This album gives an interesting overview of Ravel's orchestral output, with a mixed programme of works from different periods of his career. The outstanding soloists are soprano Arleen Aug�r and violinist Pina Carmirelli; conductor Ernest Bour presents wonderfully nuanced performances. Some of Ravel's most famous pieces are featured, including a beautiful interpretation of his song cycle Sheherazade, which tells the story of the narrator of The Arabian Nights. Another notable inclusion is Daphnis et Chloe Suites 1 and 2. Daphnis et Chloe began as a one act ballet by Ravel, and was later adapted by the composer into the two Suites heard here. This album is part of a new re-release series (Century Classics) consisting of SWR music bestsellers. The series is competitively priced, optically highly attractive and contains acclaimed SWR recordings mostly of the SWR orchestras and their chief conductors.

On this album Roger Norrington leads the Radio-Sinfonieorchester Stuttgart des SWR in a profound performance of Franz Schubert's Ninth Symphony, the "Great" C Major. The programme also includes the overture to Schubert's melodrama Die Zauberharfe. Schubert's Symphony No. 9 is the last Symphony completed by the composer. It's nickname of the "Great" C Major is intended to distinguish it from his Sixth Symphony, the Little C major. Usually, the subtitle is taken as a reference to the symphony's majesty. Unusually long for a symphony of Schubert's time, a typical performance lasts around 55 minutes. While early ensembles often wouldn't perform the work due to it's length and virtuosic requirements, on this release Norrington and his Radio-Sinfonieorchester Stuttgart des SWR rise to the occasion in brilliant fashion. The present album is part of a new re-release series (Century Classics) consisting of SWR music bestsellers. The series is competitively priced, optically highly attractive and contains acclaimed SWR recordings of the SWR orchestras and their chief conductors.

This special recording of the Radio-Sinfonieorchester Stuttgart under Georges Pr�tre comprises two symphonic poems by Richard Strauss and his Rosenkavalier-Suite Op. 59. Richard Strauss was a pioneer in the genre of the tone poem. The tone poems that he wrote are still considered to be the high point of program music. He extended the boundaries of program music and took the concept of realism in music to an unprecedented level. He widened the expressive range of music, while depicting subjects many times thought unsuitable for musical depiction. French conductor Georges Pretre made his Paris debut at the Opera-Comique conducting the work of Richard Strauss, no doubt creating a special place in Pretre's heart for Strauss's music. This album is part of a new re-release series (Century Classics) consisting of SWR music bestsellers. The series is competitively priced, optically highly attractive and contains acclaimed SWR recordings mostly of the SWR orchestras and their chief conductors.

This album is the sixth installment of the series dedicated to the SWR recordings of Fritz Wunderlich. It contains arias composed by less known contemporaries of Mozart, including two arias by Alessandro Scarlatii and Handel. Fritz Wunderlich had a bright, albeit entirely too short career. Born to a violinist mother and choir director father, he was enveloped in music from an early age. He was urged to pursue classical voice training by a theater troupe who heard him singing as they passed by the bakery where he worked. He was granted a scholarship to the Freiburg Music Academy in Breisgau, and studied there from 1950 to 1955. While there he also studied the classical horn, which explains his incredible breath control. During the remaining decade of his life Fritz Wunderlich gained respect as a Mozart singer, Bach interpreter, and Bel Canto and light opera performer.

Beauty is a question of view. For some it consists in perfection, symmetry; others perceive it only when ruptures, cracks, relativizations add to the impression. Herbert Joos has called his orchestra suite, which he premiered on the occasion of being awarded the 2017 Baden-Wurttemberg Jazz Prize for Lifetime Achievement, "Change of Beauty." This fits a process of musical creation that the star chef and bass trumpeter Vincent Klink laconically commented upon his encomium at the award ceremony at the Stuttgart Theaterhaus as follows: "I assert at this point that perfection curtails freedom and completely runs counter to a humanism of the Joosian kind." Ergo, beauty can endure only in a state of flux. An insight that coincides with Herbert Joos's experience in the course of a dazzling career as a musician. The trumpeter, flugelhorn player and composer appeared on the jazz scene at a time when certainties were crumbling. Born in 1940 and influenced by musical individualists like Miles Davis, Chet Baker, and Billie Holiday, Joos first learned the craft of imitation in ensembles such as the Modern Jazz Quintet Karlsruhe, but at the same time experienced the beginnings of the aesthetic resistance. In no time at all he sent jazz tradition packing into the museum.

