet Li Bai, and was written for flautist Sharon Bezaly who performs it here. If the sea in Zhou Long's piece is an Asian one, Glazunov used a visit to Crimea and the Black Sea for his inspiration, adding a good pinch of Wagnerism to its not very salty water. Debussy and Bridge on the other hand most probably had the same sea in mind when they composed their works: Debussy finished his La Mer while visiting England in 1904, staying in Eastbourne on the south coast, and Frank Bridge (1879-1949) was born and grew up in Brighton, some thirty kilometres further west.

A pupil of Rimsky-Korsakov and director of the Moscow Conservatory, Mikhail Ippolitov-Ivanov is most famous for his evocative Caucasian Sketches [8.553405]. He was always interested in the music of the ethnic minorities in the Soviet Union and in later life he pursued an interest in the music of the Turkish peoples, composing the Turkish Fragments, Op. 62 in 1930. This richly melodic suite is notable for its characteristically oriental turns of phrase. Many years earlier, in 1908, he wrote his Symphony No. 1 in E minor, Op. 46 which, with its solemn evocations of liturgical music, confirmed him in the lineage of eminent Russian symphonists.

REVIEW:

The Singapore Symphony under Choo Hoey's direction plays everything capably; the homophonic chords in the symphony's first movement are powerful. I can imagine any of the London orchestras supplying greater tonal finish, but not necessarily mustering a comparable empathy and enthusiasm. The reproduction is excellent.

– MusicWeb International

A fascinating version of Mahler’s Tenth. 

There have been two other recordings made of Clinton Carpenter’s completion of Mahler’s 10th (Farberman/Philharmonia Hungarica and Litton/Dallas). Only the Litton is currently listed on ArkivMusic. Furthermore, the Singapore account seems to be the only DVD of  any version of the complete 10th, making it doubly welcome. Following highly successful performances in China in 2009, this live performance was subsequently taped in August in the concert hall of Singapore’s iconic, gleaming, bug-eyed arts complex known as Esplanade, Theatres on the Bay.

Mahlerians have been arguing for decades over the merits and demerits of the various completed versions of the 10th. There are now at least seven of them (counting Cooke twice), all recorded at least once, providing plenty of fodder for Mahlerians (or are we Mahlerites?) to chew over. Lan Shui has thrown in his lot with the Carpenter version, believing it to be “more authentic” than Cooke’s. I will not attempt to take sides on the issue; all have their strong and weak points. Suffice it to say here that, generally speaking, the Carpenter version is more densely scored than the familiar Cooke version(s), incorporates more interpolated contrapuntal lines, and employs far more percussion (the beginning of Scherzo I sounds almost like a timpani concerto). As a result, principal melodic lines sometimes become obscured and the viewer finds the camera zeroing in on an instrument seen but not heard.

Those familiar with Cooke will easily detect numerous differences in the orchestration; again, this is purely a matter of speculation, and each listener must decide for him- or herself as to the judiciousness of each detail. The movement with the greatest departure from Cooke is Scherzo II, where the orchestration sounds downright clumsy at times. But compensating are passages like the transition to the fifth movement, with its dull thuds in the bass drum rather than the brutal whacks Cooke calls for, followed by ghostly muttering and murmuring in the double basses and other low forms of instrumental life. Following all this grisly groveling Cooke assigns the hauntingly beautiful melody to the solo flute, as does Carpenter, but the latter adds an oboe, harp, and horn—a moment of true magic.

Far less contentious is the excellence of the performance at hand. The Singapore Symphony once again shows the world that it deserves to be ranked with the best. Though this is a live performance, there is nary a missed note or imprecise attack to be heard. (Touch-up sessions, I was told, were minimal.) Special commendation goes to the many felicitous touches from principal flutist Jin Ta, principal oboist Rachel Walker, and principal horn Han Chang Chou, though the latter is unfortunately too far from the microphone. In the opening Adagio, conductor Lan Shui emphasizes the music’s inherent lyricism rather than its passionate intensity, drawing forth seamless arcs of sound and tonal beauty from his superb string section. At the other end of the emotional spectrum is the absolutely terrifying scream of anguish near the end of the symphony, with the high trumpets piercing the air like a laser beam. But regardless of whether the passage is a ravishingly beautiful melodic line or a rush of instrumental virtuosity, Lan ensures that it makes musical sense. There is an innate feeling for phrasing and structure to every gesture he makes, and the orchestra responds accordingly. Particularly delicious are the episodes in both scherzo movements, where Lan injects a good dose of old-fashioned Viennese schmaltz, something I’d not heard before in this music.

