Beckwith, J.: Canadian Composers Portraits

Tremblay, G.: Canadian Composers Portraits

Anhalt, I.: Canadian Composers Portraits

TCHAIKOVSKY: Songs (Complete), Vol. 2

Includes work(s) by various composers. Ensemble: Baltimore Consort.

Vocal Recital: Dawson, Lynne - Poulenc, F. / Hahn, R. / Chau

Antonio Rosetti was born around 1750 in Litomerice, a town in Northern Bohemia, and was originally called Franz Anton Rösler. In 1773 he left this native country and joined the Hofkapelle of Prince von Oettingen-Wallerstein, whom he served for sixteen years. With the retirement of Joseph Reicha in 1785, Rosetti rose to the position of Kapellmeister of Fürstlichen Kapelle and stayed there until 1789, before becoming Kapellmeister to the Duke of Mecklenburg-Schwerin in 1789. Rosetti wrote a great deal of music, including symphonies, concertos and vocal works. He is perhaps best known today for his horn concertos, which Mozart scholar H. C. Robbins Landon suggests may have been a model for Mozart's four horn concerti. Horace Fitzpatrick writes in The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians: 'Rosetti's contemporaries ranked him with Haydn and Mozart'. Rosetti is also known for the Requiem (1776) which was played at a memorial service for Mozart in Prague in December 1791 (the work was originally written as Requiem on the death of the Mrs. Krafft-Ernst in Oettingen-Wallerstein in 1776). This recording presents this work as world premiere recording accompanied by smaller sacred works and the symphony Murray A23.

Classical Music

Classical Music

Classical Music

Luis de Briceño’s arrival in France was marked by a wave of enthusiasm. The Spaniard was at the heart of a polemic that questioned the supremacy of the lute, an instrument cherished by French music lovers at the beginning of the 17th century. Our rekindled interest lies not in this controversy, but in the beauty of Briceño’s compositions and the freedom they offer the musicians who play them. On this album, we discover Le Poème Harmonique in a repertoire bearing the marked touch of popular Spanish music, accompanied by the delightful song of Isabelle Druet and Claire Lefilliâtre.

Canta a Maria Grever y Agustin Lara

In researching libraries and publishers' basements for materials for this project, I found some of the greatest American love songs ever written, a richness of music that made it difficult to choose.

Although Johannes Brahms is best known for his symphonies, string quartets and piano music, he was also a prolific writer of lieder, composing over 200 pieces in the medium. This charming collection celebrates his wonderfully rich; lyrical style through detailing 27 such works - ones which span much of his 40-year song career.

In this historic release, the great lyricist of Fiddler on the Roof, She Loves Me, and the Pulitzer Prize-winning Fiorello! shares with musical theater fans 53 of his "hidden treasures" - rarely heard songs from 17 musicals, with many songs performed by Harnick himself and his late composer-partner Jerry Bock.

Three cuts feature Harnick as recorded just last year for this special collection, and other archival recordings star three-time Tony Award-winner Audra McDonald, Brian d'Arcy James, Hugh Martin, Charlotte Rae, and more. This 2-CD set is a grand celebration of Harnick's 90th birthday on April 30th and the 50th anniversary of Fiddler on the Roof. That musical's iconic "Sunrise, Sunset" is being released for the first time in its original demo recording by Bock and Harnick.

The deluxe package includes a 60-page booklet with extensive notes by Harnick and a foreword by famed Broadway producer Harold Prince, who comments: “This magnificent set is testimony to Sheldon’s extraordinary gifts, and to his place in the pantheon of Broadway musical creators.”

This is a hybrid Super Audio CD playable on both regular and Super Audio CD players.

Given his magnificent achievement in the field of art song, and the vast volume and consistently high quality of his Lieder oeuvre, it is not surprising that Schubert’s songs have been recorded numerous times. It is not surprising either that many composers, such as Franz Liszt, Johannes Brahms, Benjamin Britten, Hector Berlioz, Max Reger and Anton Webern made arrangements of Schubert’s songs. What is surprising, however, is the fact that these arrangements - made by some of the greatest composers in musical history - are so seldom heard either in concert or on record.

With the release of this album, hopefully that situation will change. It combines 17 Schubert compositions, of which 13 were orchestrated by late-romantic German composer Reger Max, and four by a member of the Second Viennese School, Anton Webern. When listening to these songs, the listener will discover that these arrangements are made with such craftsmanship that they themselves became unparalleled works of art.The performers on this SACD are the Rundfunk-Sinfonieorchester Berlin and German tenor Christian Elsner, conducted by Maestro Marek Janowski. The album’s accompanying booklet contains the lyrics to the songs both in German and English, as well as programme notes and artists’ biographies.

