For the Beauty of the Earth is a dazzling celebration of the creation of the earth. The contemporary works, which feature brass, organ, and percussion, come from some of the most prominent composers of the day, such as David Marlatt, Charles Widor, and James Curnow. Especially notable is David Marlatt's Earthscape, which is a beautiful lyrical work inspired by the view of our planet from outer space. "In the silent, black vacuum of space exists this bright blue planet, slowly rotating... a serene and breathtaking view of the only source of life..." (Alfred Music) Organist Sharon Rose Pfeiffer performs alongside fifteen-member Gabrial V Brass Ensemble to create a thick and evocative sound for these tracks. These tracks were recorded in Mechanics Hall, Worcester, MA- a building known for it's superb acoustics.

In August of 2015, Andris Nelsons conducted the Lucerne Festival Orchestra for the third time.; The last time the orchestra had played Mahler’s Symphony no. 5 was in the summer of 2004 under their founder, Claudio Abbado. Nelson’s interpretation is different, but no less inspiring, with its fiery passion.; Baritone Matthias Goerne’s smooth, warm voice is perfect for capturing the somber mood of this music, which begins with a funeral march.; Truly, this live recording brilliantly captures the relationship and trust between ensemble and conductor.

Emerging around the beginning of the 19th century, Gypsy brass bands developed from Turkish military bands.; The performing ensemble on this release, Fanfara din Cozmesti, is one of the most well known Romanian Gypsy brass bands performing today.; This release includes an extensive booklet with information about the fifteen band members and each of the songs on the album.

Accompanied by the Schonbrunn Festival Orchestra conducted by Guido Mancusi, Josef Hofbauer presents this new album of trumpet concertos. Included on this disc are concertos by Harutyunyan, Planel, Torelli, Neruda, and more. Hofbauer says of this release, “With this CD I devote myself to a journey with the Schonbrunn Festival Orchestra. A journey through various music genres and their trumpet concertos. It is also a journey through my past… Each concerto we recorded for this CD has its own story in my past – thus My Favourite Trumpet Concertos.”

Also available on standard DVD

Andris Nelsons conducted the Lucerne Festival Orchestra for the third time in August 2015, the orchestra’s second summer without founder and guiding spirit Claudio Abbado. The first half of his concert was already a highlight: the baritone Matthias Goerne seemed completely at home in a selection of songs from Des Knaben Wunderhorn. His warm, dark voice allows him to capture the somber and tragic atmosphere of this music like no one else. Its shaded timbre is most perfectly suited to the work’s melancholy and nocturnal moods, where one can directly experience how an artist of this caliber can bring music to the edge of the abyss. The Lucerne Festival Orchestra, renowned for its unique Mahler sound, had last played Mahler’s Symphony No. 5 in the summer of 2004 with Abbado – a flowing, transparent, and ethereal interpretation. Nelsons finds a completely different approach to the work. His Mahler is fiery, expansive, and powerful. In spite of the introductory funeral march, his reading is more positive than tragic, radiating an intense vitality. It is breathtaking to observe the orchestra’s response to Nelsons’s energetic, physical, and emotional conducting style. The relationship between orchestra and conductor is one of giving and taking, nothing else.

Picture Format Blu?ray: NTSC 16:9, Full HD

Sound Formats Blu?ray: DTS HD Master Audio, PCM Stereo

Region Code: 0 (worldwide)

Running Time: 123:12 min

Disc Format: BD 25

Subtitles: German (Original), French, English, Japanese, Korean

Founded by John Wallace in 1986 to explore and perform the extensive brass repertory, The Wallace Collection is one of the world's pioneering brass ensembles with an international reputation for innovative programming. After a twelve-year sabbatical, the ensemble was relaunched in May 2014 at a Park Lane Group concert in the Queen Elizabeth Hall, London. Currently it aims to achieve the extraordinary and exceptional in brass through focusing on the music of today in close juxtaposition with the lost repertory of the 19th century.

Brass instruments have been prominent in Peter Maxwell Davies’s music since his Op. 1, a trumpet sonata he wrote the year he turned twenty-one. The focus of this record, however, is on music from a long quarter-century later: the Brass Quintet he produced in 1981 and a spray of pieces that came in the immediate wake of that major effort, including not only two smaller items for the same formation but also a horn solo that, though so different in scale, is related in substance to the quintet. Trumpet tunes continue the story into the next two decades.

Renowned trumpet player James Zingara presents this album of new works for trumpet. This release contains works by such composers as William Price, Carl Vollrath, Valentin Mihai Bogdan, and Jeffrey D. Boehm. James Zingara currently serves on the faculty at University of Alabama Birmingham, and frequently performs and records throughout the US.

WUNDERHORN-LIEDER ? ES SUNGEN

Stretching back from the stark Soviet soundscape of Shostakovich, to the early pre-modernism of Prokofiev, to the pre-revolutionary opulence of Scriabin and Rachmaninov, Septura redresses a lack of original music for brass by these great composers by charting a turbulent 70 years of Russian history. Brass instruments feature prominently in these composers' symphonic output, and Septura is a natural fit for their chamber music. The focus is piano music with one prominent exception: perhaps Septura's most ambitious transcription to date, Shostakovich's profound and deeply personal Eighth String Quartet.