The visual element has been tastefully considered and imaginatively executed. At the huge explosion of agonizing dissonance near the end of the Adagio, the camera takes us deep into the bell of the tuba, as if peering into the black abyss. During the piercing trumpet screams that immediately follow, the screen slowly goes white as our eyes are led directly into blinding light. There are numerous opportunities to enjoy the sheer visual beauty of the hall, which abounds in gorgeous color and striking textures. There are enough camera angles so that virtually every musician gets quality time in the lens but without the constant, annoying flitting around that mars so many orchestral videos these days.

The worthy filler, Five Elements , is a 12-minute suite of five short pieces by Messiaen’s only pupil, the Chinese-born Chen Qigang, now living in Paris. Dating from 1998, it has become one of Chen’s more frequently played works (in this country I know of performances by orchestras in Milwaukee and Los Angeles), and it has been recorded before, on an all-Chen Virgin Classics CD. Didier Benetti’s performance there is good, but Lan is more imaginative in bringing out the exquisite subtleties and colors in this music of Takemitsu-like delicacy and purity. Each of the “elements” (not physical substances, but rather “cyclic movements which constitute the universe”) is scored for a different combination of instruments and is visually framed in a different color (blue for water, red for fire, etc.) while the camera locates the various sources of sound, often using a split screen and resulting in a kind of advanced guide to the orchestra. Mallet instruments and special effects in the strings (harmonics, tapping, col legno , etc.) play major roles in the highly varied and fascinating sound world of Five Elements.

The disc comes with good booklet notes by Marc Rochester in five languages (English, French, German, Japanese, Chinese), brief interviews with Lan about the music, and a small photo gallery. All in all, this is a product well worth watching as well as hearing, and anyone who loves the Mahler 10th owes it to him- or herself to acquire this release.

FANFARE: Robert Markow

Announced as a commemoration of the 150th anniversary of Mahler’s birth, this recording by the Singapore Symphony Orchestra is also apparently the first video/Blu-ray release of his Symphony No. 10 as completed by Clinton Carpenter. This version is less frequently heard than the ‘performing version’ by Deryck Cooke, but as discussed in Tony Duggan’s excellent comparative review of recordings of Mahler’s Symphony No.10, Carpenter was the first to begin working on this project, commencing as he did in 1946. The first edition was completed in 1966, ten years before Cooke’s was published in 1976. As well as these two, there are also versions by Joe Wheeler, and more recently Remo Mazzetti, Rudolf Barshai (1924-2010), Nicola Samale and Giuseppe Mazzuca.
 
Beginning with the Adagio, the only movement completed by Mahler and which has often appeared as a single movement on Mahler symphonic cycles, we get the measure of the Singapore Symphony Orchestra and Lan Shui’s conducting. Directing without a score, Shui doesn’t linger or cloy with over-sentimental fussiness. This is perhaps not quite the most gripping of Adagio recordings, but it works well enough – clean and efficient, rather than streaked with the blood and sweat of intense and daring risk-taking. The real passionate work comes later on. The recording is detailed and bright, and although the absolute sheen of the strings may not be quite as glossy as Sir Simon Rattle in his later Berlin Philharmonic recording this is clearly a crack band, standing up well to the edge-of-the-seat scrutiny of microphones and assorted cameras. The impact of ‘that chord’ at 19:15 will make you jump out of your seat, cleverly preceded by some disarmingly innocent celestial ceiling-gazing by the video director.
 
Musically things become interesting with the second movement Scherzo. Carpenter clearly had a different idea to Cooke about what Mahler might have done had he lived to revise his scoring, and there are quite a few extra trills, counter-melodies, darting changes of tempo and other twiddly bits added to what was actually quite a substantially notated original. The overall effect is for this reason not hugely different to the Cooke version, and the extras either add character or pickiness, depending on your mood or point of view. Having become so used to the Cooke version it’s hard to know whether the opposite would be the case were the tables turned, but to my ears the music is eccentric enough without too much extra superimposed material. The rather Hollywood tinsel of the final section, marked ‘Pesante’ with Cooke is a case in point. This does stand very well as a performance in its own right however, and with absolute conviction from the performers as good a case as any is made for Carpenter’s version of this movement.
 
There is some structural adjustment going on in the ‘Purgatorio’, unnamed as a movement in this version. However, in essence the extra thematic flights and different approach to texture don’t create as much of a ‘new’ movement when compared to Cooke as you might think. It is with the fourth movement Scherzo that the sense of an alternative vision becomes most immediately apparent. Cooke’s version is rich and effective, but for me always leaves the sense of an unfinished work – the realisation that Mahler would certainly have done more had he lived to create a definitive and complete piece. Carpenter’s working of the material doesn’t sweep away all of the musical idiosyncrasies left by the bare bones of Mahler’s short score, but at least gives a more immediate impression of something established and rooted in its own tradition. There are some magical moments, and the Singapore players if anything warm to their task in this movement even more than in the rest of the piece. There are too many differences between Carpenter and Cooke to mention, and I have to admit to getting lost while trying to follow Carpenter using the Cooke score, but the overall effect is more important than the technical analysis in my view. I found myself sold on this version the more I listened.
 
