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.

CD 1
We kick off proceedings with the superheated sprint and flicker of the Candide Overture. It takes the breath away even in the broad romantic theme.
 
West Side Story is reflected in the Ramin and Kostal orchestration that makes up the Symphonic Dances. They’re all here: sleazy, laid-back, bluesy, woozily romantic, eager and rowdy. The highlight comes in the ever-so-on-your-toes Cha Cha. one can virtually see Bernstein's smile as well as his sentimentality in the Adagio finale where Prokofiev’s Romeo and Juliet must have had its influence. Spun silver meets a fine drizzle of Stateside lachrymose romance!
 
This version of the dry and witty Prelude, Fugue and Riffs has seen plenty of action on disc. Here is Benny Goodman holding on by his fingernails.
 
After three tapes from the 1960s we have Hilary Hahn's 1998 Serenade. Its transparency lets light and air into a piece which although more dynamic in the hands of Francescatti and Stern responds well to this more diaphanous and nuanced recording and approach from Hahn, Baltimore and Zinman. There’s a touch of Pulcinella in Aristophanes, of the Barber concerto in Ericymachus and of Schuman or and Glass in Agathon. It’s all most beautifully done by Hahn.
 
CD 2
Classic 1965 Britten meets New York pizzazz in Bernstein’s Chichester Psalms. The booklet, in common with the other four issues, is pretty thin on information and certainly no sign of the sung words. The Songfest is a cycle of 12 poems set for six singers and orchestra. Good to hear this Slatkin-conducted version from St Louis. This Britten-modelled anthologised structure ranges from portentous to histrionic. It is also touched with Copland's traditional queasy-wincey Old American Songs. There are two lovely - almost Sondheim-style - ballads in the shape of To My Dear and Loving Husband and Storyette HM.
 
Bernstein's Mass has been written about elsewhere on this site. A Simple Song is beautifully sung by Alan Titus - its popular sentimental roots show through and do no harm. To close the disc Marilyn Horne treats us to a group of gentle Bernstein songs with Martin Katz.
 
CD 3
This comprises groups of songs from West Side Story, On the Town, Wonderful Town and Candide. There's hardly a Latino DNA strand to be heard in the voices of Larry Kert and Carol Lawrence in Maria and Tonight but the magic flows like mercury still. Mind you - contrary to the critical consensus and my own expectations - I also enjoyed immensely DG's Te Kanawa West Side Story. Before we get to the 1957-recorded Somewhere ballet we have a bright 2009 America. The 1957 tapes have been very well revived indeed. 
 
On the Town 1960 recalls the world of Allegro (wonderfully given new life by Sony in their recent definitive set) in John Reardon's voice not to mention in those of Comden and Green. In Some Other Time there 's a real lump in the throat with the repeated words Oh well, we'll catch up some other time. I recall that I first heard this extraordinary and fragile song in that wonderful 1980s radio series Book, Music And Lyrics from Robert Cushman. There’s not a dry eye in the house but it’s not sentimental trash. It’s an irresistible hymn to sentiment with real power to move. By contrast I found little to like in the wince-making Wonderful Town.
 
Candide is a big flouncy piece of Hollywood, complete with orange blossom, cotton bolls and twirling sun parasols. It has real glitter and sentiment and delights in the Latino style in I'm easily assimilated. It ends with Make Our Garden Grow with what amounts to a touching hymn to Thoreau’s Walden. It’s not out of place that the listener may also sense the benevolent shadow or pre-echo of Copland's The Tender Land.
 
I had forgotten how powerful is Some Other Time but there is so much here to be reminded of and to smile about. Interestingly the sources are predominantly 1950s and 1960s before a degree of self-importance came into his music. I note that the selection also avoids the symphonies.



