An English Christmas from Westminster Choir College Recordings, is the perfect way to “ring in the holidays” with the joyous sounds of Christmas, the album’s arrangements of holiday favorites being performed on the world’s largest range of handbells. The Westminster Concert Bell Choir is considered to be America’s leading handbell ensemble. Hailed for its virtuosity, the Westminster Concert Bell Choir performs on the largest range of handbells in the world. The choir has appeared on Public Television’s Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood and several holiday broadcasts of NBC’s Today show. Recent performances include joining Josh Groban to perform The Bells of New York for the national broadcast of the Christmas tree lighting at Rockefeller Center, as well as having performed at Carnegie Hall twice during the Christmas season. Kathleen Ebling Shaw is in demand as a conductor and handbell clinician worldwide. She has conducted ensembles and led symposia throughout the US, Japan, England, Korea and Australia. - Naxos

Seasons combines Antonio Vivaldi's timeless concerto cycle The Four Seasons, performed by the Trafalgar Sinfonia and soloist Kerenza Peacock, with a new contrasting composition by British composer Oliver Davis. Inspired by the same set of poetry upon which Vivaldi based his Four Seasons, Davis's new work Anno, performed by Grace Davidson, is a composition for orchestra and solo soprano. This release follows the success of Davis's debut Signum album Flight earlier this year (SIGCD411): "... exuberant works are performed with charisma and sensitivity by Kerenza Peacock and the LSO." (BBC Music Magazine) Since graduating the RAM in 1994, Oliver Davis has composed and produced numerous concertos, albums, soundtracks and television scores working with all the major London orchestras.

Anne Boleyn is without doubt the most famous of Henry VIII's six wives. She was brought up for a time under the guardianship of Margaret of Austria, who was patron to some of the most famous composers in all of Europe, and then in the French court before her return to England in 1522. It was in France where the young Anne developed her keen musical tastes, and when a collection of her favorite works began to be assembled into what is now known as the Anne Boleyn Songbook (Royal College of Music, MS 1070). The book probably remained in her possession until her execution in 1536, when she was accused of adultery with no less than five men including her own brother, George, and luteplayer Mark Smeaton. Here Alamire explores the finest works in the Songbook by the greatest composers of the early 16th century, including Comp�re, Brumel, Mouton, and Josquin. Performances by Alamire are interspersed with French chansons and instrumental items for lute, harp and voice. The program concludes with a most haunting setting of 'O Deathe rock me asleep', not from the Songbook but possibly linked to Anne's fate while awaiting her execution in the Tower of London.

Initially regarded as a master composer of art songs, Jake Heggie has since become known as perhaps America’s leading contemporary composer of internationally acclaimed operas. Winning examples of both genres appear on this release: the world premiere recording of a short, one-act opera, The Radio Hour – as well as four shorter vocal pieces. The Radio Hour – the world’s first-ever “choral opera” – is a compact work for silent actress, with running narrative and commentary from a choir. The program is rounded out with four mostly art song-based works in varied arrangements, several with choral elements, sung by the vaunted John Alexander Singers. Susan Graham, one of America’s most beloved mezzo-sopranos, is heard in three of the shorter pieces; Pacific Symphony members provide the instrumentals. “A masterpiece of clarity and intensity, with a score that is at once thematically compact and richly inventive.” San Francisco Chronicle (review of Jake Heggie’s opera “Moby Dick”)

Although highly productive and respected in his lifetime as a Lied composer, Robert Franz (1815–92) has since become a peripheral figure in music history. As they began to explore the songs of Franz, Georges Starobinski and baritone Christian Immler were moved by their findings to devise a program including twenty-three of the composer’s often quite brief songs. Using the poet Heinrich Heine as their guiding star, they present these – all Heine settings but from different opus groups – in the form of two ‘imagined’ song cycles, framed by further settings of Heine poems by Schumann and Liszt.