The fifth movement Finale opens with that now famous damped bass drum, and sounds suitably funereal. Carpenter uses the keener edge of trumpets to top the brass chorale at bar 23, and the flute solo from 30 has a nice harp accompaniment illustrated well in a split view on the video. There is a certain amount of schmaltz in the orchestration which might take a bit of getting used to, but these sorts of things are questions of taste. The orchestral colourings to my ear sometimes have a Tchaikovsky-like flavour: the joviality of the Nutcracker drawn into pits of despond by the mood of the Sixth Symphony amplified by overwrought early 20 ^th century late-romanticism. There is no doubting the effectiveness of Carpenter’s orchestration, but there are moments where Cooke’s closer alliance to what historical Mahler research might consider a more ‘authentic’ realisation allows a clearer window into what Mahler actually left, rather than what someone else feels he might have done. This doesn’t quite tip into over-working of the material, but sails close enough at times. I don’t dislike the result, but am rather glad this plush cast of extras isn’t the only Mahler 10 we have.
 
The programme of this DVD also gives us Wu Xing or ‘The Five Elements’ by Chinese composer Chen Qi-gang. The five short movements each represent a different element: Water, Wood, Fire, Earth and Metal respectively. Clever camerawork helps the ear identify some of the effects which arise, but as with most pieces with such clear themes, the music is not difficult to interpret and follow. There is plenty of interesting percussion with Wood for instance, Britten-like brass chimes and licking flames rising from the double–basses and bass drum in Fire. This is all highly effective stuff, essentially romantic in idiom, but with some gorgeous melting harmonies and sonorities. Bonus features for the DVD include some introductions on both pieces in English from conductor Lan Shui and some photographs including backstage souvenirs, and some of the orchestra’s other concert performances.
 
With good booklet notes by Marc Rochester and clever use of Klimt’s ‘Der Kuss’ to illustrate Mahler’s marital crisis at the time he was working on the symphony, this is a very nicely produced DVD and an excellent recording of Clinton Carpenter’s completion of Mahler’s Symphony No.10. I have to admit to being far more used to hearing the Deryck Cooke version in a variety of recordings, and so accept any comments I may have on the Carpenter version will be compromised by having this as an ingrained reference point. I accept the validity and effectiveness of Carpenter’s version, but ultimately feel closer to Mahler’s intentions in the piece – at the state in which he left it – with Cooke. What this DVD shows is that there is most certainly more than one way to deliver this remarkable piece, and having the choice is most certainly more of an enrichment than a distraction from any one ‘true’ version of the score – something which can never exist in any case.
 
-- Dominy Clements, MusicWeb International  

Classical Music

Zhou Long, born 1953 in Beijing, came to the US in the 1980s and studied at Columbia University with composers Chou Wen-Chung and Mario Davidovsky, among others. Prior to this release, two collections of his chamber music have been reviewed in Fanfare—one by myself in 22:5, and one by Peter Burwasser in 19:1. Both of us were attracted to the composer’s ability to blend the sonorities of Chinese and Western instruments and devise convincing formal designs that drew from both musical cultures. In “limiting” himself to a Western orchestra (except for additional and varied percussion) in this program, he has in a sense set himself a greater challenge, and succeeds admirably.

What impresses most about these four works are the breadth of orchestral colors Zhou manipulates, and how the musical drama grows directly out of those colors. The four Poems from Tang, for example, are purely instrumental evocations of Tang Dynasty (AD 618–907) poems (printed in English translation in the booklet), where sounds of nature as well as intimations of mist, clouds, flames, and dreams emerge within fugitive rustling, burbling, and murmuring timbres, in contrast with full ensemble passages reminiscent of Stravinsky’s orchestral palette in The Firebird. Moreover, the rhythmic insistence of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring appears to have influenced Zhou in the remaining works; in The Rhyme of Taigu an expanded percussion section not only adds haunting colors and textures but provides an energetic, repetitious rhythmic impetus, and Da Qu, which isolates Jonathan Fox’s bells, vibraphone, and gongs against an orchestra that threatens to erupt from tranquil to volatile, near chaotic, expression in the blink of an eye, is even more exotic and vibrant. (Note to solo percussionists and adventurous orchestras: this work has great audience-wowing potential.) Even the brief transformation of a Shaanxi love song, mixed with Zhou’s recollection of farmers burning their fields, in The Future of Fire builds to thunderous Rite-like climaxes.

BIS’s engineering captures the wide dynamic range of the music vividly, and conductor Lan Shui and the Singapore musicians present everything in the best possible light.