Kansas City based William Jewel College Concert Choir led by Dr Anthony Maglione is known for it's imaginative concert repertoire that ranges from Baroque to Contemporary music. The Trumpet Sounds figures heavily in the contemporary classical choral tradition with an impressive diversity in the featured composers including those not frequently found in contemporary choral repertoire. Dr. Maglione's eight movement cantata for voices and trumpet, based on Walt Whitman's poem The Mystic Trumpeter closes this intrepid release with it's world premiere debut recording.

The National Brass Ensemble with James Sommerville and Gail Williams, French Horn.

The National Brass Ensemble is comprised of twenty-six of the finest brass players in major orchestras across the US. “Gabrieli”, featuring the NBE, includes 15 pieces from the Italian composer’s highly influential Sacrae Symphoniae (1597), arranged for this ensemble by San Francisco Symphony trombonist Tim Higgins, and the debut of Music for Brass, a new work by celebrated film composer John Williams. The inspiration for this recording comes from a historic, Grammy Award-winning recording, The Antiphonal Music of Gabrieli, featuring the legendary brass ensembles of the Chicago Symphony and the Philadelphia and Cleveland orchestras. It has been long admired as the definitive modern performance of Giovanni Gabrieli’s works.

In the early romantic period, struggles with absolutism's collapse led people to find new solutions in communal life. Another vision of society emerged, shaped by artists who viewed a higher world order in nature through synthesis of all the arts, to be felt by the individual, ushering in new freedom of stylistic decisions, especially in music. The virtuosic sonatas for natural horn and fortepiano by Danzi, Ries und Nikolaus von Krufft offer stunning horn and piano dialogues. They explore the full range of timbres, flamboyantly surpassing classical structures in search of new modes of expression.

Things aren’t quite as they seem. Each of these three works was originally written for oboe, horn and piano but has been arranged for trumpet, trombone and piano. It’s not immediately clear to me by whom these arrangements were made, or maybe it was a collaborative effort, but this is in any case such an unusual combination that it might be thought a shame to dilute it in this way. Still, what is denied here to the oboe and horn is gifted to the two brass instruments that share a comparable compass.

Carl Reinecke’s Trio was composed in 1886. He hits on a delightful theme for the opening Allegro moderato, one so delightful in fact that he keeps repeating it again and again. This robust, rather old school writing is not without drama – note the vigorous trumpet-led accelerandi – and has genial charm in the Scherzo, too. The romantic warmth of the cavatina-like Adagio is properly conveyed by Michael Massong’s trombone, in particular – an instrument that lends plangent warmth to the proceedings – and there are hints of wit in the light and spirited Rondo finale.

Written on the same conventionally-structured four movement lines, Heinrich von Herzogenberg’s Trio was dedicated to an old friend, Gustav Hinke, oboist of the Leipzig Gewandhaus orchestra. Though it also reveals a comparable technical assurance to Reinecke’s work, it sports rather more in the way of bucolic humour. Thematically things are democratically parcelled out and in the hunting brio of the Scherzo, suitably stabbing accents add some vivid drama to the proceedings. The two brass players convince here – they’re in their metier, in fact – but they are also alert to the balladic potential of the slow movement whether singly or in unison. Friederich Höricke provides immaculate support here to Massong and trumpeter Andre Schoch, as indeed he does in the fanfare-dotted exuberance of the finale, with its somewhat Brahmsian close. Herzogenberg’s wife, Elizabeth, incidentally, was the dedicatee of Brahms’s Op.78 Rhapsodies.

Very much the odd man out, compositionally, is York Bowen. His late-Romantic and, pianistically, frankly Rachmaninovian elements are on show in this compact Ballade, Op.133. It was published in 1956 though assumed to have been written some years before, possibly in 1949. Bowen ensure that phrases overlap, which generates a real sense of urgency and the music flows through textures, moods, and tempi towards a quiet, reflective close. This is a fine performance, though doubtless Bowen enthusiasts would rather hear the real deal.

If you want the original instrumentation of the two German works turn to the luxury casting of Tuckwell, Goritzki and Requejo on Claves CD-50 0803.

Jonathan Woolf, MusicWeb International

Harmonische Freude features chamber music by J.S. Bach and his extended circle, as played on period instruments by Austral Harmony, an Australian ensemble specializing in 18th c. music. • Inspiration comes from the organ preludes in Kauffmann’s collection Harmonische Seelenlust musikalischer Gönner und Freunde, which specifies use of an oboe so placed to give the impression that it is an organ stop. • Kauffmann’s pupil Tag illustrates the emerging 18th c. Empfindsamkeit (‘expressive’ style. • Krebs and Homilius were pupils of Bach who aspired to perpetuate the tradition of their great teacher.

Recorded in 2013/14, Shreds! Music for Trumpet and Percussion of the 21st C. features the work of five contemporary composers born between 1959-89. Dr. David Kosmyna teaches trumpet, theory, composition, and directs the Jazz Ensemble at Ohio Northern U. He has recorded extensively in both classical and jazz styles, often to critical acclaim.