Leo� Jan�cek is one of the composers who brought fame to Czech music worldwide, and his Glagolitic Mass, Sinfonietta and mature operas are regularly performed on prominent stages around the globe. Yet the composer's folk-based works have remained relatively little known, even though traditional songs pulsate in the very heart of his music, significantly forming his singular idiom, and serving as a source of inspiration without which Jan�cek's oeuvre simply cannot be imagined. Owing to the artist's collecting passion, today we can enjoy numerous lovely songs which have been preserved in both music scores and period audio recordings. The collections Moravian and Hukvaldy Folk Poetry in Songs contain the most beautiful of them all. Jan�cek left the songs in their pure form, afforded to them by the landscape and the people living in it, merely - and with the sensitivity of a precious painting restorer - furnishing them with congenial piano accompaniments. The landscape and the language of Jan�cek's Hukvaldy and Moravia have also been imprinted in the very souls of the artists who have recorded this album, focusing on the purity of folk songs, reflecting simple directness and enchanting poetics. The present recording is the fruit of their joint seeking and endeavor to get in touch with the candid and deeply symbolic world of the songs. Into the very heart of Jan�cek's singular musical universe

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.

One of the truly grand old men on the music scene today, György Kurtág composed his Kafka-Fragmente in the mid-1980s, and these forty settings of text fragments by Franz Kafka remain one of his most often-performed works. Although the cycle contains no single narrative thread and tells no coherent ‘tale’ it has become quite common to present it in staged versions – perhaps because of the hypnotic images that emerge in the texts, as well as in the music. Many of the movements are extremely brief; in the present recording 11 of the movements are less than half a minute long, and the shortest (Es zupfte mich jemand am Kleid / Someone tugged at my clothes) lasts only 13 seconds. However, to quote the insightful liner notes by the musicologist Philippe Albéra: ’Within these miniature spaces, expressivity – as if through a process of crystallization – is pushed to its utmost limits.’ Collected by the composer, the texts have been extracted from Kafka’s letters, diaries and notebooks; shards that together form a mosaic at times sardonic, absurd, lyrical or humourous. Kurtág’s ability to convey a wide range of situations and emotions transforms each fragment into a vision of dreamlike intensity, where the real becomes surreal, and Albéra finds a symbol of the spirit of Kurtág’s music in the 16th fragment, Kein Rückkehr, and Kafka’s aphorism: ‘From a certain point on, there is no going back. That is the point to reach.’ The often highly virtuosic and demanding score is here interpreted by the soprano Caroline Meltzer and the violinist Nurit Stark, both performers with a strong commitment to contemporary music who collaborated with composers such as Aribert Reimann, Sofia Gubaidulina and Viktor Suslin.

Reviews:

Caroline Melzer and Nurit Stark yield nothing to previous performers in penetrating the depth and breadth of emotion that Kurtag conveys, and it helps that this is the best recorded version available, allowing their wide range of tone, colour and dynamics to be heard to full effect.

– BBC Music Magazine

The 40 separate fragments are divided into four groups…linked less by a definable concept than an intuitive sense of what constitutes unity within the author's bleak and fractured world-view. It is in this latter respect that Caroline Melzer and Nurit Stark make so gripping an impression - characterising the many fragmentary shards with an explosive intimacy…a likely first choice for those new to this enigmatic and intriguing work.

– Gramophone

14 distinct titles introduce this exciting new series uniting the finest Alpha and ZZT Baroque recordings. Discover - or rediscover - universally known works as well as world premiere recordings of rarities. Newly conducted artist interviews allow for fresh perspectives on their recordings. All releases, digipak in format with trilingual booklets, feature photographs by great (Magnum Cooperative) contemporary artists adorning the covers and a strong 'queen of colors' scheme, bringing to mind gods, kings, warriors, the devil, life, violence and death... Themes omnipresent in Baroque art!

Already well known to opera audiences worldwide, Swedish soprano Camilla Tilling is also a dedicated and acclaimed recitalist, as noted by reactions in the Sunday Times and Gramophone, among other publications, to her two previous BIS releases with pianist Paul Rivinius that feature songs by Richard Strauss and Franz Schubert. This new, third BIS disc of songs by Edvard Grieg, Jean Sibelius and Wilhelm Stenhammar takes its title from Stenhammar’s I skogen (In the forest), with many of the selected songs either played out in or depicting natural settings, in a manner familiar to Nordic composers.

