The Jazz Roots series traces the African ancestry of blues, jazz, bossa nova, fusion and this set gathers the many fruits of those fertile seeds. Check it out: Original Jelly Roll Blues Jelly Roll Baker; Maple Leaf Rag Scott Joplin; Dippermouth Blues Louis Armstrong; Take the 'A' Train Duke Ellington; Black Coffee Sarah Vaughan; Ornithology Charlie Parker; Downhearted Blues Bessie Smith; Take Five Dave Brubeck Quartet; So What Miles Davis; Birdland Weather Report; Rockit Herbie Hancock, and more!

Classical Music

Artfulness disguised as simplicity – achingly beautiful.

‘Flicka’, as she is known among friends, has garnered the opera houses and concert halls around the world for four decades and her agenda is still well-filled. As a recording artist she has been prolific and appeared in opera, art-song, sacred music, operetta, Broadway musical and cross-over albums – always with glorious results. The present disc, recorded in 1978 and reissued by Arkiv with the original cover picture and Lionel Salter’s liner notes, was one of the few records with her I never bought on LP – God knows why! Now that I finally have it in my collection I feel satisfied. Mahler songs and Frederica von Stade’s voice have always seemed the ideal combination.

Her clean, slim voice is especially well suited to Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen. One of her specialities in opera was the trouser role: Cherubino and Octavian. The opening lines of Wenn mein Schatz are sung with innocent, boyish tone and in Ging heut’ Morgen she is wonderfully fresh and youthful, singing the final lines touchingly with ‘naked’ tone. She can also be strong and dramatic: Ich hab’ ein glühend Messer has all the necessary intensity with desperation almost visible. Then Die zwei blauen Augen is simplicity itself. I have heard few recordings of this cycle that sound so right – and this in spite of a woman singing what is, after all, a man’s words.

The two Wunderhorn songs are just as affecting. In Rheinlegendchen she adopts that boyish tone again and sings, so to speak, with wide open eyes – a spontaneous story-teller. Wer hat dies Liedlein erdacht?, famously recorded in the 1930s by Elisabeth Schumann, definitely has an open-air atmosphere. Schumann was a charmer, ‘Flicka’ with rounder tone is no less charming.

The five Rückert songs are, for me, indelibly connected with Janet Baker and her late 1960s recording with Barbirolli. Baker could, like no-one else, combine simplicity and deep emotions. But Frederica von Stade’s leaner voice is equally well suited to these songs. Her sophisticated artlessness – sounds like a contradiction but is exactly what I hear; artfulness disguised as simplicity – makes Liebst du um Schönheit so achingly beautiful. She applies the same light touch on Um Mitternacht, and this doesn’t exclude interpretative depth. She has the required power for the big emotional moments, most importantly the final pages of this great song.

The final song, Ich bin der Welt abhanden gekommen, has for forty years been one of the family’s great favourites – always in Janet Baker’s reading. Other recordings have popped up and we have admired them, listened closely and in the last analysis returned to Ms Baker. I still find it the deepest-probing but Frederica von Stade’s ethereal rendering of Ich bin gestorben dem Weltgetümmel (Rückert actually wrote Weltgewimmel) has also etched itself into my store of unforgettable musical moments. A wonderful end to a memorable recording.

The recording is first class and the LPO play like gods under Andrew Davis’s watchful direction. There are no song texts in the booklet, which is a pity, but they are easily available on the internet.

-- Göran Forsling, MusicWeb International [6/2011]

Also available - 8 Guarneri reissues appearing for the first time on CD!

"...few performing groups can bring as much sheer musicality and communicativeness to the music at hand. Even at this latter stage of their performing life, the Guarneri still bring a quality of artistry and musicianship that other quartets can only envy.

Consider...the Second String Quartet of Hungarian composer Zoltan Kodaly. It's an early work (written in 1918) that nimbly blends modern sonorities with traditional folk-dance melodies and rhythms. No doubt, only a handful in attendance had heard it before. The Guarneri immersed themselves in the music, crafting a performance that left a favorable impression of the music (rather than draw attention to themselves)."

- Marc Shulgold, Rocky Mountain News

Duke was as versatile a composer as he was genius. He got people swingin' with goofy hits such as "Diga Diga Doo." He wrote the anthems of the Great Depression with songs such as "New East St. Louis Toodle-oo," and then he helped jazz mature with the smoothest romantic sophistication the genre ever has or ever will see. Enjoy a great mix of 14 Ellington classics.

Drawn from the worldwide catalog holdings of Sony Classical, which includes both the Columbia/CBS and RCA Victor label imprints, the SONY Classical Originals, SONY Classical Masters Singles and Box Sets, and SONY Opera House series offer an extensive selection of highly desirable and collectible EU (Germany) pressed import editions, smartly designed and graphically pleasing, featuring the most sought-after recordings by the world's preeminent, legendary artists both past and present, with many titles newly re-mastered in 24 bit High Resolution Audio.

