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SUMMER NIGHT CONCERT 2020

Sony Masterworks

$11.98 Oct 09, 2020

Sony Classical is proud to announce the release of this year's Summer Night Concert 2020 with the Vienna Philharmonic, conducted by Valery Gergiev with tenor Jonas Kaufmann as soloist. The Summer Night Concert was performed this year on September 18th 2020. It is an annual open-air event, which has been held since 2008. The previous series was the "Concert for Europe", which took place from 2004 until 2007. The park of Schönbrunn Palace in Vienna/Austria is the magical setting for the concert. The illustrious conductors who have previously led the orchestra at this event are Georges Prêtre, Daniel Barenboim, Franz Welser-Möst, Valery Gergiev, Lorin Maazel, Christoph Eschenbach, Zubin Mehta, Semyon Bychkov and Gustavo Dudamel. Thanks to it's UNESCO World Heritage setting in the Baroque park of Schönbrunn with the palace as a backdrop, the Summer Night Concert adds great visual charm to it's superb musical quality. This event is classical music at it's very best. Millions of viewers and listeners in more than 80 countries can follow the concert online, on TV and radio. The Vienna Philharmonic's 2020 Summer Night Concert took place in unusual circumstances. After the coronavirus pandemic resulted in the longest enforced break in the orchestra's history, the concert planned for May 2020 had to be postponed until September and took place for the first time with a reduced audience. The Vienna Philharmonic devoted this very special concert to the theme of love. This is the fourth time that Valery Gergiev has conducted one of these concerts: he first appeared with the orchestra in 1997 and has conducted the Summer Night Concerts in 2007, 2011 and 2018. Valery Gergiev is a vivid representative of the St Petersburg conducting school. His debut at the Mariinsky (then Kirov) Theatre came in 1978 with Prokofiev's War and Peace. In 1988 Valery Gergiev was appointed Music Director of the Mariinsky Theatre, and in 1996 he became it's Artistic and General Director. He successfully collaborates with the world's great opera houses, works with the World Orchestra for Peace (which he has directed since 1997), the Philharmonic Orchestras of Berlin, Paris, Vienna, New York and Los Angeles, the Symphony Orchestras of Chicago, Cleveland, Boston and San Francisco, the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra (Amsterdam) and many other ensembles. From 1995 to 2008 Valery Gergiev was Principal Conductor of the Rotterdam Philharmonic (of which he remains an honorary conductor to this day), and from 2007 to 2015 of the London Symphony Orchestra. Since autumn 2015 the maestro has headed the Munich Philharmonic. This year's programme featured the star tenor Jonas Kaufmann, who is appearing at one of these concerts for the very first time, even though he has been performing with the orchestra to great acclaim for the last two decades. Since his sensational début at the Metropolitan Opera in New York in a performance of "La Traviata" in 2006, Jonas Kaufmann has numbered among the top stars on the operatic horizon. The international press has singled him out as the "new king of tenors". Insiders praise him as the most important German tenor since Fritz Wunderlich. Kaufmann is just as much in demand internationally in the Italian and French repertoires as he is in German opera. He has sung Massenet's Werther in Paris and Vienna, Cavaradossi in Puccini's "Tosca" in London, at the Met and La Scala. His intensive characterizations of Don José in Bizet's "Carmen" and Werther in Massenet's opera took opera fans throughout the world by storm. His solo albums are bestsellers only a few weeks after being released. In 2011 he was presented the coveted "Opera News Award" in New York. Shortly afterwards Kaufmann was named a "Chevalier de l'Ordre de l'Art et des Lettres" by French culture minister Frédéric Mitterrand. Kaufmann has been selected several times as "Singer of the Year", by the classical music magazines "Opernwelt", "Diapason" and "Musical America" as well as by the juries of "Opus-Klassik" and the inaugural "International Opera Awards" (2013). The 177-year old tradition of the Vienna Philharmonic goes back to 1842, when Otto Nicolai conducted a Grand Concert with all members of the imperial "Hof-Operntheater". This event was originally called "Philharmonic Academy" and is regarded as the origin of the orchestra. Since it's founding, the orchestra has been managed by the administrative committee - a democratically elected body - and works with artistic, organisational and financial autonomy. All decisions are reached on a democratic basis during the general meeting of all members.

