THE SECRET LIFE OF WALTER MITT

Murray Perahia and Radu Lupu first teamed up on disc in 1984 with the Mozart D major sonata and Schubert Fantasia, setting benchmark standards for sharply honed and tonally cultivated piano ensemble playing. The gorgeous engineering gains warmth and amplitude in this new transfer for Sony's Masterworks Expanded Edition series. Likewise, the not-inconsiderable Mozart-Busoni and unhyphenated Mozart fillers yield sonic improvement. My list of all the wonderful things that transpire through the pianists' sublimely synchronized fingers, minds, and hearts would take longer to read than for you to listen to this disc all the way through.


Where do I start? The effortless, impeccably calibrated runs tossing back and forth in the Mozart sonata's first movement? The exquisitely scaled dynamics, acute harmonic and linear cogency, and split-second timing of transitions and phrase endings in the Schubert? Or the pianists' mutual sixth sense for divining perfect tempos? Two-piano mavens familiar with Busoni's retooling of the Mozart F minor Fantasia for Mechanical Organ will notice that Perahia and Lupu rightly restore passages from Mozart's original score that Busoni cut (notably in the finale). If you love the piano, you need this disc. [2/21/2004]
--Jed Distler, ClassicsToday.com Reviewing Sony 93015

Sony Music proudly announces the release of THE FOREIGNER (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack) with the music by Grammy® nominated composer Cliff Martinez (Drive, TV’s The Knick).  “This is a unique score for me - my first time doing a score for a nonstop action film,” said Martinez. “Director Martin Campbell trusted me and left me alone to do what I do best.  The music is all electronics with a couple of hardware synthesizers - it’s really dark and tense.”  THE FOREIGNER, starring Jackie Chan and Pierce Brosnan, is a timely action thriller from director Martin Campbell, about a humble London businessman Quan (Jackie Chan), whose long-buried past erupts in a revenge-fueled vendetta when the only person left for him to love - his teenage daughter - is taken from him in a senseless act of politically-motivated terrorism. In his relentless search for the identity of the terrorists, Quan is forced into a cat-and-mouse conflict with a British government official (Pierce Brosnan), whose own past may hold clues to the identities of the elusive killers.Martinez added, “There’s a recurring theme in the film where Jackie [Chan] keeps wiping the floor with these young bodyguards and keeps saying, in essence, ‘I can’t believe you guys can’t handle an old man’.  I found out that Jackie and I are only a few months apart in age.  I hope you young guys can handle us old men!”1.    Landscape Gardener 2.    Spit It Out    3.    Wired to Blow    4.    He Jumped Off the Roof    5.    I Wouldn't Count on It 6.    Daughters Room 7.    Another Bombing    8.    That's Where I'd Be    9.    Your Mole is Hugh McGraw    10.    Three Second Wonder 11.    Put Your Bag on the Table 12.    She Used You    13.    X-Rays Down    14.    Clean Up Your Mess 15.    Observe and Report

Sony Classical proudly announces the release of THE CHAMBER (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack), featuring the music by James Dean Bradfield. The Chamber is a claustrophobic survival thriller set beneath the Yellow Sea where the pilot of a small submersible craft and a three-man Special Ops team become trapped underwater in a fight for survival. A haunting, atmospheric score by James Dean Bradfield of the Manic Street Preachers (in his first work for film) adds to the claustrophobic tension of this taut survival thriller. “The sound design and soundtrack needed to be intertwined to create almost it’s own character in that small, claustrophobic space. James’ work on the film is not only able to stand on its own, as a beautifully atmospheric music score, it is a vital part of creating the mood of each scene… something that, as a filmmaker, is an asset in telling the story in the way I wanted it to come across.”, comments writer and director Ben Parker.

Pedrito Martínez‘s album Rumba de la Isla features songs once interpreted by Camarón de la Isla, the legendary flamenco icon. The album celebrates the convergence of both the Cuban and Flamenco rumbas. The great rumbero Pedrito Martínez integrates in his own personal way, classic songs by Camarón de la Isla in a unique tribute to one of the greatest flamenco artists.