After a long break, cpo continues its important, yeoman’s Heinrich Schütz edition – repeatedly hailed as a benchmark series – with the Weser-Renaissance Bremen under Manfred Cordes. This latest release has the ensemble interpreting Schütz’s Symphoniae Sacrae I, the oldest printed collection of his works. To capture the essence of these works involving obbligato early baroque instruments that also qualify very much as solo music, the technical bases must be fully and truly exhausted by the composer and the interpreters. “… Interpretive vibrancy, presence…and joy in sound…” (FonoForum)

Arnold Schönberg founded the Society for Musical Private Performances in November 1918 “to give Arnold Schoenberg the opportunity personally to carry out his intention of providing artists and art lovers with a veritable and precise knowledge of Modern Music”, as Alban Berg described in a leaflet in 1919. Chamber music, solo pieces and songs saw performance, and to a great extent, properly arranged for the available means, original large-scale orchestral works of topical and artistic high-quality were also produced. In the autumn of 1921, Schönberg embarked on an arrangement of Mahler’s Das Lied von der Erde, which, however, he broke off in the middle of the first movement. The continuation was to be taken over by Webern, but this did not happen, evidently as a consequence of the end of the society. It was only in 1982/83 that the German composer, conductor and musicologist Rainer Riehn (b. 1941) was prepared to continue what had been begun.

Newly recorded in the bright acoustic of the Cenacolo of San Giorgio Maggiore Monastery in Venice, La Reverdie brings together, for the first time, musical compositions written c. 1330-1430 in honor of the Venetian Doges, or Venice itself. + This release, whose title is borrowed from the text of a most famous Johannes Ciconia-composed motet, includes the nine ceremonial motets written – according to recent research – to commemorate political, diplomatic or devotional events as well the election of the Doge, by, among others, da Padova, Landini, Ciconia, Romanus, de Monte and Lantins.

Faith in God was for Dvorák the cornerstone on which he built his own life and work, hence it comes as no surprise that a number of his seminal pieces are within the domain of sacred music, and frequently linked with a strong personal story.

The first version of the oratorio Stabat Mater came into being after the death of his first-born daughter. In the wake of the triumph of its London premiere, Dvorák received more commissions from the UK, which gave rise to other paramount compositions: The Spectre's Bride, Requiem and Saint Ludmila.

The instigation for Te Deum came from New York, where following the premiere of the New World Symphony Dvorák wrote the Biblical Songs, the apex of his oeuvre of this genre. The set also contains pieces that have been seldom performed (the cantata The Heirs of the White Mountain, Psalm 149 in the previously unreleased recording made by the conductor Václav Neumann.).

At the same time, this 8-disc collection within the Dvorák series, featuring gems from the Supraphon archive, showcases superlative artists and performances in sensitively re-mastered sound.

After the successful album release “Slavonic Souls” (Capriccio C5039) the Vienna State Opera Singer Zoryana Kushpler, accompanied on the piano by her partner and twin sister Olena, offer a rich recital of famous Spanish songs by the likes of Granados, de Falla, Mompou, Rodrigo and Montsalvage, including some choice rarities by these composers. Born in Lvov, Ukraine, Ms. Kushpler made her debut at the Wiener Staatsoper in 2007 as Adelaide in Richard Strauss’s Arabella. She has also been heard there in the operas of Tchaikovsky, Verdi, Puccini, Offenbach and Johann Strauss.

This is the second disc of songs with Sally Silver and Richard Bonynge appearing on SOMM. The collection of songs on this CD ranges across the whole of Massenet's career as a composer. This selection also includes duets and other settings for solo voice groupings, of which Massenet composed many.

"What an adventurous move it is for a record company to provide listeners with the opportunity to hear songs that have not been committed to disc time and time again." - IRR

Anonima Frottolisti Ensemble, a group specializing in Early and medieval music, confronts a little performed yet interesting repertoire: the “contrafacta”, compositions in which the lyrics and the melodies are a blend of the sacred and profane. Starting from the 12th c., these two seemingly opposed worlds diverged in the custom of secular text usage on sacred melodies. Later, the trend is the opposite: popular melodies in vogue at the time are filled with liturgical and spiritual texts, thus becoming an effective means of leading people to faith and knowledge of the scriptures.