-- Rob Barnett, MusicWeb International

PIANO WORKS

ALSO SPRACH ZARATHUSTRA

More than three decades after his tragically early death, Glenn Gould’s performances are still the standard by which every new recording of Bach’s keyboard works is judged. A new 4-CD Masters box gathers two classic Gould recordings from the 1970s: the French Suites, considered “one of the landmarks in the discography” (MusicWeb International), along with his “powerful and masterly” (BBC Music Magazine) interpretations of the English Suites.

RACHMANINOFF Aleko: Suite 1. HOVHANESS Floating World—Ukiyo. MUSSORGSKY Khovanshchina: Introduction • Andre Kostelanetz, cond; 1 Simon Estes, bs; “His O” • SONY 88999 (34:11)


Andre Kostelanetz (1901–80) was involved with Rachmaninoff’s music from his teenage years, when he was a rehearsal pianist and vocal coach at the Mariinsky Theatre in Saint Petersburg. Rachmaninoff, a generation older, was the leading composer of that era before he left Russia in 1917; his The Miserly Knight had its Mariinsky premiere in 1912, a few years before Kostelanetz’s arrival. When Kostelanetz also escaped from Russia, in 1922, he brought a knowledge and love of Rachmaninoff’s music with him to New York, where he was to lead many of his compatriot’s works, in their original form and in lush arrangements for popular tastes. Although written decades earlier, Mussorgsky’s Khovanshchina had its Mariinsky premiere in 1911.


Rachmaninoff’s first opera, written at age 19, reflects many influences, Borodin and Mussorgsky perhaps even more than Tchaikovsky. Aleko has its exciting moments and its dreary ones; as is the case with Stravinsky’s Firebird , the suite captures the wheat while eliminating the chaff. Placing the overture last produces a dramatic comedown, as it dies away gently, but this is in keeping with many of the composer’s own gentle, tricky codas. Hovhaness was one of Kostelanetz’s favorite contemporary American composers; Floating World—Ukiyo , subtitled a ballade for orchestra, was written for and dedicated to the conductor. Its colorful, lush orchestration and exotic, pseudo-Japanese harmonies take Rachmaninoff a generation further. It is exciting music to hear once, and this performance is a stunner.


“Andre Kostelanetz and his Orchestra” was contracted for each recording session; neither the booklet nor Columbia recording logs for April 2 and 4, 1968, name the players, but they were probably members of the New York Philharmonic, as Kostelanetz led both Aleko (with Estes) and Floating World in Philharmonic Promenade Concerts that spring. Kostelanetz would often specify individuals he wanted, according to the music at hand—Mitch Miller on English horn was a favorite. The Aleko performance is wild and lush, as best suits Rachmaninoff, and the analog stereo recording is gorgeous but gimmicky, as string sections are electronically pumped up and tamped down across a wide soundstage. In one of his finest performances, Simon Estes sounds like a true Russian bass in a song that encompasses the entire bass-baritone range. Despite the pop-oriented sound, the results are wonderful. The recording of the Hovhanness is potent yet clean; the unconventional nature of the orchestration obscures any electronic manipulations. The Khovanshchina Prelude, another Promenade Concert specialty, is played with instrumental brilliance but without much character, missing the early-dawn mystery of the piece—the sun shines brightly from the opening measures. The 1967 stereo sound has every instrument up too close, leaving no room for subtlety.


This is a reissue of a Columbia stereo LP; the front cover is identical to that of the LP, including “MS 7126” instead of the CD number; its claim of “First Recordings” applied in 1968. A Sony representative told me that “Collectors don’t like bonus tracks; they want their CDs to be identical to the original release.” Which is a poor excuse for a 34-minute CD. Such timings were common for Kostelanetz’s pop albums, but not for classical ones. Most CD reissues of his pop records (on the Collectables label) put two LPs on a single CD and then add bonus tracks. Nevertheless, this CD is enthusiastically recommended for the Rachmaninoff.


FANFARE: James H. North

In 1956 at the Rome Opera, the legendary Pierre Monteux conducted one of his very few opera recordings, Verdi’s La traviata, starring soprano Rosanna Carteri as the doomed heroine Violetta, Cesari Valletti and Leonard Warren.

