One of the New York Times' 5 Classical Albums to Hear Now!

“What if a woman wrote the song?” This question drives a recital of songs by female composers performed by soprano Golda Schultz and pianist Jonathan Ware. Opening with works by Clara Schumann and Emilie Mayer (including her setting of the ballad "Erlkönig"), this recital weaves stories of women’s experience with fantastic tales of powerful sirens like the Lorelei. The great American-British violist and composer Rebecca Clarke’s arresting William Blake settings offer a woman’s perspective on texts also set by Benjamin Britten. Devotional works from Nadia Boulanger reveal a compositional master in her own right, in addition to her legendary status as pedagogue to innumerable greats including Aaron Copland and Daniel Barenboim. This be Her Verse, a song cycle by poet-librettist Lila Palmer and composer Kathleen Tagg was directly commissioned by the artists to conclude the program and add an important contribution to the repertory: songs written by women, about women, highlighting the female experience.

Sandrine Piau and Véronique Gens have a longstanding rapport and dreamed of making a recording together. Here they pay tribute to two singers who, like them, were born within a year of each other, Mme Dugazon (1755-1821) and Mme Saint-Huberty (1756-1812): both enjoyed triumphant careers in Paris, inspiring numerous librettists and composers. Gluck even nicknamed Saint-Huberty ‘Madame-la-Ressource’, while ‘a Dugazon’ became a generic name for the roles of naïve girls in love, and later of comical mothers. Rivals? They very likely were, given the quarrelsome spirit of the operatic world of the time, even if they never crossed paths on stage. Intermingling airs and duets, Piau and Gens here play the heroines of Gluck, Grétry, Monsigny, J. C. Bach, Piccinni, Edelmann and Cherubini. Developed in collaboration with the Centre de musique baroque de Versailles, this program on the cusp between Classicism and pre-Romanticism is very much the heart of the repertory championed by Julien Chauvin’s Le Concert de la Loge.

REVIEW:

I don’t know about any rivalry here, but Gens and Piau, both of whom have complete mastery over this repertoire, function extremely well individually (as one might expect) and in duo. They are backed up by a fine and sensitive instrumental ensemble which outlines the highly dramatic content of these arias with a fine sense of the style and good sound that never overwhelms. To be sure, we can obtain the Gluck and Sacchini elsewhere, but the remainder consists of little-known but equally dramatic and well-composed music. Still, this glimpse into the repertoire of the Parisian opera world of the 18th century is well worth obtaining, not only for the premieres of pieces but the artistry of both sopranos as well.

-- Fanfare

The French baritone Florian Sempey has established himself as a key player on today’s operatic scene. For his first solo recital, Rossini was the obvious choice, first of all because he has already performed the title role in Il barbiere di Siviglia in the leading opera houses, from Paris to London, and of course by way of Orange and Pesaro. But there is another reason: ‘Rossini was the first composer’s name I heard in my life. At my grandparents’ house, there was a bust above the piano, on a little rococo display stand’ – the bust that appears on the cover of this album. ‘Rossini’s music is a challenge for singers and also a great and very strict technical training for them. It calls for the highest standards and degree of precision.

This program presents arias in French and Italian, mingling the most famous (including Figaro’s ‘Sono il factotum’) with rarities such as Germano’s aria from La scala di seta and Don Parmenione’s from L’occasione fa il ladro. It also includes magnificent duets with two dream partners, Karine Deshayes and Nahuel Di Pierro. And who better to conduct the Orchestre de l’Opéra National Bordeaux Aquitaine than the accomplished Rossinian Marc Minkowski, who gives this music an inimitable sparkle?

George Antheil called himself a ‘Pianist-Futurist’. A lover of speed, cars and airplanes, the American composer settled in the Paris of the Années Folles, where he frequented Picasso shows and Stravinsky concerts, and composed works such as the Sonate sauvage and Jazz Sonata, which caused a scandal: during a concert in Budapest, he even brandished a pistol to restore silence in the hall . . . He hero-worshipped Beethoven, whose pieces he played in the first part of his recitals before moving onto his own music. In 1933, he returned to the United States, where he met John Cage and Morton Feldman. Patricia Kopatschinskaja and the young Finnish pianist Joonas Ahonen – whom The Times, following what the journalist described as ‘one of those concerts you remember for ever’, presented as the violinist’s ‘doppelgänger’! – pay tribute to the self-proclaimed ‘Bad Boy of Music’.