Praised for her “impeccably pure and iridescent voice” (Financial Times), soprano Adrianne Pieczonka is primarily known for her vocally opulent and interpretively intense Richard Strauss and Richard Wagner opera performances– though her vocal and stylistic versatility enables her to be at home in dramatic operatic roles by Verdi, Puccini and others. Her first Delos release is constituted of a varied program of Richard Strauss and Wagner songs. Strauss created 158 lieder for soprano voice in total; many of the dozen heard here are among his true masterpieces. The opera specialist Wagner, on the other hand, wrote far fewer songs than Strauss. Best-known among them are the five ecstatically romantic Wesendonck-Lieder, a masterpiece among Lieder cycles. Accompanying Ms. Pieczonka is Brian Zeger, a pianist whose technical finesse and interpretive sensitivity mark him as one of the great collaborators of our time.

Mneme by the Greek early music ensemble "Ex Silentio" is a collection of musical remembrances from around the Mediterranean Sea: dances, songs and instrumental pieces from medieval and early renaissance sources. At home in the traditional folk and "classical" early music worlds, Ex Silentio create colorful portraits of mighty kings, noble knights and beautiful princesses who once populated those countries as well as people's imaginations then as now. "Mneme" is a historically well-informed, visionary and highly creative fairytale derived from Greek mythology and Mediterranean psyche.

‘I am an EU singer’, Hermann Prey always said about himself. However, by that he did not mean so much his citizenship of a European Union country as the fact that he felt at home in the fields of ‘E’ and ‘U’, i.e. in ‘serious’ and entertainment music alike. For Prey, this distinction never existed, but only the issue of the quality of music, and he found this not only in opera and Lied, but also in operetta, the musical and the well-made hit. For forty-six years Prey convinced audiences; this five-disc collection reveals his fascinatingly wide-ranging repertoire and interpretative skill.

Modern Fairy Tales, recorded in 2014 for Centaur Records, features oboist Courtney Miller accompanied by one of three pianists on six works of chamber music written in the 19th, 20th and 21st c. by, among others, B�la Bart�k and Peter Schickele. She travels throughout the US as a solo, chamber and orchestral musician, playing both prestigious as well as smaller, more intimate venues where she enjoys more audience interaction.

Although the output of Gregorio Allegri was not large, it covered almost every musical genre of the time, from strict polyphony to monody, instrumental music and the cantata. He is now remembered principally as the composer of the nine-voice Miserere, written around 1638 for the Holy Week celebrations and made famous in the nineteenth century version which requires a high C in the coro favorito. Five years of bibliographic and musical research in Italy and abroad have permitted the rediscovery of the well-rounded personality that his contemporaries recognized in Allegri, and, from this point of view, quite apart from a world premier recording of exceptional importance, the pieces contained in the Altemps manuscripts undoubtedly constitute a new chapter to add to the history of sacred music.

The King’s Singers perform the complete Italian madrigal collection Il Trionfo di Dori. Commissioned by Venetian nobleman Leonardo Sanudo in 1592, the collection features 29 works, each written by a different composer and poet, and set for nine voices. Among them are Vecchi, Gabrieli, Marenzio, de Monte, Striggio, Anerio, Gastoldi, Porta and Palestrina.

On July 29, 2015 composer Mikis Theodorakis will celebrate his 90th birthday. In honor of this occasion, Soprano Johanna Krumin and baritone Peter Sch�ne offer this collection of thirteen of the composer's songs. Regarded as somewhat of a political hero, Theodorakis has given a face and a voice to the Greek people. This project aims to be a musical homecoming, a return to his beginnings in the form of pure music free from all external constraints.

Isabel Leonard’s luxuriant vocal tone, riveting stage presence and remarkable artistic versatility make her one of today’s most in-demand singers. In this – her first Delos release – she explores the riches of Spanish song in all its varied Iberian forms and styles that can be traced back as far as its millennium-old Moorish influences. The generous program encompasses pure folksongs, folk-influenced art songs, dances and popular theater songs by quite a few of Spain’s finest composers of the late-19th and 20th c., Mompou, Falla, García Lorca, Sanjuán, Granados and Montsalvatge. Herself a Spanish speaker and passionate devotee of Iberian musical art, Ms. Leonard is partnered here by Brian Zeger, one of America’s most supremely sensitive and accomplished piano collaborators. “…magnetic charisma and a remarkable depth of tone” (Bachtrack)