Classical Music

2007 issued double CD anthology of recordings by one the most influential classical composers of the 20th Century commemorating his 70th birthday.

Tracks:
1. GLASS, PHILIP - LIGHTING
2. GLASS, PHILIP - FACADES
3. GLASS, PHILIP - EVENING SONG
4. GLASS, PHILIP - A GENTLEMAN'S HONOR
5. GLASS, PHILIP - HYMN TO THE SUN
6. GLASS, PHILIP - METAMORPHOSIS FOUR
7. GLASS, PHILIP - OPEN THE KINGDOM
8. GLASS, PHILIP - DANCE II
9. GLASS, PHILIP - GLASSPIECE NO. 1
10. GLASS, PHILIP - CHANGING OPINION
11. GLASS, PHILIP - OPENING
12. GLASS, PHILIP - FLOE
13. GLASS, PHILIP - KNEE PLAY
14. GLASS, PHILIP - FUNERAL FO AMENHOTEP
15. GLASS, PHILIP - WICHITA SUTRA VORTEX
16. GLASS, PHILIP - FORGETTING
17. GLASS, PHILIP - DANCE IX
18. GLASS, PHILIP - DAM

Classical Music

Winter Words is the solo debut release by American tenor Nicholas Phan. The recording was made in the wake of a recital tour in 2010-11 which culminated in his Carnegie debut at Weill Hall. A graduate of the Manhattan School of Music and an alumnus of the Houston Grand Opera studio Nick has performed with the opera companies of Los Angeles and Seattle, symphony orchestras of Atlanta, St. Louis and San Francisco, and the Marlboro, Ravinia and Edinburgh Festivals, among others. He sang in Stravinsky's Pulcinella with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra under Pierre Boulez which was nominated for a Grammy Award. Nick presents a deeply personal perspective of Britten's music, encompassing his own performing experiences to audience reaction. He says: "I've been a fan of Britten since playing his Young Person's Guide to the Orchestra with my youth orchestra in Detroit as a teenage violinist. But my great devotion to his music increased to an obsession when an excellent pianist and good friend asked if I'd perform with her at a small university in Missouri. She suggested Winter Words, saying, "I think these would sound really great in your voice, and I've wanted to play them for ages, so indulge me." I researched and played through Britten's settings of Hardy's poems and before long, I was hooked." Approaching the performance in a small Midwestern town with some trepidation ("how would they react?"), Nick describes the audience's overwhelmingly positive response: "my favourite piece on the program ... the most lasting impression." Such is the enduring quality of Britten's sophisticated yet direct song writing, of which Nick is a leading torch-bearer. critical acclaim for Nicholas Phan "took hold of the music with unerring musicality, precise diction, and conversational command." - The Rest is Noise, Alex Ross "an excellent young singer ... more importantly he penetrates deeply into the inner drama" - Boston Globe "Vocally and dramatically at the level of the finest international artists." - Chicago Sun Times

A festive concert of great voices, this Volkslied-Edition offers on 5 CDs the most famous and most beloved German folksongs, performed by well known singers like Hermann Prey, Peter Schreier, and famous choirs, especially boys choirs, such as the Dresden Kreuzchor, Thomanerchor Leipzig and the Regensburger Domspatzen. A well done edition for all friends of choir music offered for a verys special price!

Following the success of the Mozart Mass in C minor last year, CORO is delighted to announce the release of its second recording with Harry Christophers and the Handel and Haydn Society. Celebrated soloists Elizabeth Watts, Phyllis Pancella, Andrew Kennedy and Eric Owens joined Harry and the Society to record Mozart's Requiem live at Boston's Symphony Hall earlier this year. Mozart's final moments are reflected through this masterpiece of drama, intensity and depth. The mysterious circumstances surrounding the Requiem's commission (delivered by a 'messenger in black' who refused to reveal the identity of the person who had sent him), and the fact it was left incomplete by a dying Mozart, have ensured a continued fascination with the work. Completed by Mozart's colleague Süssmayr in 1792, the Requiem is one of Mozart's most popular and enduring works and one of the most enigmatic pieces of music ever composed. The CD will also feature Mozart's Ave verum corpus and the first recording on period instruments of his concert aria Per questa bella mano for bass voice and solo double bass obligato--a piece famous for its fiendishly difficult double bass part, performed superbly on this recording by Robert Nairn. Harry Christophers was appointed Artistic Director of Boston's internationally acclaimed Handel and Haydn Society in 2008. Founded in 1815, the Society is the oldest continuously performing arts organization in the U.S. and has given the American premieres of major works by Handel, Bach and Haydn, has won a Grammy Award, and will celebrate its Bicentennial in 2015. "Onstage, Christophers has what it takes to inspire the Society's fine musicians." The Wall Street Journal "...a commanding and compelling reading of an important if often overlooked monument in Mozart's musical development." Gramophone on COR16084: Mass in C minor

