Music composed by Richard Rodgers. Lyrics written by Lorenz Hart.
Principal Cast: Harold Lang (Joey Evans); Vivienne Segal (Vera Simpson); Beverly Fite (Linda English); Barbara Ashley (Gladys Bumps); Kenneth Remo (Ludlow Lowell); Jo Hurt (Melba Snyder).
Recorded at CBS Studios, New York, New York in 1950. Originally released on Columbia (ML 4364). Includes liner notes by Richard Jay-Alexander.
This is part of Columbia Records " Broadway Masterworks" series.

Tchaikovsky: Romeo and Juliet - Symphony No. 6, "Pathétique"

What's not to like? Here we have one of Eugene Ormandy's classic accounts of the Nutcracker Suite, followed by a transcription for the Modern Mandolin Quartet that sounds surprisingly attractive, all things considered. Then the fun really starts with Spike Jones' demented take on the story, full of his trademark sound effects and madcap humor. Capping it all off are two 1940s arrangements for four pianos of the Dance of the Reed Flutes and the Waltz of the Flowers. Obviously the recording quality varies widely (even the Ormandy doesn't compare to today's best), but that's not really the point. What you get is a sort of trip down memory lane with this ever-popular music--and more to the point, the arrangements are sufficiently distinctive to justify wanting to listen to the entire disc at a sitting. As a special holiday treat that gives you much more than just another Nutcracker, you simply can't go wrong. Charming and fun! --David Hurwitz, ClassicsToday.com

Tchaikovsky: Symphony No. 4, Op. 36, 1812 Overture, Op. 49 &

Principal cast: Maxene Andrews (Pauline DePaul); Patty Andrews (Paulette DePaul); Douglass Watson (Norwin Spokesman); Jim Weston (Make-Out); MacIntyre Dixon (Father); Bette Henritze (Mother); William Griffis (Rankin); Marilu Henner (Donna); Phyllis Sommerville (Wilma); Ann Reinking (Maggie); Janie Sell (Mitzi); John Travolta (Misfit); Treat Williams (Utah); John Mineo (Lucky); William Newman (Sarge); Samuel E. Wright (Sam); April Shawhan (June); John Driver (Bill).
The Big Band: Joseph Klein (leader); Ruben Rivera (cello); Carmen Mastren (guitar/banjo); Jimmy Sedlar, Bob Millikan, Jay Brower, Charles Sullivan (trumpets); Harry DiVito, Merv Gold, Jack Gale, Vincent Forchetti, (trombones); Bernie Berger, Harvey Estrin, Michael Schuster, Sol Schlinger (saxophones); Mike Cavin (clarinet); Clay Fullum (piano, accordion); Hal Schaefer (piano); Doc Soloman (bass, Teddy Sommer (drums); Warren Hard (percussion).
Recorded at CBS 30th Street Studio, New York, March 31, 1974.
All songs composed by Richard M. Sherman and Robert B. Sherman.

Tchaikovsky: Symphony No. 5 - Capriccio Italien: Classic Lib

George Szell wasn't known for his Tchaikovsky, and he didn't record all that much of him. There's a very good Fourth Symphony on Decca (with the LSO), and of course he played the major concertos when necessary, but this release constitutes his outstanding contribution to the Russian composer's discography. There's certainly value in scarcity, for this Fifth Symphony is one of the great ones: magnificently played (of course), urgent and dynamic in the first movement, passionate but always flowing in the second, elegant in the waltz, and triumphant but never needlessly bombastic in the finale. Listeners who view Szell as a "strictly by the score" interpreter, largely on account of his treatment of tempo, will be surprised to hear an added cymbal crash in the finale's coda. It's all good, clean fun.