Art Lange, FANFARE

The previous Debussy disc from these performers was reviewed with considerable enthusiasm, especially in the case of La Mer. I carefully avoided reading my colleagues' words prior to assessing this second disc but, having now repaired that, I am pleased to be able to echo their opinions. The SSO and Lan Shui have indeed got a remarkable feel for this music. Combined with a very fine and detailed recording in surround this second disc is also a winner.

The first thing that struck me was the structural clarity brought to the greatest work, Jeux. My list of alternative performances, going back to Jean Martinon in 1974, exhibit much refinement and tonal beauty but not until this new BIS SACD have I been so aware of the architecture underlying the beauty. I can only echo Jean-Pascal Vachon's booklet note when he states that this is one of the hardest pieces in the symphonic repertoire to analyse. To a listener this seemed to progress inevitably to its cryptic final notes, at no point was it just a wash of impressionist sound. The composer remarked ironically that he came to realise that a choreographer is a man who is very strong on arithmetic. This cleanly delineated performance would surely be less difficult for the dancers to count than many an alternative.

Jeux is only about a quarter of the disc and the other two works, also composed just before the First World War, are much less performed in the concert hall. A search online showed little evidence of stagings of La Boîte à joujoux and Khamma has yet to be staged. Neither were completed by Debussy himself. In the case of Khamma he orchestrated just a few pages before handing over to Charles Kœchlin "under his supervision". The work apparently annoyed Debussy, presumably the scenario lacked the cohesion he wanted but he could also have been doubtful about working with the notorious dancer Maud Allan. He described it as: "that queer ballet, with its trumpet calls, which suggest a riot or an outbreak of fire, and give one the shivers." Debussy's music was quite adventurous and contained, according to the composer, "the most recent discoveries of harmonic chemistry. " Kœchlin recalls that Debussy was happy with his orchestration. One commentator even suggests he came back to the piece. Certainly the plot line is sufficient to make for an eventful work. Kœchlin was no mean composer himself and he makes a splendidly dramatic job of Debussy's score, sufficient, one would have thought, to make it more frequent in our concert halls than it is. Perhaps it is true that the final score sounds more like Kœchlin than Debussy but since Debussy approved, that seems irrelevant. Here the SSO and Shui give it their considerable best and it makes for good listening whatever its perceived shortcomings.

The final piece is his ballet for children La Boîte à joujoux. In this case he orchestrated most of it leaving a little to be completed, when illness overtook him, by his friend Caplet. Entertaining though this piece is it does not have the coherence of Ravel's Ma mère l'Oye and to my mind it is not too surprising it is neglected. However, second class Debussy is a great deal better than many another lesser composer. Performed as it is here the work charms the ear throughout and is very much worth the occasional hearing.

I have already mentioned the very informative booklet notes by Professor Vachon. With two out of three works which are obscure they are more than usually useful and maintain BIS' reputation for providing high quality documentation. Overall I would recommend this most strongly for Jeux and regard Khamma as a valuable reminder that some works do not deserve neglect. The recording allows the spacious acoustic of Singapore's Esplanade Concert Hall to be heard, a reminder that yet another city has a better large hall than London.

– MusicWeb International (Dave Billinge)

Classical Music

The works on this recording were written at various periods in Claude Debussy’s life, and reflect different aspects of him: from a young man stylistically unsure of himself to the confident maître, from a jobbing composer struggling to fulfill sometimes incongruous commissions to a man worn down by illness and outer events.

The disc opens with Printemps – a work originally for choir, piano and orchestra written in 1887 during Debussy’s stay in Italy as a winner of the Prix de Rome, but only published 25 years later in an orchestration made by Henri Büsser under the composer’s supervision. Three of the works that follow were commissions – the Rapsodie from a lady saxophonist, the Marche écossaise from an American general of Scottish descent and the Deux Dances from the instrument-maker Pleyel wanting to market a new model for a chromatic harp.

Chronologically the last work on the program, Berceuse héroique is Debussy's contribution to a tribute to the king of Belgium at the beginning of the Great War. Having rejected the idea of writing a heroic march in the safety of his own home he instead opted for a lullaby for piano, which he orchestrated the following year.

The closing work on the disc, however, is Nocturnes, for which Debussy borrowed the title from a series of atmospheric paintings by James Whistler. Made up of three equally atmospheric movements, it is today one of Debussy’s best-loved compositions for orchestra.

Nocturnes also forms the end of a trilogy of Debussy albums from the Singapore Symphony Orchestra and Lan Shui. Critical acclaim for the team range from ‘superb’ (BBC Music Magazine, about La mer) and ‘unquestionably world-class’ (Klassik-Heute.de, about the orchestra) to ‘a magnificent disc’ – the French magazine Classica’s verdict on the three ballet scores Jeux, Khamma and La Boîte à joujoux.