Classical Music

The first recording by Yannick Nézet-Séguin and the Rotterdam Philharmonic Orchestra for BIS centred on Berlioz' Symphonie Fantastique, a work which stands squarely on the threshold between Classicism and Romanticism. Nézet-Séguin's interpretation brilliantly demonstrated this ambivalence, as the reviewer in CD Review on BBC Radio 3 remarked: 'A Fantastic Symphony that relishes in the transparency and the delicacy of Berlioz's scoring while remaining true to its vivid imagination and dramatic punch'. On the follow-up to that exciting release is another work that straddles a musical divide, namely Richard Strauss' Four Last Songs. Composed in 1948, these late blooms of an unabashed Romanticism stood in the midst of a musical landscape which featured the twelve-tone serialism of the Darmstadt School, John Cage's prepared piano and the first examples of musique concrète. In accordance with Strauss's wish, it was the dramatic soprano Kirsten Flagstad who first performed the songs, but they also became closely associated with Elisabeth Schwarzkopf. On the present recording, it is Dorothea Röschmann, one of today's foremost Mozart sopranos who lends her voice to what is often regarded as an expression of the composer's acceptance of death's inevitability, at the age of eighty-four. We meet Strauss in a completely different mood in the disc's opening work - the large-scale symphonic poem Ein Heldenleben (A Hero's Life) composed fifty years before the songs. By casting himself in the role of the Hero, Strauss managed to provoke generations of music-lovers for years to come. A study of aggressive egotism, the work has been called, as well as the most conceited piece of music ever written. But it is also widely regarded as one of the most brilliant, and virtuosic, orchestral scores in the history of music, displaying the possibilities of a large symphony orchestra to the fullest.

Classical Music

Classical Music

Classical Music

Anger produces menacing sounds. But the voice of tenderness is softer,' wrote French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and much the same could be said of the diverse music on this second volume of American percussion music. It ranges from Elliott Carter'

Mahler: Das Lied von der Erde

Vocal music comprised around a quarter of Czech composer Bohuslav Martinu' extensive output, no fewer than 27 songs dating from 1912 alone, and much of it remaining unpublished during his lifetime.

Classical Music

Classical Music

Zebeljan: The Horses of Saint Mark

Performing on early 19th-century pianos from the Frederick Historic Piano Collection, competition prizewinners Dmitry Rachmanov, a Juilliard graduate, and Cullan Bryant, a graduate of Manhattan School of Music, explore the interrelationships between the keyboard music of Beethoven and his principal teachers in this fascinating double-album of rarities for piano four-hands, culminating in a revelatory account of the Great Fugue in Beethoven’s own keyboard arrangement. The distinctive sonorities of these highly esteemed period instruments transport the listener back to the time when Beethoven, his teachers or his own pupils, may have performed this music themselves for the first time.

This triple disc set includes the most famous recordings of Alfredo Kraus, Lucia Alberti and Renato Bruson with arias by Bellini, Donizetti, Verdi, Mascagni etc. Also included are rare opera scenes such as Donizetti’s “Gemmy di Vergy” and Bellini’s “I Capuleti e I Montecchi. This is a highly recommended collection for fans of opera and these Belcanto artists; 38 beautifully sung selections in all!

Classical Music

Served by very high level interpreters, the fourth volume in this series underlines and strengthens the public's growing interest in this previously unpublished repertoire. Fondation Bru plans to organize an international symposium in Venice about this unjustly forgotten composer. This new volume reveals a Lucien Durosoir somewhere between impressionism and modernism, confirming the genius of his very atypical language. Blending in with the shimmering colors of Le Balcon, for choir and string quintet, we find a tender lullaby (a French melody), a virtuoso trilogy for piano and cello, an Idylle where music becomes Poem... Ut poesis musica !

Classical Music

The Swedish baritone Peter Mattei has made a formidable reputation for himself performing at the most prestigious opera houses in the world: the Metropolitan, Teatro alla Scala and Covent Garden, to mention but a few. He first came to the attention of an international audience when Peter Brook selected him as his Don Giovanni, for an Aix-en-Provence production which was later filmed. Something of a 'director's opera singer', Mattei has also worked with Ingmar Bergman, Michael Haneke and Patrice Chereau, and regularly astounds audiences with his exceptional acting skills, coupled as they are with a voice of rare beauty. In the recording studio he is, however, a more rarely seen guest. On this his first and long-awaited disc of arias, he revels in the rich opportunities offered by the baritone literature, performing a selection of his favourite arias and roles. Lovelorn young men and cynical libertines, friends faithful unto death and innocent victims of oppression - all of these are brought to life as one of today's finest operatic baritones displays his entire range with the eminent support of the Royal Stockholm Philharmonic Orchestra and Lawrence Renes on the podium

With the new WERGO production "Initiale - Lieder und fr�he Kammermusik" (Initials - Songs and Early Chamber Music), the complete Lied compositions by Bernd Alois Zimmermann are now available as a recording for the first time. The eleven songs were all interpreted by the adorable singer Anna Prohaska. The up-and-coming 27-year-old star currently captivates the opera world with her light and lyric soprano voice. Except for "Sonate" of 1950, all works compiled on this CD were created between 1939 and 1946. WERGO thus closes a gap in Zimmermann's repertoire and puts a focus on the beginning of the career of this great composer: Never had Zimmermann been as close to the neo-romantic tonal language as in his song compositions in which he set texts by Rilke, Klabund or Nietzsche among others to music. This genre - to which he never returned again - reflects both the expression of intimate feelings and his strong interest in literature.

Best known for his spectacular operas Giacomo Meyerbeer also contributed to the more intimate world of French, German and Italian song with a fair number of finely-crafted examples.