Genuin presents the second release of the Saxon Wind Philharmonic, this time featuring for the first time, festive wind music. Director and conductor Thomas Clamor leads the group through Bernstein and Gershwin classics such as Candide, Summertime, and Strike up the Band.

Classical Music

Classical Music

Kosovo native Flaka Goranci’s extensive international opera career features leading parts in operas by Mozart, Rossini and Weill. She is also accomplished in the genre of folk music, as can be heard on her new CD “Albanian Flowers”. Supported by colleagues of Balkan descent, Ms. Goranci presents songs from Albania and the Kosovo. Love’s bliss and love’s sorrow go side by side and the appropriate roundelay of symbols mostly includes spring and flowers. Further typical elements found in this music coming out of peoples’ daily lives include weddings, loyalty to one’s homeland and shepherd tunes.

Classical Music

Classical Music

The album originally entitled 'Liverpool Pops at Home' grew out of the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra's desire to put on a concert called Sounds of the City, a concert to show the richness of the musical legacy from the great musicians and composers of Liverpool.

Schutz, H.: St. Luke Passion / Die Sieben Worte Jesu Christi

CAPPELLA COLONIENSIS (1954-2004)

Includes work(s) by Claude Debussy, Max Reger, Arnold Schoenberg, Alexander Alyabyev. Ensemble: Linos Ensemble.

Alen Bonde: Sound Spectrum

American composer Marty Regan specializes in composing music for traditional Japanese instruments, a fascination he has developed since 2000. Regan describes his Japanese-style compositions as "hybrid musical soundscapes that reflect the age in which we live, an era based not necessarily on globalization, but of partnership based on global cultural interaction." In contrast, Splash of Indigo features a complementary side of Regan's output, containing only works for Western orchestral instruments and voice. Despite the album's instrumentation, Regan's connection to Japan remains strong in Splash of Indigo. Splash of Indigo proves Regan is more than capable of inventing and developing charming and complex networks of musical ideas. In it's varied collection of chamber and large ensemble works, Splash of Indigo shows Marty Regan is a composer of considerable breadth and skill beyond his dedicated efforts to build a bridge between American and Japanese musical culture.

An die Geliebte

Firenze 1616

Beside the famous master of Baroque Music – Johann Sebastian Bach – this 2CD set, Baroque Christmas Rarities includes nearly unknown but no less atmospheric treasures of baroque Christmas music by Bach’s talented sons, Telemann, Buxtehude, and others. Most of them were commissioned works for the feast and includes very different styles: from festive cantatas, moody motets to chamber musically solo songs. A “must” for all lovers of Baroque Music as well for listeners that would like to find some extraordinary music for the upcoming feast.

REVIEW:

Seasonal motets and cantatas by Christian Geist, Pal Esterhazy, Buxtehude, and Giuseppe Maria Po del Finale, with a tranch of contributions from Bach family members. Thoroughly engaging.

-- BBC Music Magazine

Includes cantata(s) by Johann Sebastian Bach. Ensembles: English Baroque Soloists, Monteverdi Choir. Conductor: John Eliot Gardiner. Soloists: Katherine Fuge, Gillian Keith, Robin Tyson, Nathalie Stutzmann, Christoph Genz, Jonathan Brown, Peter Harvey.

Danish composer John Frandsen (b. 1956) is well known for his interpretation of texts. This new release collects some of his most evocative solo song cycles with a myriad of poems set to this music. Four of Scandinavia’s most promising young vocalists are featured on this album, including Lise Davidsen and the composer’s own son, Morten Grove Frandsen.

Christmas is a time of singing, a time for giving and a time of celebration with family and friends. Naxos Family Classics is proud to offer you our second Songs of Praise CD, this one for the Christmas holidays'.

Classical Music

Joseph Haas' Christmas Liederspiel, Christnacht, combines Bavarian and Tyrol folk tunes into an oratorio. His Marian Hymns based primarily on texts from the 13th to the 18th centuries. The composers of the other various carols on this release are either pupils or contemporaries of Haas.

There are not many so-called 'standard' songs on this CD but the observant reader may already have noticed that it presents several Schiller texts in alternative settings, ranging from very early (Des M�dchens Klage D6 is Schubert's first song - bar one) to very near the end of the composer's life. It is instructive to compare and see the quite different approach to the same text at different times. Listening to Schubert songs is always life-enhancing and even if not all of them are masterpieces there are constantly interesting turns of phrase or just a beautiful melody that is a pleasure to listen to, especially when sung so well as Lothar Odinius does here. This disc is from beginning to end Schubert singing on the highest possible level.

Classical Music

Alpha Classics continues its collaboration with the Ensemble Intercontemporain and presents a programme devoted to compositions by its conductor and artistic director, Matthias Pintscher. bereshit, ‘in a beginning’ in Hebrew, is a piece on the subject of divine creation. The architecture of the work refers to the idea of the growth of the elements out of nothingness to their finished state: the colours, the harmonies are therefore always redefined by what precedes and follows them. Songs from Solomon’s garden – still in a highly spiritual dimension – explores amorous passion through the shir ha shirim (Song of Songs). The poetic density of this text is underlined here, with the only repeated phrase of the work taking on a quasi-incantatory signification: ‘she-cholat ahava ani’ (for I am sick of love).

Classical Music