Critical acclaim from the New York Times:

"George Antheil (1900-59) was a technophilic, self-declared bad boy of music; regardless of whether that’s true, he didn’t please his way into the canon. Here, however, this American composer gets a tribute that places him in a lineage of innovators from Beethoven to the mid-20th century — traced by the daredevil violinist Patricia Kopatchinskaja and an enthusiastic partner in the pianist Joonas Ahonen.

"...Antheil would perform his works alongside, say, something from a century earlier, and Kopatchinskaja and Ahonen do the same by programming Beethoven’s Violin Sonata No. 7 in C minor. It is a fiery and freely interpreted account reminiscent of Gidon Kremer and Martha Argerich’s fearless, unpredictable, at times unwieldy recordings from the 1990s.

"Like the Beethoven, the Antheil is in four movements, but it blends traditional form with a thoroughly modern sound that, in this reading, bustles at a breakneck pace with percussive and metallic timbres. Looking beyond Antheil’s generation, the album also includes pieces by Morton Feldman and a nocturne by John Cage, works that subtly recall the sonatas but also stand alone as studies in sound-making and extremity — of strength and softness, of overtone-rich expanses. Executed with discipline that borders on mechanical, they couldn’t be better suited to a world according to George." --The New York Times (Joshua Barone)

Nothing is as it appears in the old English manor house of Bly. A new governess takes up her post and discovers that the children who are her new charges are under the influence of the ghosts of the previous governess and her depraved lover. As one disturbing event unfolds after another, the questions become more pressing: What horrors happened here before her arrival? Are the children innocent? Do we really see what we are seeing?

Based on Henry James’s strange ghost story, Benjamin Britten’s The Turn of the Screw is a psychological thriller in the form of a chamber opera. The Orchestre de la Monnaie, under the British conductor Ben Glassberg, took up this masterpiece in a staging which, despite the Covid crisis, received rave reviews. We now present a version recorded in studio conditions immediately after the performances. The two leading singers, Ed Lyon and Sally Matthews, are utterly convincing: together they push the audience’s imagination to unbearable levels of tension…

Forty years have passed since Gidon Kremer created a little musical oasis in the Austrian town of Lockenhaus in 1981. The violinist’s open-minded attitude has left its mark on this event, which has become a must in the concert calendar, and the cellist Nicolas Altstaedt, who took up the torch in 2012, continues the same philosophy. For this fortieth anniversary, he has decided to call on composers who have come to Lockenhaus or had works performed there in the past ten years. Hence the program contains two premieres – the cello concertos of Raphaël Merlin and Helena Winkelman – but also short pieces by Erkki-Sven Tüür, Esa-Pekka Salonen, Lera Auerbach, Patkop, Maja Ratkje, Matan Porat, Kurt Schwertsik and Johannes Fischer. Musical postcards that celebrate the anniversary while foreshadowing the next forty years!

The twelfth volume in the Haydn 2032 series, in which Giovanni Antonini conducts the Kammerorchester Basel, is devoted to ‘games and pleasures’. The symphonies recorded here, nos. 61, 66 and 69, were composed for the daily theatrical performances held at Eszterháza Palace in the spring of 1776. For Haydn they marked the end of a festive period, before he had to return to the serious business of writing operas. The ‘Toy Symphony’, attributed to Haydn for 200 years before it was discovered that it was in all probability composed by a Benedictine monk, completes the program in a similarly light and cheerful atmosphere.

A few years after the success of her album crossing Baroque music with folk, Love I Obey (ALPHA538), the Franco-American singer Rosemary Standley visits Schubert, this time with the complicity of the ensemble Contraste: ‘We all have a few notes of Schubert buried deep inside us’ say the artists, who have got together around his music and brought to it an original sound texture, the result of their varied influences – classical, pop, jazz, folk. They have picked some of the best-known lieder (Ständchen, selections from Winterreise, etc.) and universally loved instrumental pieces, incorporating in them rhythms from other countries and instruments unusual in this repertory: the jazz trumpet of Airelle Besson, the guitar of Kevin Seddiki, the percussion of Jean-Luc Di Fraja join forces with the piano, violin, viola and cello of Contraste – not forgetting the exceptional participation of the soprano Sandrine Piau, who joins Rosemary Standley for several duets. The arrangements are by Johan Farjot.