Kirill Kondrashin was one of the most prominent Russian conductors in the generation following Mravinsky. He was born in Moscow in 1914 into a family of musicians, studied at the Moscow conservatory under Boris Khaikin, went to Leningrad in 1936 to be the conductor of the Maly Theater and to the Bolshoi Theater in Moscow in 1943. At the same time, he was conducting various Russian concert orchestras. In 1956 he left the Bolshoi Theater to devote himself entirely to the concert podium. He became the preferred partner of such great soloists as Emil Gilels, Leonid Kogan, David Oistrach, Sviatoslav Richter, and Mstislav Rostropovich. Tully Potter called him “probably the best concert accompanist of the twentieth century.” After Kondrashin’s work had increasingly shifted out of the country, he emigrated to the Netherlands in 1978 and became permanent conductor of the Amsterdam Concertgebouw Orchestra along with Bernard Haitink. From his home in Amsterdam, he kept up with his duties as guest conductor, including many at various West German radio stations. His concerts left a deep impression in Munich, and Kondrashin succeeded Rafael Kubelik as new Chief Conductor of the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra in 1982. Before he was able to take over his new position, however, Kondrashin died of a heart attach shortly after a concert in Amsterdam in March 1981.

“Whoever has heard Elisabeth Grummer singing cannot forget the way this lovely voice, at once ethereal and yet full sounding, effortlessly flows along,” wrote Lanfranco Rasponi. “No other has ever brought such intimate spirituality and such romantic sensitivity into music.” This characterization, referring to the singer’s major opera roles, applies equally to her concert appearances and song recitals. Elisabeth Grummer was born in 1911 and grew up in Meiningen, where she trained as an actress and appeared in classical roles at the theater. After her marriage, she put an end to her acting career and moved to Aachen, where her husband worked as concert-master at the opera. She took voice lessons and was discovered by Herbert von Karajan, the young General Music Director at the opera at the time, who offered her a role as a flower girl in Parsifal in 1941. More roles followed, engagements in Duisburg and Prague and finally at the Stadtische Oper Berlin in 1946, where she evolved into an excellent singer of lyrical piano parts. Until 1961 she appeared each year at the Bayreuth Festival. She made guest appearances at all the major opera houses in the world, but remained true to the Berlin Opera unti her farewell to the stage in 1972. She taught at the Berlin music school and held master courses in Paris and Salzburg. Compared to Elisabeth Grummer’s rank as a singer, her recordings are shamefully few in number, giving these radio recordings a special documentary significance.

Mothers are powerful muses. They represent a whole spectrum of attributes, both mythic and personal: they can be forces of nature and nurturing, guidance and inspiration, patience and strength, and of course, love: profound, fierce, unconditional. This album features musical compositions that pay tribute to the diverse aspects of motherhood, from the sacred “Ave Maria” to the saucy “Mrs. Robinson,” and everything in between. Motherhood, perhaps the prototype of creation, has compelled us to utilize our full creative potentialities as arrangers and interpreters. Queens and saints, homemakers and lawmakers, scientists and artists, goddesses and mortals: the rich complexity of motherhood inspires this musical tribute. Describe as “the most dynamic duo of this generation” (San Francisco Classical Voice), “rock stars of the classical music world” (Miami Herald), “exhilarating” (Gramophone), and “the very model of complete 21st century musicians” (The Washington Post), Greg Anderson and Elizabeth Joy Roe are revolutionizing the piano duo experience for the 21st century. Together they aim to make classical music a relevant and powerful force around the world through their adrenalized performances, original compositions, notorious music videos, and more.

“He is not only a virtuoso pianist, but has more or less mastered nearly all orchestral instruments. That puts him in a position to provide the individual members of the orchestra with helpful advice, which-nowadays- hardly any conductor is able to do. As these qualities go along with striving for the ideal, a rare capacity for enthusiasm as well as with an iron will he does not hesitate to impose, Hans Rosbaud is an inestimable and somehow indispensable institution.” (Bernhard Sekles, Rosbaud’s former professor of composition) This release is the fourth from SWR Classic focusing on the work of German conductor Hans Rosbaud. It features, on seven albums, all the Haydn recordings Rosbaud did, including his only stereo recording of a Haydn symphony with the Berliner Philharmoniker as well as the concertos.

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REVIEW:

Everything in this set combines elegance, vigour, warmth, and an unobtrusive sense of style. Performance standards are consistently high and the mono recordings (only the Farewell is in stereo) have been very cleanly transferred.

– Gramophone

In 1905, when Wilhelm Backhaus won the distinguished Anton Rubinstein competition in Paris at the age of 21- Bela Bartok came in second!- he thrilled the famous musicians of his day, and, of course, the turn of the century audience, with standard pieces of the highest splendor. Yet he not only impressed with works by Franz Liszt and related virtuoso composers. In 1927, he was the first pianist to record all 24 etudes Opp. 10 and 25 by Frederic Chopin. Still admired today, this documents his superb technique and simultaneously his temperament with its almost ebullient willingness to share. In the present documentation, we have the E flat Major concerto Op. 73 with the Stuttgart Radio Symphony Orchestra conducted by Joseph Keilberth in palpable accordance with the clear and clarified desires and wishes of the soloist. In respect, this recording is not only a confirmation of Backhaus as an absolute authority for the E flat Major, but also a clarion call in regards to Keilberth.