Classical Music

Classical Music

Five hundred years ago no one would have had to argue long about the image and significance of Nuremberg. The city was the intersection of numerous trade routes, housed the imperial regalia, was the germ cell of German humanism. A musical tour through what was then the centre of Europe –Dominique Visse and the Capella della Torre are embarking on no less a venture on this CD. They takes us back to an epoch around 1500, a date always regarded as the heyday of the free imperial city. The musical tour goes on down from the castle to the spacious Marktplatz and further, Visse and his Capella della Torre take the listener by the hand...

"Renaissance Music in Perfection"- RBB Kulturradio "Finally one realises why the shawm was considered a "royal instrument" in Renaissance times." - NDR Kulturradio

"Marvellous the excellent wind players of Capella de la Torre." - Tiroler Tageszeitung

"Capella de la Torre shows on the highest level how instruments can be used in the interpretation of Renaissance Music."- Toccata

"The level of the group can be without any doubt be compared with the ensembles of Jordi Savall."- NDR Kulturradio

Per il Santissimo Natale

Composing over 150 works for piano and voice over a period of 44 years, the songs of Francis Poulenc remain consistently popular to concert audiences the world over. Varying in their individual style and character, Poulenc set music to a wide range of different French poetry – both ancient and modern, and from the serious to the surreal. The final disc in Signum’s series of The Complete Songs of Francis Poulenc features a cast of the finest singers of our generation, accompanied by Malcolm Martineau as well as additional instrumental soloists for Poulenc’s larger-ensemble settings of his songs.

Highlights from some of the most celebrated recordings from Harry Christophers and his award-winning ensemble. Equally appealing to fans of The Sixteen and those who are new to the group, this disc provides a definitive collection of familiar classics and lesser-known treasures.

R E V I E W:
British choir the Sixteen is billed as being among "the Voices of Classic FM," the impressively successful British independent classical radio network. This mixed-gender adult group of (natch) 16 voices performs music ranging from the early English Renaissance to Mozart and, on occasion, the Romantics. An objection to their style might be that they tend to sound similar in all these repertories. This double-CD "essential collection" tends to reinforce that idea, but it also showcases the group's considerable strengths. To put it briefly, the Sixteen makes early music go down easy and does so without turning it completely into something different. The vocal surfaces are gorgeous, and each album contains a note by director Harry Christophers that touches on connections between the music's origins and its resonances in our own time. They sweat the details and that has never been more apparent than in this greatest-hits release. Most of the time such albums are left to label underlings and produced without imagination, but this one is beautifully packaged and has a full new set of notes concisely explaining the album's fresh concept. That concept is well thought-out; the album is not just a random selection of tracks somehow judged to be the best of the Sixteen, whose music-making is nothing if not consistent. Instead, each piece chosen is associated with a specific historical event, many of them significant junctures in British history. You couldn't ask for a better place to start in approaching unfamiliar music than to get a basic grip on its context in this way and then have it very attractively performed. The remastering is very strong; there's little sense of shifting sonic perspective even though the originals are drawn from a wide variety of this prolific group's releases. All this makes the album a fine introduction to one of modern Britain's most successful vocal groups.

-- All Music Guide

Charles Ives wrote almost two hundred songs. Although his reputation rests on orchestral, chamber and piano music, it is Ives's songs that represent the heart of his creative thinking. The expressive variety encountered is accordingly vast: indeed, the gradual evolution of Ives's songwriting is analogous to the wider evolution of American music during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This new edition includes all the songs that Ives completed. The alphabetic approach ensures that each volume (of which this disc is the fourth of six) contains a representative cross-section.

Classical Music

This disc is very BIS. It brings together several extraordinary talents in a programme that skillfully links together the old and the new. The unifying factor is Kalevi Aho - the leading compoer of his generation in Finland. It features his third symphony - Sinfonia concertante for violin and orchestra. Jaakko Kuusisto, the leading Finnish violinist of his generation, is the soloist. The other work on this disc is Mussorgsky's song cycle 'Songs and Dances of Death' which Aho orchestrated for the great Finnish bass Martti Talvela. Here the soloist is the most fêted bass of his generation, Matti Salminen. To complete this glamorous package we have Osmo Vänskä conducting his Lahti Symphony Orchestra. The recordings were supervised by the celebrated BIS team of Robert Suff and Ingo Petry and took place in the stunning new all-wood concert hall in Lahti.