‘Well, what a surprise – a divine surprise! I have delighted in immersing myself in the world of Handel for more than forty years now. But I must admit that I experienced yet another lesson in strength and joy when I toured and recorded the Dettingen Te Deum and the Coronation Anthems’, says Hervé Niquet. As a lover of large orchestral formations, he has assembled a number of instrumentalists and singers close to the (gigantic) forces used at the premiere, with a large band of oboes, bassoons and trumpets, and assigned the solo arias to the entire ‘chapel’. Niquet speaks of ‘the glittering power of this ceremonial music concocted by a Handel conscious of placing the best of his genius at the service of the crown and of history’, and he in turn invests all his enthusiasm and expressiveness in these works combining ‘grace and strength’. Fans of Champions League football will recognize in "Zadok the Priest" the theme of that competition’s anthem!

REVIEW:

Niquet’s fluid lines heighten the drama by drawing out crucial words in long, upswelling crescendos, punctuated at climaxes by pungent brass and woodwinds. His performers apply dynamics with authority and precision, fashioning an intricate fabric.

-- BBC Music Magazine

The great Norwegian cellist Truls Mørk makes a triumphal return to chamber music with his regular piano partner Håvard Gimse. The program features two English composers, Benjamin Britten and his teacher Frank Bridge, whose Cello Sonata was written during the First World War and is tinged with despair and searing emotional force. Britten composed his Cello Sonata in 1961, following his meeting with Mstislav Rostropovich, to whom he dedicated the work. Another person traumatized by the Great War was Debussy, who wrote: ‘It was cowardly to think only of the horrors being committed, without trying to react by rebuilding, insofar as my strength allowed, a little of that beauty which is currently under attack.’ His Cello Sonata (1915) was the first of a series of six sonatas for various instruments that he planned to compose, only managing to write three before his death. As a determined Moravian nationalist, Janácek did not entitle his three-movement work of 1910 ‘sonata’; he called it Pohádka (Fairy tale) and based it on a poem by Vasily Zhukovsky.

REVIEW:

What one notices from the very start of the Bridge sonata, with which the disc begins, is Mørk’s fulsome tone. He is partnered very well throughout by Gimse and the recorded sound is really present, upfront, so much so that it is best to lower the volume for a realistic perspective. That said, I have found much to like in these accounts.

This is an excellently programmed disc, admirably performed and well recorded. It should provide plenty of pleasure. Alpha are also to be commended for their cardboard product with sleeves for inserting both CD and booklet.

-- MusicWeb International

Four of the 20th century’s greatest works for cello and piano: three of them famously recorded back in the 1960s by Rostropovich and Britten – a hard act to follow. Yet the Norwegian duo, Truls Mørk and Håvard Gimse, rise fully to the challenge in close yet lucid recorded sound that achieves an exemplary balance between cello and piano. Marginally less juicy of tone and idiosyncratic of phrasing than Rostropovich, Mørk brings a classical poise and eloquence to his phrasing and a marvellous sensitivity to detail, while Gimse is fully alive to the very different styles of piano writing in these four works.

The qualities of the new recording are especially favourable to Frank Bridge’s big two-movement Sonata – composed athwart the outbreak of the First World War, which horrified him – where the old recording suffered from slightly cloudy piano sound. As Mørk soars through the fraught lyricism of its first half, one hears clearly how Bridge subtly inflected even the most seemingly conventional piano figuration with his own individuality. And if the new recording of Debussy’s war-time Sonata is less dark and rhapsodic than the Rostropovich-Britten, it exemplifies the more enduring characteristics of French culture he sought to uphold.

The fugitive flights of melody and figuration comprising the three whimsical movements of Janáček’s Pohádka (Fairy Tales) demand a glancing, mercurial response which they certainly receive here, while the Britten Sonata somehow emerges as a weightier, more substantial work than in the original recording by its dedicatee and composer – special though that will always remain.

-- BBC Music Magazine

Joachim Du Bellay (1522-1560) stormed onto the Parisian literary scene with the resounding avant-garde manifesto Défense et illustration de la langue française. Ronsard and Du Bellay are the great French poets of the sixteenth century, but while the former has been set to music hundreds of times, Du Bellay inspired only about thirty compositions. Denis Raisin Dadre and his ensemble Doulce Mémoire celebrate the Angevin poet on the occasion of his 500th anniversary with works by the leading composers of the period, among them Arcadelt (who set nine chansons to his texts, including Je ne puis dissimuler a year before Du Bellay’s death), Lassus, Chardavoine and Verdonck. It was also established practice at the time to declaim poems accompanied by a musician who improvised on the lyre, an instrument and usage imported from Italy (recitare a la lira). Denis Raisin Dadre has decided to pay tribute to these sixteenth-century ‘slam poets’ by asking a modern equivalent, Kwal, to ‘slam’ some of Du Bellay's sonnets, including the famous "Heureux qui, comme Ulysse."