The same holds true for the Capriccio, a bubbly performance given additional brilliance thanks to Szell's willingness to let the trumpets strut their stuff (also true in the symphony) and to the orchestra's hair-trigger rhythmic precision. Szell may not have let his hair down often, but there's a difference between discipline and inhibition. His best performances, as here, offer plenty of the former with no trace of the latter. The sonics show their age in a high level of hiss and a certain want of timbral richness, but better this than a remastering that chops off the treble and robs the music of its natural brilliance. That, thank God, you can still hear in abundance. This is a release that Szell fans will surely want to acquire, assuming of course that you don't already own one of its prior incarnations.
--David Hurwitz, ClassicsToday.com

Alicia de Larrocha will always be remembered as one of the most idiomatic and poetic interpreters of Spanish piano music, but this beloved artist – born in Barcelona in 1923 to two pianists – was hardly less devoted to Mozart. In the 1990s, towards the end of her career, she undertook a series of concerto recordings for RCA with Sir Colin Davis – one of the great Mozartians of his time – conducting the English Chamber Orchestra, formidable Mozart veterans themselves. Now collected for the first time in a 6-album set, these performances were widely admired by music lovers and critics. Gramophone wrote: “In their transparency and vitality these performances are outstanding. Sir Colin’s partnership is affectionate and exemplary [Nos. 25 and 27].” And of their collaboration in Nos. 19 and 27: “Sir Colin’s unforced way with the opening tutti of K 595, his awareness of ‘all passion spent’ is haunting but unobtrusive. Such sensitivity is effortlessly mirrored by Larrocha with her enviable ease, her avoidance of all artifice or attention-seeking dalliance. Few other pianists are more attuned to Mozart’s mix of pain and radiance.”

*** This title is a reissue of a Japanese release with liner notes in Japanese. The vocal texts are printed in Latin and Japanese.***

*** This title is a reissue of a Japanese release with liner notes in Japanese. ***

*** This title is a reissue of a Spanish release with liner notes in Spanish. ***

*** This title is a reissue of a Spanish release with liner notes in Spanish. ***

Khatia Buniatishvili’s new recording for Sony Classical is a concept album as imaginative, sensitive and philosophical as the pianist herself.

“Labyrinth” explores the unfathomable quest that is human life. It plots a filmic course through hesitance, wistfulness, sensuality, pleasure and pain – all seen through the eyes of a woman enlightened by self-reflection and wisdom.

Recorded at La Grande Salle Pierre Boulez at the Philharmonie de Paris, the album occupies its own half-real domain, drawing on the evocative language of composers from Scarlatti to Morricone and from Bach to Glass.

The labyrinth, says the French-Georgian pianist, is ‘our fate and creation; our impasse and deliverance; the polyphony of life, senses, reawakened dreams and the neglected present; unexpected and expected turnings of the said or unsaid ... The labyrinth of our mind.’

After strong statements in the music of Liszt, Schubert, Rachmaninoff, Chopin, Mussorgsky and the folk music of her native Georgia in her album ‘Motherland’, Buniatishvili has assembled her most varied musical menu yet in “Labyrinth”. She puts her formidable pianism in the service of her extraordinary imagination with typical fearlessness, depicting one woman’s dance with life in all its horrors and joys.

Included are film scores by Philip Glass (The Hours) and the late Ennio Morricone (Once Upon a Time in America), canvases for piano by Erik Satie and Serge Gainsbourg, a Latin American dance by Heitor Villa-Lobos, an Estonian prayer by Arvo Pärt, a Hungarian study by György Ligeti, John Cage’s infamous stretch of musical silence and concert works by Scarlatti, Brahms, Bach, Rachmaninoff, Chopin, Couperin and Liszt.

For the album Buniatishvili also did arrangements herself including Bach’s Badinerie for four hands and the composer’s Sicilienne (BWV 596) based on Vivaldi’s Concerto in D minor RV 565.

‘Deborah’s Theme’ from Morricone’s Once Upon a Time in America was released as a single in July, as a tribute to the composer who died earlier that month at the age of 91, after an unrivaled career in film music.

Khatia Buniatishvili is one of classical music’s true one-offs, a pianist with almost unequalled delicacy of touch and a film-director’s ear for focus-pulling and storytelling. She is a preferred collaborator of top-drawer musicians including Zubin Mehta, Paavo Järvi and Gidon Kremer and has recorded with all three.

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REVIEW:

Buniatishvili achieves a lovely velvety tone in music by Couperin and Liszt and in the beautiful closing Adagio by Bach after Marcello’s Concerto for Oboe and Strings. Labyrinth spotlights Buniatishvili as a curator with a distinctive perspective as well as a pianist with an unusually sensitive spirit.