This is a re-release of an SWRmusic-Bestseller, once again available. It contains Czerny's Symphony No.2 as well as the only available recording of the Symphony No.6. Both symphonies are charming, elegant works full of wit and grace, showing clearly that Czerny was not only a gifted composer of piano etudes. These works are performed here by the SWR Rundfunk- Orchester Kaiserslautern conducted by esteemed conductor Grzegorz Nowak. Grzegorz Nowak started his international career in 1984 as winner of the Ernest Ansermet Conducting Competition in Geneva. Since then he has been a guest conductor of famous orchestras in all parts of the world, and held positions with the German Chamber Orchestra, the National Opera in Warsaw, and more. Currently, he is the Music Director of the Metamorphosis Concert Foundation in Edmonton and the Sinfonia Helvetica.

This is a re-release of an SWRmusic-Bestseller, containing the concert recording of Bruckner's No.9 from September 20th, 1996 at the Stuttgart Liederhalle, conducted by one of the most prominent conductors of the 20th century, Carlo Maria Giulini. Carlo Maria Giulini was born in Barletta in 1914 and concluded his study of conducting at the Accademia Chigiana in Siena and the Accademia di Santa Cecilia in Rome. He debuted as a conductor in 1944 with the Augusteo Orchestra, and at the same time became Fernando Previtali’s assistant in the orchestra of the RAI in Rome. Giulini gave up conducting in 1998. His life’s work includes a large number of phonograph recordings with, among them, the Vienna Philharmonic, which counted Giulini as its most important conductor for many years. After a long illness, Carlo Maria Liulini died in June 2005, and was laid to rest in the family chapel in Bolzano.

This is a re-release of an SWRmusic-Bestseller. It contains Bruckner‘s most famous symphony heard in an outstanding interpretation. Kurt Sanderling, at that moment already 83 years old, fully demonstrates the experience gained from his long career, at his side an SWR Radio-Sinfonieorchester Stuttgart performing at the highest level. More than just a resident of Berlin, Kurt Sanderling has always been very closely connected with the city. It was here that he began his artistic career as voice coach at the Stadtische Oper at the age of eighteen, when Otto Klemperer, Erich Kleiber, Leo Blech and Wilhelm Furtwangler were conducting. Sanderlings guest tours took him almost everywhere in Eastern and Western Europe, to Japan, and the USA, where he conducted the world’s leading ensembles.

This is the only available official recording of Karel Ancerl conducting Josef Suk’s Asrael. Asrael is central to Josef Suk’s oeuvre and an outstanding work in the Czech music repertoire. The prominent standing of the conductor Karel Ancerl is due mainly to his success in establishing the Czech Philharmonic as one of the world’s most eminent and successful orchestras in only a few years’ time. Under his great predecessor Vaclav Talich, the most significant Czech conductor of the twentieth century, the orchestra was able to flourish primarily in its home country, yet under Ancerl it became, despite the restrictions of the Cold War, an orchestra that was celebrated everywhere, whose 1959 world tour went down in history as the longest and most extensive ever up to that time. A stirring intepretation of the Südwestfunk-Orchestra of Baden-Baden, digitally remastered from the SWR original tapes!

REVIEW:

Firstly, it is doubtful the orchestra was familiar with either score prior to this recording. Secondly, it appears that this was the conductor’s first engagement with them—though, unsurprisingly, he was invited back in 1969. To achieve such committed, marvellously played and eloquent performances of unfamiliar repertoire when conductor and orchestra had no prior relationship is a remarkable achievement.

The sound is pretty impressive, wearing its five decades lightly. It presents a very realistic aural picture of Ančerl’s interpretations. N,o one buying this disc will be disappointed on sonic grounds. What you will definitely get if you buy this disc is a memorable performance of a great Czech symphony. This an important release and a major addition to the Ančerl discography.

This recording contains the complete recital given by Clara Haskil at Ludwigsburg Castle in April, 1953. The Debussy works and the encores have never been previously released. The performance is musically outstanding and features engaging repertoire, thus being an impressive record of a legendary musician. The eminent Romanian pianist, Clara Haskil began, her career as a child prodigy and entered at the Bucharest Conservatory when she was 6. At age 7 she was sent to Vienna and profited from the tutelage pf Richard Robert (whose memorable pupils included Rudolf Serkin and George Szell) and briefly with Ferruccio Busoni. She was only 7 (or 10) when she made her public debut there. At 10 she was sent to Paris to continue her training with Morpain, and, at 12, entered the Paris Conservatoire. A celebrated interpreter of classical and early romantic repertoire, many considered Clara the foremost interpreter of W. A. Mozart in her time. She was also widely known for her interpretation of Beethoven and Schumann, both of which can be heard on this recital.