After Franck, Debussy and Strauss, Mikko Franck and the Philharmonic Orchestra of Radio France here continue their collaboration with Alpha Classics, this time with the spotlight on Igor Stravinsky. The program begins with two pieces from his so-called ‘neo-classic’ period: his Capriccio and Octet. In the first, in which Stravinsky sets up a dialogue between piano and orchestra, the soloist is one of the great stars of the new generation, the French pianist Nathalia Milstein. Then the mood darkens, with the primitive rhythms and ferocious chordal attack of The Rite of Spring, a work that Mikko Franck has long since wanted to immortalize on album: a major masterpiece of the 20th century and an essential milestone for every orchestra. Every single player seems to be on fire in this recording, which puts the seal on seven years of collaboration and achievement with its Finnish Music Director.

Julien Chauvin meets up with one of the great harpsichordists and fortepianists of our time, Andreas Staier, who is a leading interpreter of the Mozart concertos. He presents us with his vision of the Piano Concerto no.23 and its famous Adagio, ‘one of the most heart-rending slow movements ever written by Mozart. Performers often tend to take it too slowly, certainly thinking that this will accentuate the tragic side, but Julien Chauvin and I spontaneously agreed on a slightly faster tempo, which respects the basic pulse of this movement in Siciliana rhythm. When you start with the right tempo, it’s amazing how the whole discourse comes together perfectly, in a very logical and simple manner’, says Staier, who plays a magnificent instrument by Christoph Kern after a 1790 fortepiano by Anton Walter, the great maker of Mozart’s time. Also on the program is the Symphony no.40, in which, says Julien Chauvin, ‘Mozart explores types of writing that he pushes to their most extreme limits. This is the case in the finale, where we find a succession of dissonant disjunct intervals at the opening of the development which, on closer inspection, present us with the full chromatic scale (except for G natural, the symphony’s tonic). And so the twelve-note series was born!’

The famous Marquise de Pompadour, favorite of King Louis XV for nearly twenty years, reigned over the arts at court. Rameau, whom she particularly admired, was omnipresent. He received a specific commission for the Théâtre des Petits Appartements, where the Marquise herself sang in the midst of a troupe of amateurs and professionals: the result was Les Surprises de l’Amour, from which the ensemble Les Surprises takes its name. Under the expert direction of Louis-Noël Bestion de Camboulas, the group presents here the very first recording of this ballet in its original 1748 version, including the prologue entitled Le Retour d’Astrée, and couples it with another commission for one of the court’s annual residences at Fontainebleau: Les Sybarites (1753), an acte de ballet whose principal couple is reminiscent of the King himself and his favorite. A first-rate vocal line-up brings these two works back to life: Marie Perbost, Eugénie Lefebvre, Jehanne Amzal, Clément Debieuvre, David Witczak, Philippe Estèphe.

With Van Gogh in Me, the Netherlands Chamber Choir presents an experience in which the paintings of Vincent Van Gogh and Gustav Klimt come to life to the music of the great Romantic and early 20th century composers such as Debussy, Saint-Saëns, Mahler... and, in a world premiere, a transcription for a cappella choir of Satie's first Gymnopédie. Originally written for solo piano, this work, which is known and played throughout the world, finds a new magical and celestial dimension in this new version for choir.

Mentioning the name of Van Gogh immediately evokes in each of us a color, a landscape, a sensation... Hence the idea of creating an immersive audiovisual experience: the choir approached an Italian collective, fuse*, to link images and sounds to the emotions of the musicians and the audience... fuse* developed an algorithm based on the works of Van Gogh and Klimt by recording their styles, colors, brushstrokes... then, during the concert, collects the sound of the choir but also biometric data that analyses the emotional state of the audience, the singers and the conductor, and creates visuals in real time, an astonishing show of colors and shapes that mixes sound, images and emotions... The visual of the album is inspired by these experiments.