A deeply satisfying performance, rewardingly cast and conducted. Rosanna Carteri has the ideal voice, hovering between lirico and spinto, to satisfy the vocal and dramatic demands of the part. Cesare Valletti is just about an ideal Alfredo, a suitably youthful and emotionally vulnerable portrayal. As father Germont, Leonard Warren – famous in the part at the Metropolitan – sings with the mellow tone and care for words that were his hallmarks.

- Gramophone

The legendary Broadway producer George Abbott once said that Ed Ames's voice was one of the finest he had heard on the legitimate stage. After success as a member of The Ames Brothers – the multi-platinum vocal quartet and popular TV fixture ­– Ames turned his attention to acting and a solo vocal career. His acting career took off as he landed roles in the Broadway production of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, the off-Broadway production of The Fantasticks and the role of "Mingo" in the TV series Daniel Boone. Opening Night, a collection of songs from Broadway musicals recorded in 1964 was his first solo recording and includes "Try to Remember" from The Fantasticks, his first charted single. Several years later, he followed up with the album More I Cannot Wish You, another collection of Broadway favorites that includes "The Impossible Dream" from Man of La Mancha and "Climb Ev'ry Mountain" from The Sound of Music.

CDs 1 and 2 
"This is very much - though not exclusively - Tilson Thomas's Ives and predominantly from the 1980s. The exceptions include a single straggler conducted by Stokowski (the Fugue movement from symphony 4) though his name is not mentioned in the booklet listing. In any event it’s the version in which Jose Serebrier collaborated as assistant. There’s also Stokie's Robert Browning Overture and Ormandy's America Variations.
 
MTT directs orchestras from Chicago, the Concertgebouw and San Francisco. the recordings sound a lot better being more recent than those for Bernstein, Barber and Copland.
 
The Second Symphony and the Variations on America have solid Brahmsian ‘bottom’ to them even if the Second does end with American brashness and that innovative iconoclastic discord.
 
MTT’s From Steeple and Mountains does justice to the inventive Ives who pushes magically at the boundaries of the spidery decay of tonality. The piece has some of the mystique of the trumpet solos in Schmidt's Fourth Symphony yet with a wonderful spareness. The Browning Overture is out there at the edge as well with a dissonant devilry. The webby canvas returns in the subtleties of the Holiday Symphony’s Decoration Day which sound rather lichen-hung as if having escaped from the dank worlds created by Frank Bridge in the 1920s.
 
Two ballads sung by Thomas Hampson with MTT at the piano show how predictive Ives was of the wit of Bernstein. In Things our Father Taught Us the drawing-room melts away as modernity’s refractory imagination infiltrates the room.
 
The Circus Band is brazen and pastiche. General William Booth enters Heaven is a phantasmagoria which bawls with tin tabernacle wildness. Ives cuts this already heady mixture with gospel hymn cross-currents. The challenge thrown down by the choir in Are you washed in the blood of the Lamb is taken up in the long string sampler hymnals of the Fugue from the Fourth Symphony.
 
CD 3
The Third Symphony is smoothly Brahmsian yet with unusual touches. The Children's Day chatter is full of earnestly playful Allegro power. It is an affectionate portrait that ends in a impressionistic fragile mist - infinitely touching and uncertain of itself. Those bells might well have inspired Hovhaness who was a close co-worker of Henry Cowell and Lou Harrison; the latter revived the Third Symphony in 1947 winning for the work a Pulitzer Prize.
 
Three Places in New England is another Frank Bridge-style confection - clammy, lichen-draped and Gothic-romantic. There are times when you could morph this score into Bridge's There is a Willow. The orchestral piano chips in part way through The St Gaudens across the sweetest tender string writing. Putnam’s Camp is full of good-hearted discord and moonlit Pierrot play. The famous Housatonic at Stockbridge is in part Delian as in Appalachia with the gently twinkling discord of the piano across the choir which is only heard in this movement. It ends, not in honeyed reaffirmation, but in a boiling discord.
 