Mainly known today for his violin concerto, during his lifetime the Hungarian composer Karl Goldmark was praised for the quality of his instrumentation, his skilful use of folk music and his own Jewish heritage, and his evident gift for melody. The author of several operas, among them The Queen of Sheba, Goldmark wrote music in most genres, and although largely self-taught he was sought out as a teacher of composition by Sibelius, among others. Composed in 1875, his ‘Rustic Wedding’ Symphony was his most popular orchestral work. At the first performance the audience hailed it as a triumph, and Goldmark’s friend Brahms said about it: ‘clear-cut and faultless, it sprang into being a finished thing, like Minerva from the head of Jupiter.’ The five-movement symphony has sometimes been described as a suite of tone poems, including a wedding march with variations depicting the wedding guests, a nuptial song and a bucolic wedding dance. Even though the work is now a rarity in concert, conductors such as Sir Thomas Beecham and Leonard Bernstein demonstrated their belief in it by performing it on many occasions. Composed some ten years later, Goldmark’s E flat major symphony, Op.35, is far less well-known. Although its form is more traditional than that of its predecessor, it is similar in mood – bucolic and high-spirited – and provides rich opportunities to sample Goldmark’s skill as an orchestrator and musical colourist. Performing these unjustly neglected works is the Singapore Symphony Orchestra – a band which under its principal conductor Lan Shui has impressed reviewers in repertoire as diverse as Debussy’s La Mer (‘an unequivocally world-class performance’, BBC Music Magazine), Zhou Long (‘utterly compulsive… orchestral playing of the highest calibre’, International Record Review) and Rachmaninov’s Second Symphony (‘a moving, completely satisfying performance’, allmusic.com).

Not many instruments have a birthday - the tuba, however, does: the 12th September 1835. It is true that more or less similar instruments were already in existence, but it was on that day that a patent for the instrument was registered in Germany. By the second half of the century, with the operas of Richard Wagner, it had become an indispensable colour in the orchestra, and was later to play a significant role in works by such composers as Richard Strauss, Stravinsky and Prokofiev. Tuba concertos started to appear in the middle of the twentieth century, and finally gave lie to the cliché that the tuba was heavy, clumsy and incapable of playing fast. On this disc, the Norwegian tuba virtuoso Øystein Baadsvik explores some of these concertante works, including pieces by the Georgian composer Alexander Arutiunian and the Swedish composer Torbjörn Lundquist. The programme opens and closes with a Williams, however. Written in 1954, Ralph Vaughan Williams' Concerto for Bass Tuba was at first considered a last eccentricity of an aged composer, but with the passing of time it has become recognized as a classic.

This album of orchestral showpieces features four of the five members of the Mighty Handful, a group of Russian composers who, during the second half of the 19th century, collaborated to create a distinct national style. The recorded works illustrate different aspects of their endeavors – both in terms of the musical means they employ and their subject matter. Orientalism is one of the typical features of the music of the group, as witness Balakirev’s Islamey – employing material from the Caucasus Mountains – and Borodin’s Polovtsian Dances, describing the revels of a nomadic eastern tribe during a 12th-century raid into the Russian lands. The most individual of the group was Modest Mussorgsky, with a musical language both powerful and startlingly vivid in imagination. His celebrated Pictures from an Exhibition was composed in 1874 as a tribute to a recently deceased artist friend, and takes in such specifically Russian elements as the fairy-tale witch Baba Yaga and the Great Gate of Kiev. Originally written for the piano it is here performed in the 1922 orchestration by Maurice Ravel. Also by Mussorgsky, the opening Night on the Bare Mountain paints a witch’s Sabbath in bold brushstrokes, and was re-orchestrated by Rimsky-Korsakov after the composer’s death. It is his version, with more sumptuous orchestral textures and a tighter formal plan that is heard here, performed by the Singapore Symphony Orchestra and Lan Shu

Generally acknowledged as one of the great masters of the late-Romantic symphony orchestra, Richard Strauss understood like few others how to use the rich palette of instrumental colours to portray larger-than-life passions and emotions. He did so in a series of pioneering symphonic poems – often choosing as his subject extraordinary characters such as Don Juan, Till Eulenspiegel and Don Quixote. But before either of these, in his very first tone poem, he composed a portrayal of Macbeth, his ferociously ambitious wife and their downfall. It is with this rarely played work that Lan Shui and the Singapore Symphony Orchestra open their all-Strauss disc. Also included is another early tone poem, Tod und Verklärung, which Strauss started composing very shortly after Macbeth, and which was actually premièred before that work. In his new work, Strauss didn’t make use of an existing character or story – instead he set out to depict the emotions of a man struggling against and finally giving in to death. These two works, which both end in death, frame a suite from one of the composer’s most lighthearted ventures – the opera Der Rosenkavalier, set in mid-eighteenth century courtly Vienna. Premièred in 1911, this sophisticated aristocratic comedy, proved a perennial favourite and towards the end of his life, Strauss gave his blessing to the Suite recorded here, which manages to include a fair selection of the opera’s best-loved moments.