Following his acclaimed first recording for Alpha Classics, Saga, the German baritone Konstantin Krimmel continues to tell us stories, with a program focusing on Zauberoper or ‘magic opera’. Accompanied by the Hofkapelle München orchestra conducted by Rüdiger Lotter, Krimmel explores operas by Mozart, Salieri and Gluck, alongside less well-known titles by Paul Wranitzky and Peter von Winter: spectacular musical comedies from the eighteenth-century Viennese repertory, with their enchanted fairytale universe. Konstantin Krimmel, with German-Romanian roots, first got in touch with music at the St. George's Choir Boys in Ulm and from this moment on, the fascination of music never left him. At the age of 21, he began his vocal studies with Prof. Teru Yoshihara, which the singer completed with distinction in 2020. In the meantime he is being coached by Tobias Truniger in Munich.

This album is the story of a dialogue between two voices: the singing voice and the voice of the cello, which has always been considered the instrument closest to the human voice. It is also the story of two worlds and the meeting of two cultures, East and West. The East we encounter here is Armenia, its thousand-year-old culture, its music and its songs, which resonate with the compositions of Bach, Kodály and Ligeti.

For the cellist Astrig Siranossian, vocal melody and the sound of the cello are two voices that she has always combined in her concerts, coupling a dance from a solo cello suite by Bach with an Armenian song that she performs with great sensitivity. East and West, Armenia and Europe: it is her roots and her emotions that the young cellist shares with us here. This recording was made on two different cellos, according to the repertory: an instrument by Francesco Ruggieri dating from 1676 and the famous Giovanni Gagliano of 1756 known as the ‘Sir John Barbirolli’.

The Orpheum Foundation, which has been supporting young musicians for over thirty years, has joined forces with Alpha Classics for a series of recordings devoted to Mozart’s concertos, regardless of instrument. The leading soloists of the young generation have been selected to appear under the artistic direction of Howard Griffiths, a renowned Mozart conductor, who considers that performing his music is like ‘looking in a mirror: you can hear if everything is in place, musicality, intonation, rhythm, phrasing’. These albums will reveal the great virtuosos of tomorrow and immortalize their success in this implacable test. Ludvig Gudim plays the Violin Concerto No. 4 in D Major, K. 218 (with cadenzas by Joachim); Joséphine Olech plays the Flute Concerto No. 1 in G Major, K. 313; and Jeneba Kanneh-Mason plays the Piano Concerto No. 6 in B-Flat Major, K. 238.

Barbara Hannigan writes: “Sehnsucht, a central and nearly untranslatable word of the Viennese fin-de-siècle period, referring to aspects of longing, melancholy, and nostalgia. During the Covid-19 pandemic, a collective Sehnsucht arose, in performers and audiences alike. Sehnsucht: Live in Rotterdam, played to the empty concert hall of De Doelen. We decided to issue the recording as an album, recognizing that the performance also represents continuity and mentorship through music. Both young Dutch artists, conductor Rolf Verbeek and baritone Raoul Steffani are associated with the initiatives Equilibrium and Momentum, and joined me and the Camerata RCO for this intimate journey… In Sehnsucht, we explore two song cycles of Berg, written shortly after Mahler’s 4th Symphony. All these works are presented in special arrangements for chamber ensemble. The Berg songs are expanded from their original voice and piano to a dialogue of new colors and instrumentation. Mahler’s 4th Symphony is reduced to an intimate soloistic journey, a tender conversation.”

For the American composer Caroline Shaw, writing music is like ‘cooking someone you love a meal’, she told BBC Music Magazine. The youngest-ever winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Music, Shaw has premiered works at Carnegie Hall and the BBC Proms.

Good food and music ‘should be nourishing and complex; they should be something that you can taste easily in the beginning before you find there’s much more underneath’. As the journalist Kate Wakeling points out: ‘This sounds much like Shaw’s own music. Her work combines immediate, sensuous appeal with taut structural rigor.’ This album is the outcome of a meeting between the composer and David Violi, Pauline Buet, and their partners from I Giardini. It presents a monograph of chamber music, including a world premiere recording, The Wheel, a dialogue between the voices of the cello and the piano.

REVIEW:

The Pulitzer prize-winning Caroline Shaw (b.1982) has a gift for sensuous, delicate music in which a sturdy sense of form, often based on nature or architecture, is ever evident. She blends rough with smooth in a manner that manages to be challenging but enticing.