Tracklisting:

01 Que a mi me vio de nacer
02 Yo vivo enamorao
03 Dos estrellas relucientes
04 Solo vivo pa' quererte
05 Volando voy
06 Quiero quitarme esa pena
07 No naqueres na' de mi
08 Gitana te quiero
09 Homenaje a Camaron

The Man Who Knew Infinityis a 2015 British film based on the book of the same name by Robert Kanigel. The story follows Srinivasa Ramanujan, a mathematician who grows up poor in India and then moves to Cambridge University during World War I. The score for this movie was written by Los Angeles based musician and composer Coby Brown. He has also composed for the PBS documentary series “Angeleno,” and several of his songs appear on Showtime’s “Shameless.”

Starring Academy Award� nominee and Golden Globe Award winner Jessica Chastain, MOLLY'S GAME is based on the true story of Molly Bloom, an Olympic-class skier who ran the world's most exclusive high-stakes poker game for a decade before being arrested in the middle of the night by 17 FBI agents wielding automatic weapons. Her players included Hollywood royalty, sports stars, business titans and finally, unbeknownst to her, the Russian mob. Her only ally was her criminal defense lawyer Charlie Jaffey, played by Idris Elba, who learned that there was much more to Molly than the tabloids led us to believe. Speaking to the dynamic score he crafted for this engaging true-life thriller, composer Daniel Pemberton said, "I wanted to write it so it felt a bit more like a bunch of different bands had written the score than rather a solitary film composer. I wanted it to feel like something that came from inside Molly's world, the kind of music she would listen to or be surrounded by. It needed to feel contemporary, not like a traditional film score. But at the same time Aaron always wanted to give her a theme, one that would grow through the film into a big emotional resolution at the end, so it was important to work that into what I would do as well."

Sony Music proudly announces the release of PROFESSOR MARSTON AND THE WONDER WOMEN (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack) featuring composer Tom Howe’s original score.Stage 6 Films’ PROFESSOR MARSTON AND THE WONDER WOMEN premiered to rave reviews at the Toronto International Film Festival and was released in theaters in association with Annapurna Pictures across the United States on October 13“Working with Angela was fantastic,” exclaims Howe. “I was lucky enough to join the project before Angela filmed anything. Early conversations with her about the characters and story arc meant I was able to write a suite which she listened to on set and this formed the main theme and palette for the Marstons. The music takes us on an emotional journey tracking the ups and downs of the Marstons story infusing a subtle twist by using unusual percussion and bondage sounds.”Director Angela Robinson had this to say about the score, "I was lucky enough to start working with Tom Howe in pre-production of PROFESSOR MARSTON AND THE WONDER WOMEN.  Often the composer does not get involved with the film until after you've completed the final cut, but Tom was integral from the beginning. He wrote several Marston themes that I listened to while I was shooting so that his score became part of the actual filming of principal photography.  I told Tom that I wanted the score to accomplish the same task the filmmaking was doing -- I wanted to tell a lush, romantic, beautiful story but with this unconventional subject matter and I wanted the score to do the same -- to be beautiful and emotional and elegant but also to simultaneously subvert itself.  We settled on using a variety of percussive elements in the score which culminated in Tom integrating clapping and the sounds of actual spanking in the score to infuse the lyricism with a daring, subversive twist -- like the Marstons!" ABOUT PROFESSOR MARSTON AND THE WONDER WOMEN:In a superhero origin tale unlike any other, the film is based on the incredible true story of what inspired Harvard psychologist Dr. William Moulton Marston to create the iconic Wonder Woman character in the 1940s. While Marston's feminist superhero was criticized by censors for her “sexual perversity”, he was keeping a secret that could have destroyed him. Marston's muses for the Wonder Woman character were his wife Elizabeth Marston and their lover Olive Byrne, two empowered women who defied convention: working with Marston on human behavior research – while building a hidden life with him that rivaled the greatest of superhero disguises.ABOUT THE COMPOSER: Tom Howe is an award-winning composer from the UK who has scored over 70 Emmy and BAFTA-winning dramas and documentaries, such as The Liquid Bomb Plot, Autopsy, The Vatican Saints, and Finding Jesus. After establishing himself in the UK, Tom moved to Hollywood where he wrote additional music for several major motion pictures, including the worldwide hit Wonder Woman, Disney’s Monkey Kingdom and Fox’s Exodus: Gods and Kings.  Tom has recently completed work on animated film Charming from the producers of Shrek, and is currently scoring the Aardman Animation film Early Man.The track list of PROFESSOR MARSTON AND THE WONDER WOMEN (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack) is as follows:1.    Professor Marston 2.    What Is Normal? 3.    Observing Olive 4.    Professional Jealousy 5.    The Speakeasy 6.    The Sorority Spanking 7.    Lie Detector 8.    I See You in Everything 9.    Olive Kisses Elizabeth 10.    Inducement 11.    Let's All Be Friends 12.    Olive Makes Her Decision 13.    They All Kiss 14.    Hiding Her True Self 15.    Elizabeth is Pregnant 16.    This is Pornography 17.    Olive Becoming Wonder Woman 18.    Looking for Mr. Gaines 19.    Donn Got Into a Fight 20.    Olive Leaves 21.    Marston Falls Ill 22.    Elizabeth Begs for Forgiveness 23.    Love Me for All My Days 24.    Professor Marston & The Wonder Women 25.    Marston End Credits 26.    Wife Not Your Jailer (Bonus Track)