Rising star violinist Chloe Chua presents a recording combining Chen Gang and He Zhanhao's Butterfly Lovers Violin Concerto with Niccolo Paganini's First Violin Concerto, performed together with the Singapore Symphony Orchestra, Rodolfo Barraez and Mario Venzago. The Butterfly Lovers Violin Concerto was written in 1959, and inspired by a tale often called the Romeo & Juliet of ancient China. Chen and He deftly combine a Western classical idiom with elements from Chinese opera, such as grace notes and portamento effects, and the work has become one of the most famous and acclaimed pieces of Chinese classical music. This album also features an interpretation of Chen Gang's Sunshine over Tashkurgan, which adds Central-Asian maqam to the stylistic palette. The programme concludes with Paganini's First Violin Concerto, musically inspired by Rossinian bel canto. The three works share a richness of melodic invention and orchestral colours, as well as breathtaking virtuosic demands for the soloist. The solo parts are in excellent hands with Chloe Chua, who admires the steadfast love and perseverance of the Butterfly Lovers, and feels fully at home in these evocative and exhilarating masterpieces.

The Singapore Symphony and its music director Hans Graf present a recording of Józef Kozlowski’s Requiem, together with the Singapore Symphony Chorus & Youth Choir, as well as a quartet of outstanding soloists: Olga Peretyatko (soprano), Olesya Petrova (mezzo-soprano), Boris Stepanov (tenor) and Christoph Seidl (bass). The Requiem (1798) was commissioned to Kozlowski by the abdicated King Stanislaw of Poland, and can be perceived as a requiem not just for the monarch, but for the entire Polish nation, absorbed by the Russian state during the 1780s. Interestingly, the work was also heard during the funeral of Tsar Alexander I of Russia, in a different version with heavier orchestration and choruses for more drama. The current recording uses a new edition created by conductor Graf himself, realizing the intimate character of the original 1798 version. Composed just 7 years after Mozart’s famous Requiem, the work is rooted in Viennese Classicism, yet also adumbrates nineteenth-century developments, with a subtle Slavonic tinge. This revival is a gem to anyone interested in music from the early Romantic era.

The "Tondichtung", or tone poem, was a popular European genre from the mid-19th to early 20th century. German composer Richard Strauss excelled in this form, producing ten works. A tone poem is a single-movement orchestral piece meant to evoke moods, stories, or scenes without following a strict narrative. Strauss's Don Juan, Op. 20 (1888), was inspired by Nikolaus Lenau's poetic take on the Don Juan legend, portraying him as a man seeking the perfect woman and ultimately succumbing to despair. Strauss's orchestral work mirrors this, opening with energetic themes of Don Juan's adventures, featuring lyrical passages for his loves, and concluding with dark chords symbolizing his demise. In 1898, Strauss composed Ein Heldenleben (A Hero's Life), a six-section tone poem inspired by Beethoven's Eroica, reflecting his own life and career. Themes depict the hero, his adversaries, companion, battles, peace, and eventual retirement. Critics debated Strauss's self-portrait as arrogant or humorous, but the work remains a testament to artistic struggle and triumph. Austrian conductor Hans Graf, Chief Conductor and Quantedge Music Director of the Singapore Symphony Orchestra (SSO) since 2020, is known for his curiosity, creative programming, and commanding presence. An acclaimed guest conductor worldwide, he has won multiple awards including the �sterreichischer Musiktheaterpreis and recorded works by Mozart, Stravinsky, and Berg. Founded in 1979, the SSO is Singapore's flagship orchestra, performing year-round and achieving global recognition, including rankings by Gramophone and BBC Music Magazine. Under Graf, the orchestra has released over 50 recordings and revived rare works by composers like Kozlowski, Klenau and Ogerman. The SSO forms part of the Singapore Symphony Group, which also encompasses choruses, youth orchestras, and major music festivals.

This album provides a peek into Paul von Klenau's vast collection of music created during World War II where he produced works, almost obsessively, until his passing in 1946. The album includes world premiere recordings of Klenau's Violin Concerto, Piano Concerto, and Symphony No. 8, showcasing his mastery of both tonal and atonal sonorities, his distinctive introspective style, and his exceptional talent for venturing into uncharted musical realms.