Combining the famous Third Symphony (“Eroica”) with excerpts of the lesser known ballet music “The Creatures of Prometheus,” Grammy® Award winning conductor Kent Nagano has chosen repertoire based on Beethoven’s admiration for Napoleon Bonaparte. The ballet score, written shortly before the Third Symphony, reveals the first clear signs in music of the composer’s admiration for the “Prometheus of his era.” The finale’s melody was taken from a popular French operetta of the time, which Beethoven also used in the last movement of the “Eroica.” Kent Nagano’s unique pairing of these interrelated Beethoven works evokes the enthusiasm of both scholars and casual music lovers alike.

"• Exclusive to Naxos! • All titles never before available in the U.S.! • Incredible value; budget prices! • German pressings of the immense Sony Classical Masters Catalog in smart, desirable and collectible multi-disc editions • The Sony catalog is replete with legendary artists and many of the greatest recordings of the classical repertoire • Box fronts feature large, prominently displayed photo of the featured artist • Slender, shelf-friendly boxes; CD's housed in space-saving slipsleeves"

The voice of this lovely singer is now in its freshest full bloom. These years, the early middle period, of a singer's career ought to be cherished and relished like the fine days of our fickle summer. Yet we have an ungrateful way of passing them over with a forward look towards the things of autumn, the mellow fruitfulness of the mature interpreter, the ripeness of art that knows all shades of expression from the most playful to the most profound. Listening to this record, I find the critical habit urging me on to commit this kind of folly. In the very first song, Dowland's Come again, one is already preparing to go and look for Janet Baker's record (HMV HQS1091, 7/67); in Liszt's Die drei Zigeuner the ineffaceable memory of Schwarzkopf interposes. And it is true: there are limitations to the success of this delightful record. By comparison with Schwarzkopf there is something passive and underlit about the story-telling in that song; just as Baker's exceptionally strong projection and rhythmic vitality make von Stade's singing of Conte again seem placidly hymn-like, wanting sharpness of flavour (and sometimes of consonant also). There is a limit, too, to the success of The Blessed Virgin's Expostulation, the dynamics less imaginatively judged than in Britten's edition of the piece, and with a rather square regularity in the pacing of recitative. But how sad if because of this one were to miss the tender absorption of von Stade's performance here, or the lovely pianissimo of such phrases as "flattering hopes, farewell". What a loss, too, if the second side of the record were to go unheard because of the qualified success of the first. The Bilitis songs have the most winning feminity, "La chevelure" drawing from the singer a richer, more sensual tone, while a new darkness colours the satyres' obituary in the last song (and, if reassurance is needed, it should be added that Martin Katz accompanies more sensitively than he did in the recording by Marilyn Home some years ago—Decca SXL6577, 6/74). Then comes the set of four French folk songs arranged by Canteloube of the Auvergne: magically evocative, and bolder in the projection of personality. Finally, a touching, quite simple American song, addressed to Jenny Rebecca ("four days old"), serves as an encore piece, allowing the voice to settle and linger graciously in the mind. Von Stade is already an accomplished recitalist, though she will no doubt come to communicate more vividly and imaginatively on record. Meanwhile, here is one of the finest singers of the younger generation, her voice in that precious early summertime condition, fresh-toned and beautifully placed: a fine, admirably recorded, first song recital, and, one hopes, the first of many.

– Gramophone [11/1978]

BIG BAND:THEME SONGS

Renowned classical guitarist Sharon Isbin follows up her Grammy-winning album, JOURNEY TO THE NEW WORLD, with another extraordinary musical exploration, SHARON ISBIN & FRIENDS: GUITAR PASSIONS. This time, the journey is focused on Isbins musical mentors and has a Latin American flavor on many tracks. Joining Sharon on this new recording are Steve Vai, Stanley Jordan and Nancy Wilson, among others.

• The inaugural broadcast of the Peabody and Emmy®-award winning series The Met Live in HD.
• The Magic Flute has delighted audiences of all ages for centuries. Julie Taymor’s dazzling English-language production brings one of Mozart’s greatest works to life as never before.
• James Levine leads a cast that includes Ying Huang as Pamina in her Met debut, Nathan Gunn, Matthew Polenzani, Erika Miklosa and Rene Papa.
• Taken from the December 30, 2006 live performance.
• Aspect Ratio: 1.78:1

Like it or not John Williams has dominated silver-screen culture since the 1990s. His cinema music is often the film; the film is often the music. There is a concert dimension to his work as there was also for his great idols - Rozsa, Korngold, Waxman and Herrmann. On this album we encounter both faces and realise there is no great chasm between them.
 