A solo piano piece, Gustave le Gray, takes Chopin’s A minor Mazurka, Op 17, as a starting point, intriguingly expanded with fresh material. Boris Kerner, for cello and eerie-sounding flower pots, pays homage to the German physicist who invented three-phase traffic theory. That description hardly does justice to the haunting music created here. The title work, The Wheel, for piano and cello, was commissioned by I Giardini. Guided by musical contours of the baroque, it turns beguilingly towards contemplation and demands attentive listening.

-- The Guardian (UK)

Jean-Philippe Rameau (1683-1764) left two very different versions of his tragédie en musique Zoroastre: the first, in 1749, suffered from cabals and the work was withdrawn from the repertory. Rameau gave it a thoroughgoing revision in 1756. At this time, he was at the height of his powers. Melody, harmony, orchestration and choral writing no longer held any secrets for him. Zoroastre brought still further innovation. For the first time, he dispensed with a prologue, and turned the overture into a philosophical ‘program’, the struggle between day and night, between good and evil.

The 1749 version is entirely governed by avant-garde ideas; Zoroastre resembles Tamino in The Magic Flute, but two generations earlier. This disconcerted some of the audience: Zoroastre was a moral, social and philosophical opera. The 1749 version has never been revived in modern times. Alexis Kossenko takes up the challenge with zest, accompanied by an outstanding cast including Véronique Gens, Jodie Devos, Reinoud Van Mechelen, Mathias Vidal and Tassis Christoyannis.

REVIEW:

For listeners more used to English Baroque, this example of high French Baroque will require a big adjustment: every element – aria, duet, chorus, instrumental interlude – is short and thick with text; the feminine ending of each musical line reinforces the Gallic character of the whole.

The chorus and line-up of soloists is first-rate, with a suitably menacing Abramane (Tassis Christoyannis) and a witchy Érinice (Véronique Gens); with a gorgeously pure-toned Amélite (Jodie Devos), and an expressive and clarion-voiced Zoroastre (Reinoud van Mechelen). The instrumental numbers (notably the sarabands) are beautifully done, with the weather – lashings of thunder and lightning – forcefully dramatised throughout.

-- BBC Music Magazine

For the fourth volume in this collection dedicated to Mozart concertos by the younger generation of performers, the Orpheum Foundation and Alpha Classics present the Concertos nos. 23 and 24 (K488 & 491) performed by the British pianist Julian Trevelyan, who was awarded three prizes at the Géza Anda Competition in Zurich in 2021 and, at the age of sixteen, became the youngest-ever prizewinner at the Marguerite Long Competition in Paris in 2015. ‘Mozart’s music is full of life, humor and enjoyment. My life wouldn’t feel fulfilled if I didn’t have his music’, says the young musician, who is accompanied here by one of the most eminent Mozartian maestros, Christian Zacharias, conducting the ORF Vienna Radio Symphony Orchestra.

Flanked by a spectacular cast featuring the role debuts of Nicky Spence and Simona Šaturová, the conductor Ben Glassberg (Music Director of the Opéra de Rouen Normandie) once again demonstrates his Mozartian temperament. This late masterpiece (written at the same time as Die Zauberflöte) places his musical genius at the service of a plot centered on the complexity of emotions, passionate love and the absurd disaster of betrayal. Scottish tenor Nicky Spence has quickly established himself as one of the leading talents of his generation. Equally at home in the operas of Strauss, Janacek, and Wagner, he was named Young Singer of the Year 2015 by the International Opera Awards and, in 2022, Personality of the Year by BBC Music Magazine. The Slovak soprano Simona Šaturová, an active presence on the international scene, enjoys a high reputation as a Mozartian. The Pope even invited her to sing the Mass in C Minor in the Sistine Chapel. She has several recordings to her credit, and her flexible and luminous voice has won her such prizes as the Thalia Award in 2021.

The first performance of Anton Bruckner’s Seventh Symphony at the Zurich Tonhalle took place on 14 January 1924, to mark the centenary of the composer’s birth. Under the direction of Walter, Furtwängler, Klemperer, Böhm and Karajan (to name but a few!), the orchestra has since given many performances of this monumental work which was its composer’s first great success and which the conductor Hermann Levi considered ‘the most significant composition since the death of Beethoven’. The orchestra’s Brucknerian tradition is perpetuated with this cycle conducted by its music director Paavo Järvi, which will continue with the Eighth and Ninth Symphonies until 2024, the year of Bruckner’s bicentenary.