Both these violin concertos have been long-neglected for the same reason: their composers were much better-known for their achievements in musical theatre rather than for their works for the concert-hall. Robert Russell Bennett studied composition in Paris with Nadia Boulanger, and his output includes seven symphonies. He also orchestrated some of the highest-profile musicals in Broadway history, including works by George Gershwin, Cole Porter, and Rodgers and Hammerstein. (Richard Rodgers modestly claimed that Bennett's skills in instrumentation had made his music 'sound better than it was'). Vladimir Alexandrovich Dukelsky changed his name to Vernon Duke at the suggestion of his friend Jacob Gershovitz - better known as George Gershwin. Duke received a rigorous training in classical music at the Kyiv Conservatory; was friends with Prokofiev and composed ballet scores for Sergei Diaghilev's Ballets Russes in Paris, as well as three symphonies. He remains better known as the creator of hit shows, such as Cabin in the Sky, and as the composer of numerous songs that became jazz standards, including 'April in Paris'. Chloe Hanslip, Andrew Litton, and the Singapore Symphony Orchestra perform both concertos with aplomb, and Andrew Litton also takes the role of pianist in Bennett's Hexapoda.

Bernard Herrmann is widely regarded as one of Hollywood’s most important composers, responsible for more than fifty film scores (in addition to his work for TV, radio, and the concert hall), and noted for his collaborations with Orson Welles and, later, with Alfred Hitchcock.

Welles was unofficially involved with Robert Stevenson’s film of Jane Eyre in the 1940s, and it was Welles that suggested Herrmann as composer for the project. Herrmann became obsessed with all things Brontë, and within months was writing to friends of his plans to write an opera on Wuthering Heights. It took him eight years to complete the vocal score, using a libretto written by his wife, Lucille Fletcher. Although he conducted a recording of the work, in 1966, he failed to see a live production in his lifetime. Although the opera features eight solo roles, Cathy and Heathcliff dominate the action and are the only singers in Hans Sørensen’s Suite of excerpts – recorded here for the very first time.

Keri Fuge and Roderick Williams take the vocal roles in this recording. Echoes was composed in 1965 for string quartet, and was later arranged for string orchestra by Hans Sørensen – the version heard on this album. The recording was made in the Esplanade Concert Hall, Singapore. in Surround Sound, and is available as a Hybrid SACD and in Spatial Audio.

Dmitri Shostakovich was a versatile composer: popular and serious styles came to him with equal ease and are frequently found together in the same work. In his twenties, before the heavy hand of Soviet officialdom slapped him down in 1936, music of every kind poured out of him: symphonies, operas and full-length ballets but also a great amount of music for film and theatre. Here Andrew Litton leads the Singapore Symphony Orchestra in a program which explores this lighter side of a composer who is otherwise often regarded as unrelentingly serious.

The album opens with Suite for Jazz Orchestra No. 1, which Litton conducts from the piano. Consisting of three brief movements, it is the only truly original work on the disc, written in 1934 for a competition aimed at making ‘Soviet Jazz’ more respectable. The remaining suites are all reworkings of existing music, such as the ballets The Age of Gold – about the adventures of a Soviet football team visiting the decadent West – and The Limpid Stream, portraying a group of entertainers visiting an idyllic collective farm. The Suite for Variety Orchestra is a compilation that the composer made in the late 1950s from three film scores, a ballet movement and four piano pieces. Closing the album is Shostakovich’s 1927 orchestration of a Broadway classic, Vincent Youmans’ "Tea for Two," which had become a hit under the title "Tahiti Trot."

REVIEW:

Entitled Jazz & Variety, this album encompasses four of Shostakovich’s more popular-style suites, mainly drawn from his ballet and theatre scores. These range from the poker-faced, Kurt Weill-like stylization of 1920s dance music, complete with plunking banjo, in the Suite for Jazz Orchestra No. 1 (1934), via the Prokofiev-like burlesques of The Age of Gold – a 1930 ballet about the vicissitudes of a Soviet football team in the wicked West – to the more straightforwardly traditional ballet numbers of The Limpid Stream(1935/45) set on an idyllic collective farm, and the Suite for Variety Orchestra put together from various pieces from the 1950s.

One item, the Waltz from the Jazz Suite, recurs twice: more fully orchestrated in The Limpid Stream, and in yet a third arrangement with a different, more banal middle section, in the Variety Suite. The collection culminates in Shostakovich’s twinkling orchestration of a version of ‘Tea for Two’, entitled Tahiti Trot (1927). Yet, in the middle of all these frolics, the searing intensity of the extended Adagio from The Age of Gold reminds us of the other, tragic side of Shostakovich.

Andrew Litton and the Singapore Symphony Orchestra lavish more care and subtlety on these pieces than the quality of invention in some of the music maybe deserves, additionally flattered by BIS’s spacious recording – though the Jazz Suite might have more bite in a drier acoustic. Still, this is a superior collection for those who relish this lighter, sometimes naughtier side of Shostakovich.