By popular demand, Sony Classical will release the soundtrack to the hugely successful period drama, following the early life of Queen Victoria. From her ascension to the throne at the tender age of 18, through to her courtship and marriage to Prince Albert. Queen Victoria went on to rule for 63 years and was the longest-reigning British monarch until 9th September 2015 when she was overtaken by her great-great-granddaughter, Queen Elizabeth II. The soundtrack features the instantly recognizable and Emmy nominated theme tune, performed by Mediaeval Baebes1     The Suite    2     The King Is Dead    3     Coronation    4     Lord M    5     Locomotives    6     Mirrors    7     The Wedding    8     The Royal Birth    9     Privy Council    10     A Royal Affair    11     Victoria Titles    ABOUT THE COMPOSERSMartin PhippsComing from a musical background (he is Benjamin Britten’s godson), Martin Phipps scored his first TV drama, Eureka Street, in 2002. Since then he has won 2 BAFTAs & 5 Ivor Novello Awards and has gone on to write music for many of the most interesting series of recent years, including the BBC and Weinstein Company’s War and Peace; Peaky Blinders and Black Mirror. In film, Martin Phipps is currently scoring Fox Searchlight’s The Aftermath, starring Keira Knightley and Alexander Skarsgård. Previous film credits include the Weinstein Company’s much anticipated Woman In Gold with Hans Zimmer, starring Ryan Reynolds and Helen Mirren; Harry Brown and Brighton Rock. Ruth BarrettRuth Barrett, has amassed an impressive number of cinema and drama credits including two scores for Dredd 3D director Pete Travis: Legacy and City Of Tiny Lights; Toast, the BBC feature film starring Helena Bonham Carter; Wallander, the BBC detective series starring Kenneth Brannagh; the BBC’s Remember Me; the British feature film Harry Brown starring Michael Caine and the gritty and hard-hitting Paul Abbott-penned feature thriller Twenty8K with UK producer Jake Gosling. Ruth Barrett’s most recent scores include Hat Trick Production’s medical drama, Critical; ITV’s hugely popular brand new eight-part family drama, The Durrells and the BBC’s five-part comedy drama Love Nina, starring Helena Bonham Carter. Ruth Barrett studied composition at The Royal Academy of Music and read music at Cambridge University.