In The Unanswered Question the tension is superbly sustained by MTT and the Chicagoans. It ends with flittering and discordant birdsong and that silkily sighing attenuated violin sound here redolent of the Tallis Fantasia. The Scriabin-like solo trumpet of Adolph Herseth is part enigmatic and part elegiac as in the Schmidt Fourth Symphony.
 
We end with Central Park in the Dark which takes us into much the same world as The Unanswered Question. There’s an evolutionary up-welling rising to a jazzily discordant convulsion. All power dissipated, the music sinks into an uneasy free-floating dimension. It’s incredibly imaginative and not at all difficult to take on board."

-- Rob Barnett, MusicWeb International

Pianist Rudolf Serkin is often recalled as one of the 20th century’s most commanding performers of Mozart, Beethoven and Brahms. But he was always a masterful Schubertian as well. After the war, he became American Columbia’s premier pianist in the Classic-Romantic repertoire. This 5-CD box gathers his recordings of the last two Schubert Sonatas – two different ones of the great B flat, D 960: one from 1975 and a live 1977 performance from Carnegie Hall – as well as the Impromptus, Moments musicaux, the “Trout” Quintet (from the Marlboro Festival with “an enthusiastic group that rises to the work’s challenges and Serkin’s inspired promptings” – AllMusic.com) & the exquisite late chamber songs “Auf dem Strom” and “Der Hirt auf dem Felsen”, in which he is joined by soprano Benita Valente, horn Myron Bloom and clarinet Harold Wright.

Sonya Yoncheva is one of today’s fastest rising young opera stars. The Bulgarian soprano first gained international prominence in 2010 when she won first prize at Placido Domingo’s prestigious Operalia competition. In 2013, Sonya had her Met Opera debut as Gilda in Rigoletto, garnering praise from audiences and critics alike, with the New York Times proclaiming, “She brought lovely stage presence and a sumptuous, penetrating voice to her performance. Ms. Yoncheva has such vocal glamour.” Sonya has collaborated with many artists from the opera and pop world including Sting, Placido Domingo, Elvis Costello and Jonas Kaufmann.

For her debut album, Paris, mon amour, Yoncheva focuses on repertoire from 19th-century Paris as an homage to the “Belle Epoque” era. The album features arias from her career-defining roles as well as new additions to her repertoire which she will be performing at some of the world’s greatest opera houses through-out the 2014/15 season. Paris, mon amour includes some of the most beautiful and well-known arias from Paris operas like La Traviata and La Boheme along with lesser-known arias from the golden era of French opera music and French operettas by Messager and Lecocq.

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.

There are many reasons to recall On Your Toes with warm affection, paramount among them being the fine, rollickingly satirical score of Richard Rodgers and the incisive, enormously adroit and witty lyrics of Lorenz Hart. There is also the colorful and popular dance score titled Slaughter on Tenth Avenue. At this album's original release in 1953, it was a most welcome addition to Columbia’s roster of previously unrecorded Broadway shows.

Introduced to Broadway in April 1936, On Your Toes was the first of the book-show musicals to take ballet seriously. Its plot about the backstage life of a ballet troupe incorporated two large-scale ballets created for the show by George Balanchine, one of which – the amazing Slaughter on Tenth Avenue – received its first full-length recording here.

The story of On Your Toes deals with a young hoofer, the son of vaudevillians, whose mother persuades him to leave the "two-a-day" and take up serious ballet. The young man’s early efforts at the art are laughable. Then, a friend of the hoofer’s presents the troupe with a new work that tells a contemporary story through the medium of ballet, and in this the young man, the leading ballerina and the troupe score a decided triumph. The plot of this successful ballet, Slaughter on Tenth Avenue, is a satire on gangster stories.