– BlogCritics.com (Jon Sobel)

Now regarded as one of the world’s leading soloists on his instrument, Pablo Sáinz-Villegas embodies “the soul of the Spanish guitar” and has long been internationally acclaimed as an ambassador of Spanish culture. He is the first guitarist in almost four decades to be invited by the Berliner Philharmoniker to perform in the Berlin Philharmonie, and also the first guitarist within that period to perform at the orchestra’s traditional New Year’s Eve concert. At the end of 2020 he will play Joaquín Rodrigo’s Concierto de Aranjuez under Kirill Petrenko. After some thirty prizes at international competitions and after concerts in over forty countries Pablo Sáinz-Villegas is rightly seen as the worthy successor of the legendary father of the classical guitar, Andrés Segovia. On the Sony Classical label he takes his place in the famous tradition of outstanding guitarists that includes John Williams and Julian Bream.

When supreme virtuosity is coupled with lightness of touch, when passion is combined with melancholy and when the six strings of the guitar vibrate like a single heartbeat, then Pablo Sáinz-Villegas is in his element. For his latest album this exceptional artist has chosen ten works that are especially close to his heart: “Spanish music represents a blend of different influences,” he explains, because “the harmonies, rhythms and melodies of a whole range of folk traditions” come together here. These traditions are not just Arab and Christian but others, too. In the music that has been written for the Spanish guitar, listeners may recognize “the voice of an entire nation”. Here is a language based on “the centuries-old peaceful coexistence of a variety of different cultures”.

“Welcome to my country, which is ready to open its heart to you.” Pablo Sáinz-Villegas’s latest album features some of the best-known works ever written for the guitar. But it is two composers above all who are central to his interest: Francisco Tárrega, who is represented by Recuerdos de la Alhambra, Capricho Árabe, Gran jota de concierto and Lágrima, while Isaac Albéniz’s contributions include Asturias and Mallorca. “I have a particularly close relationship with each of these pieces as they represent a different part of the Spain that I love so much.” Taken together, the works that have been recorded here form nothing more nor less than “the essence and soul of the Spanish guitar”. Among the central sources of inspiration of these works is folk music, notably the jota, a dance that Pablo Sáinz-Villegas often performed in his youth. The Intermezzo from Gerónimo Giménez’s La boda de Luis Alonso constitutes a tribute to the zarzuela, a quintessential Spanish genre that is a synthesis of one-act opera, theatre, drama and comedy.

An exclusive Sony artist, Pablo Sáinz-Villegas was born in Logroño in the La Rioja region of northern Spain. He has given the world premieres of numerous works, including Rounds, the first guitar piece by the Academy Award-winning composer John Williams. In 2018 Pablo Sáinz-Villegas had the privilege of working with Plácido Domingo on a joint album, the successful Volver, leading Domingo to describe him as a true “master of the guitar”. In 2006 Pablo Sáinz-Villegas founded The Legacy of Music Without Borders, a project whose aim is to bring together people in order to encourage a deeper understanding of different cultures. He has already been able to reach over 45,000 children. Pablo Sáinz-Villegas now lives in New York and Madrid.

After the highly acclaimed recording of the complete Mozart piano sonatas, pianist William Youn, who was born in South Korea and has been living in Munich for many years, is now devoting himself to a new major project - the complete recording of all piano sonatas by Franz Schubert. On the first album, the pianist spans a wide arc from the first to the last sonata: On the first CD of this album, he starts with the last, the great B-flat Major Sonata D. 960 from Schubert's year of death in 1828 - and contrasts it's sometimes dreamy sounds with the fresh, self-confident first Sonata in E Major D. 157, which was written within a few weeks in 1815. The second CD follows with the light Sonata No. 13 in A Major D. 664, the mysterious conglomerate of Sonata No. 9 in F-sharp Minor D 571 / 604 / 570, without the unfinished fourth movement, and finally the momentous Sonata No. 14 in A minor D. 784 - a work of astringency and severity rather unusual for Schubert.