Releases like this show why Arkivmusic.com's "on demand" program is so important to collectors. These aren't Strauss' greatest works, but they are comparative rarities on disc. Serious Strauss collectors will want them to fill the gaps in their collections. The performances are very beautiful, brilliantly played, and excellently paced. Mehta always has been an excellent Straussian, and in 1990 was in top form. There never would be a big market for this release, even by classical music standards, but that doesn't mean that the music should not be available to those who love Strauss' orchestral works, or little-known Romantic gems. So here it is; come and get it!

--David Hurwitz, ClassicsToday.com

TCHAIKOVSKY: SYMPHONY NO 5, SE

BEETHOVEN: PIANO SONATAS OP. 1

SCHUMANN: WALDSCENEN, ETC CAS

Splendid performances headed by Nicola Ghiuselev, who establishes a presence and a commanding authority from Dosifey's first solemn entry, and Nicolai Ghiaurov, no less authoritative as a Khovansky of threatening malevolence.

Khovanshchina has always been something of a problem, not only to Mussorgsky's colleagues and successors who wished to rescue so much fine dramatic music for the stage, but also to audiences. The very title indicates something of that. Khovanshchina does not mean "Khovansky Schweinerei", as in Dorothea Redepenning's essay in the booklet, translated here as "Khovansky filthiness", but something more like "The Khovansky Affair", which was the title given to the historical events of the end of the seventeenth century by Peter the Great himself. It is a confusion of clashing religious and political orthodoxies and personalities—the Westernizer Golitsin, the Slavophile Khovansky together with Dosifey and his Old Believers, even the German Lutherans who were in those years a significant minority. Mussorgsky was right to feel it a marvellous, and intensely Russian, subject for an opera, but he failed to control his material and make of it a strongly coherent libretto. The result is music whose power can certainly make a tremendous effect on the stage, but whose subtlety can well be approached more closely through gramophone listening. There is, with this set, a transliteration (though in a system that will be unfamiliar to most English readers) and anonymous translations.

The version used here is the reworking and reorchestration by Shostakovich, one with both strengths and disasdvantages. Among the strengths is, generally, the orchestration, which may fall strangely on ears familiar with RimskyKorsakov (few, I imagine, will know the version by Boris Asafiev). The recording, made in Sofia in 1986, is by and large successful in capturing its individuality, though it is unsubtle and does not cope very well with the chorus: this seems partly due to the large number of singers, whose words can mostly be detected only by reference to the libretto.

The main parts include some splendid performances. These are headed by Nicola Ghiuselev, who establishes a presence and a commanding authority from Dosifey's first solemn entry, and Nicolai Ghiaurov, no less authoritative as a Khovansky of threatening malevolence. Kaludi Kaludov does well to match himself so intelligently against these two, and his portrayal of the well-meaning, uncertain Golitsin is nowhere more effective than in his Act 2 soliloquy. Stoyan Popov's hefty baritone makes a formidable ShaklovIty (in Mussorgsky's words "an imposing figure despite his bloody nature"), from the opening scene as he bullies Angel Petkov's hapless Scribe. Zdravko Gadjev skilfully outlines Andrey as a weak man trying to act as a strong one.

The women are, very properly, dominated by Alexandrina Miltcheva's powerful Marfa: with her, too, a character is established in the opening phrase, and she gives a superb account of the Intense Incantation Scene while also being able to sing the beautiful Act 3 song with touching vulnerability. Maria Petrova Popova sets a fanatical yet flustered Susanna against this steady, visionary character. Maria Dimchevska is skilful at making Emma's rather complicated expressive line musical and fresh, as she tries miserably to escape Andrey's attentions in the first scene. It is a large cast; it is also a well-balanced one that gives a compelling account of a fine opera.

-- Gramophone [10/1990]

[André Watts] meets [the Liszt Sonata's] super-human demands heroically, and keeps faith with the introspective and contemplative facets of the work. The second version of Liszt’s Paganini Études finds Watts in audacious mood, and his bravura playing is masterful. Reminiscences de Don Juan, Liszt’s Mozartian fantasy, and the Hungarian Rhapsody No. 10 are effectively played by Charles Rosen, and remastered sound is pleasing.

-- Michael Jameson, BBC Music Magazine