Discs 1 and 2 address the concert hall world with the occasional departure. The third takes us on an exhilarating romp through the film music firmament - a world he has sent spinning and glittering. Williams has a marvellously piercing emotive touch that cuts through even a pachyderm's insensitivity. I recall for example coming out of a 1998 cinema showing of Saving Private Ryan with tears streaming down my face: the music and images intensify each other.
 
CD 1
Air and Simple Gifts was written for the Obama inauguration and is laid out for cello, piano, violin and clarinet. It keys into the same material that gripped Copland but imparts to it the fruity density of Howells' Piano Quartet. American Journey is a series of touching and sometimes portentous vignettes of the history of the USA. There's a dash of Copland in Popular Entertainment and of Saving Private Ryan in Immigration and Building and Flight and Technology, of Glass and Reich in Arts and Sports. The two worlds come into an even more candid collision - or collusion - in the Suite for Memoirs of a Geisha in which Yo-Yo Ma is soloist - such is John Williams' pull. The writing is roundedly impassioned. Ma's cello is wonderfully sonorous and singingly delicate in Going to School. It is an engrossingly fine score, full of delicate effects that steer well clear of kitsch Chinoiserie. The Song for World Peace - now there's a gauntlet thrown down. It is in fact a slow and satisfying evolutionary ascent to majestic heights.
 
CD 2
Summon the Heroes has the odd drum salvo and brass blast redolent of a certain Copland Fanfare. It all works well and there is something of the Superman score to it too. Odd that the Utah Symphony are conducted by the composer for Hymn to New England - it’s another skilled fanfare relieved by soft contoured undulating string writing. Sound The Bells is another eager and dazzlingly bright fanfare piece.
 
The Five Sacred Trees is a fine bassoon concerto - a sort of Celtic counterpart to The Geisha suite written at a time when things Celtic were in the ascendant: from Riverdance to Titanic. Craeb Uisnig and Dathi have a considerable insurgency of dissonance which we will again encounter on CD 3 in Born on the Fourth of July and the music for Close Encounters.
 
Elegy is a short heartfelt piece, here played by Yo-Yo Ma. It is in Geisha Suite mode. It’s a fine addition to the concert repertoire; any cellist contender for BBC Young Musician of the Year and similar should consider it as a contest piece.
 
The game and indefatigable Mission Theme will be known to Americans as the music for NBC Nightly News. March from the quirky film 1941 is Yankee-doodle rambunctious and not short on brazen confidence. The Olympic Spirit embodies the surging flag-waving of the stadium and especially the spectacle of the opening ceremonies.
 
CD 3
This disc is the deliverer of instant and usually uncomplicated enjoyment. While Williams clearly does obeisance to Herrmann’s North by North-West in Jaws and to Holst’s Planets in the Star Wars main title, his musical wizardry delivers time after time. Elite orchestras directed by the composer are everywhere and that's also true for the harmonica-dominated score for Sugarland Express. Toots Thielemans brings out the down-South and dirty Galahadry of the music reminiscent of a composer we never hear of these days: Bill Russo. Russo had at least two major pieces on DG LPs in the 1970s. The Flying Theme is done broadly and with intoxicating eagerness - a touch of Disney here, I fancy. The suite of three movements from Born on the Fourth of July is from a deeper, tougher vein with the gears of disillusion fully engaged cog by cog. Oily dissonance is strongly drawn in as it is also in the Ligeti-style Close Encounters. Perlman's version of the theme from Schindler's List is all throaty emotion - old gold glowing in auburn embers. A quick outing from the Theme from Jurassic Park has Williams taking us from still and unprepossessing ruminations into that broad optimism-loaded string hymn which he took onwards to a further peak in Saving Private Ryan. Cadillac of the Skies from Empire of the Sun comes complete with angelic choir here provided by the Bostonians rather than by Hollywood. The rambunctious Raiders March is wild and woolly with its Waltonian eddies and under-currents. More of the similar in The Throne Room and Finale from Star Wars - total immersion. It is perhaps a little cheese-cakey in its revelling in victory of the worthy over the wicked. Hats off to one of film music’s Greats: John Williams. Here's to the next 100 films.  



-- Rob Barnett, MusicWeb International

MOZART: PRUSSIAN QUARTETS

Drawn from the worldwide catalog holdings of Sony Classical, which includes both the Columbia/CBS and RCA Victor label imprints, the SONY Classical Originals, SONY Classical Masters Singles and Box Sets, and SONY Opera House series offer an extensive selection of highly desirable and collectible EU (Germany) pressed import editions, smartly-designed and graphically-pleasing, featuring the most sought-after recordings by the world’s preeminent, legendary artists both past and present, with many titles newly re-mastered in 24bit High Resolution Audio.