Cast:
Frankie Frayne - Portia Nelson
Phil Dolan III - Jack Cassidy
Phil Dolan II - Robert Eckles
Lil Dolan - Zamah Cunningham
Peggy Porterfield - Laurel Shelby
Sergei Alexandrovitch - Ray Hyson

Barber's sophistication and elegance suggest a European composer, but his melodies and restless experimentation made him uniquely American. Vladimir Horowitz, Leonard Bernstein, Isaac Stern, Leontyne Price and Leonard Slatkin are heard as you behold landmark performances of Barber's Violin Concerto; Symphony No. 1; Piano Sonata; String Quartet; Concerto for Violin and Orchestra ; three versions of his famous Adagio for Strings ; the first authorized CD release of a 1935 recording of Dover Beach for baritone and string quartet (with Barber himself as baritone soloist), and more!

With music by Leonard Bernstein and book and lyrics by Betty Comden and Adolph Green, On The Town enjoyed a successful Broadway run during the 1940s. The London production opened at the Prince of Wales Theatre in 1963 and starred Elliott Gould along with Don McKay, Carol Arthur, Andrea Jaffeand Gillian Lewis. The Original London Cast Recording of On the Town has never before been available in the U.S.

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Starring in the London production was Elliott Gould, not long after he closed on Broadway in I Can Get It for You Wholesale – his big break as a musical leading man, which was an even bigger break for his wife-to-be Barbra Streisand. Gould played the happy-go-lucky Ozzie (a role created by Adolph Green). As Gaby, the lovestruck hero, the London production featured Don McKay, a Broadway singer/dancer with an attractive, boyish voice who had been the first Tony in the hit West End staging of West Side Story. The trio of sailors on leave was completed by another American, Franklin Kiser, as the nai?ve but determined Chip. A favorite in West End musicals like Salad Days, Gillian Lewis played Claire de Lune (Betty Comden in the original production), and American Carol Arthur was Hildy, the raucous cab driver unforget- tably created by Nancy Walker. American audiences know Arthur as a comedic actress (Blazing Saddles) and as the wife of comedian Dom DeLuise, but on this recording she belts out Hildy’s show-stopping, double-entendre-laced “I Can Cook, Too” with joyous abandon.

The London recording preserved much of Bernstein’s dance music, though some arrangements were updated and smoothed out – “I Can Cook, Too,” for instance, loses its fractured-big-band musical setting. Best of all, the London recording lets us hear this spectacular score with the charm of a cast that was performing the show onstage at the same time. With its Coplandesque ballet music and hyperkinetic invention, the score, oddly enough, may the most challenging aspect of On the Town. The London recording reminds us it is a challenge full of rewards – a heartfelt masterpiece, hilarious and zany, with romantic longing and unbridled hope lurking just beneath the gleaming surface. Maybe its time has come?

-- From the liner notes by David Foil

CAST
Ozzie – Elliott Gould
Chip – Franklin Kiser
Gabey – Don McKay
Hildy – Carol Arthur
Claire – Gillian Lewis
Diana Dream – Meg Walter
Workman – Howarth Nuttall
Policeman – Lewis Henry

MUSICAL NUMBERS:
1. Opening: 10:55
I Feel Like I’m Not Out of Bed Yet – Workman
New York, New York – Chip, Gabey, Ozzie and Chorus
Miss Subways – Policeman, Workman, Chip, Gabey, Ozzie and Chorus
2. Taxi Number: Come Up to My Place 2:15 – Hildy and Chip
3. Carried Away 3:15 – Claire and Ozzie
4. Lonely Town 5:07 – Gabey
5. I Can Cook Too 2:49 – Hildy
6. Lucky to Be Me 2:44 – Gabey
7. Dance: Times Square (Finale Act I) 5:14
8. Night Club Sequence: 4:59
So Long Baby – Chorus
I Wish I Was Dead – Diana Dream
You Got Me – Hildy, Ozzie, Claire, Chip, Gabey
9. Dance: Imaginary Coney Island 8:11
10. Some Other Time 3:48 – Claire, Hildy, Ozzie, Chip
11. Real Coney Island, Finale 4:01