-- BBC Music Magazine

One of the boldest and most radical composers of all time, Alexander Scriabin had a lifelong obsession with occult and mystical ideas. Initially under the influence of Chopin, Wagner, and Liszt, his music later became more complex, taking on an expressive power which provoked extreme reactions from audiences – of adulation as well as repulsion. Not shying away from hyperbole, Scriabin once declared: ‘I am the apotheosis of creation – I am the aim of all aims – I am the end of all ends.’

The three works featured on this release belong to Scriabin’s final compositional period where the music seems to veer between voluptuous languor and striving energy. Composed back-to-back, the Poem of Ecstasy and the Fifth Piano Sonata are drenched in bitter-sweet harmonies and carefully constructed dissonances. The scores of both works make reference to the same poem – by Scriabin himself – which ends with the lines ‘thus the universe resounds with the joyful cry: I AM!’. In his last symphonic poem, Prometheus — The Poem of Fire, Scriabin aims even higher. Here he expresses the evolution of the world from formless chaos, through the appearance of mankind, fertilized by the divine spark, towards spiritual liberation and ultimate transcendence. The unusually large orchestra and a wordless choir produces a kaleidoscope of contrasts, colors and sounds caught up in an ecstatic whirl.

REVIEWS:

In Scriabin’s work, the Prometheus myth is focused less on the creative element of Prometheus and more on the theft of fire, which allows the composer to create ‘light-filled’ images. Lan Shui creates a very great tension from the very first bars, giving expression to the fantasy nature of the composition. We thus hear music with those detaching particles of sound that, like the flock of birds in flight, create effects from ever-changing forms. Shui thus proves to be an imaginative conductor who spurs his orchestra and choir on to an outstanding performance. Evgeny Sudbin blends perfectly into this feverish sound...A great performance!

-- Pizzicato

Lan Shui and his Singapore Symphony Orchestra...inflame the subject; they delight in lascivious sensualities, the better to suddenly cause volcanoes to burst. All this is of a dizzying control and a sonic refinement...

The pianist is none other than Yevgeny Sudbin...He touches on genius in Prometheus, but you also have to hear him burn his keyboard, all hammers and iron, for a 5th Sonata that sounds as if it had just come out of the forge. A great album - totally unexpected, and recorded with striking fidelity.

-- Artamag'

The Singapore Symphony Orchestra, Thomas Clausen Trio, and Jean Thorel present Symbiosis - Tribute to Bill Evans, a remarkable album celebrating the enduring legacy of one of jazz's greatest pianists. Featuring three extraordinary works, the album opens with Palle Mikkelborg's Bill Evans Suite (1969), reimagining Evans' classics such as "Waltz for Debby" and "Time Remembered". Thomas Clausen's deeply personal For Pi follows, a tender jazz ballad infused with the spirit of Evans, orchestrated for strings and trio with Anders Malta's lyrical trumpet adding poignant beauty, and Claus Ogerman's Symbiosis, reconstructed here for the first full live concert performance. Recorded live with the Singapore Symphony Orchestra, Symbiosis - Tribute to Bill Evans offers a vivid, contemporary perspective on Evans' timeless influence, blending intimacy, sophistication, and orchestral grandeur. This album continues the orchestra's extensive collaboration with PENTATONE, complementing the acclaimed Mozart: Violin Concertos (2025), Butterfly Lovers & Paganini (2024), Kozlowski: Requiem (2024), and Vivaldi: Four Seasons & Locatelli: Harmonic Labyrinth (2023).

Beloved worldwide, Chloe Chua returns to PENTATONE with Mozart's complete violin concertos - a project that began when she was just 15 years old. The album features Mozart's Rondo in B-Flat Major, K. 269 and Rondo in C Major, K. 373 as well as the Sinfonia Concertante for Violin, Viola & orchestra in E-Flat Major, K. 364. The latter also features the outstanding young Chinese violist Ziyu He, winner of the 2016 Yehudi Menuhin Competition at just 16. In this performance, he showcases his remarkable artistry alongside Chloe, herself a former winner of the same prestigious competition. The soloists are accompanied by the Singapore Symphony Orchestra under the baton of Hans Graf, for whom the relationship with the violin star is particularly special. For Chloe, Mozart's music holds a special place in her heart and she has embraced the challenge of following in the footsteps of so many legendary violinists. In these refined and fresh interpretations, her deep connection to the music - written by Mozart when he was around her age - is unmistakable. Even without a trained ear, one can appreciate her extraordinary technique, elegance, and effort to capture the vitality of these beloved works. This album continues Chloe's exclusive collaboration with PENTATONE, complementing the already released and acclaimed Butterfly Lovers & Paganini (2024) and Vivaldi Four Seasons and Locatelli Harmonic Labyrinth (2023).