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SUMMER NIGHT CONCERT 2020
Sony Masterworks Oct 2020
CD
$11.98

SOMMERNACHTSKONZERT 2025 / SUMMER NIGHT CONCERT

SONY CLASSICS

DVD

$15.99 Aug 29, 2025

The Summer Night Concert of the Vienna Philharmonic is the world's biggest annual classical open-air concert that takes place in the magical setting of the Schonbrunn Palace Baroque park in Vienna. This year marks the first time that Maestro Tugan Sokhiev will conduct the Summer Night Concert. The vocal soloist is world-renowned tenor Piotr Beczala, who will perform three iconic arias from: Georges Bizet's Carmen, Giacomo Puccini's Turandot and Emmerich Kalman's Grafin Mariza. With this open-air concert in Schonbrunn, the Vienna Philharmonic wishes to provide all Viennese, as well as visitors to the city, with a special musical experience in the impressive setting of Schonbrunn Palace and it's beautiful baroque gardens, a UNESCO World Cultural Heritage Site. Since 2004 the Vienna Philharmonic has provided an outstanding experience for the audience. The focus of this year's program is on well-known melodies from opera and operetta that lead us on a musical journey through various European landscapes und milieus.

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SOMMERNACHTSKONZERT 2025 / SUMMER NIGHT CONCERT
SONY CLASSICS Aug 2025
DVD
$15.99

Prokofiev: Summer Night Suite - Scythian Suite - Khachaturian: Masquerade Suite - Spartacus Suite

Oehms Classics

$31.99 Aug 21, 2020

This recording brings together unique orchestral suites by the Soviet composer Sergei Prokofiev and the Soviet-Armenian composer Aram Khachaturian. Summer Night Suite is based on the music from Prokofiev’s opera Betrothal in a Monastery and Scythian Suite was derived from his ballet Ala and Lolly. Aram Khachaturian wrote his Masquerade Suite in 1941 to accompany Mikhail Lermontov’s play of the same name. His ballet Spartacus (1954) portrays the defeat the Romans by the hero Spartacus who leads an uprising of slaves. The suites present a range of moods and variety of melodic invention that are completely engaging. This is the Zagreb Philharmonic’s third recording for the OehmsClassics label. Their recording of Glazunov’s The Seasons, also under the direction of Dmitrij Kitajenko, received an ICMA nomination.

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Prokofiev: Summer Night Suite - Scythian Suite - Khachaturian: Masquerade Suite - Spartacus Suite
Oehms Classics Aug 2020
CD
$31.99

FREDERICK DELIUS: 11 FAVOURITES

ALTO

$11.01 Oct 12, 2018

Contains Delius' most essential statements. Summer Night on the River, On Hearing the First Cuckoo, Brigg Fair and the Irmelin Prelude are simply magical in their effect, and Beecham's interpretations arise out of the depths of the music itself... passages such as the introduction to Brigg Fair, seem to be outside time, one yet again wonders at the poetic rightness of every nuance, the delicately exact textural balance. His identification with the composer is so complete that one is not sure whom to credit for some features... This (collection) must surely be recognised as a gem. Sleigh Ride and the Marche Caprice are entertaining enough, but all the rest are wonderful Delius - and conducted by someone who has remained the one and only Delius interpreter. Each performance is superb. (Gramophone)

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FREDERICK DELIUS: 11 FAVOURITES
ALTO Oct 2018
CD
$11.01

PIANO CONCERTO NO.1 LATE SUMME
Sterling Records Aug 2013
CD
$20.99

Mendelssohn: A Midsummer Night's Dream / Szell, Stokowski
Sony Masterworks Jun 2010
CD
$17.99

Mendelssohn: Symphonies Nos. 3-5 & A Midsummer Night's Dream
Vox Jan 1996
CD
$29.99

Night In Venice
Videoland Jan 2016
DVD
$32.99

Mendelssohn: Symphony No. 3, A Midsummer Night's Dream / Comissiona, Baltimore Symphony

Vox

$19.99 Sep 27, 2024

Romanian-born conductor Sergiu Comissiona galvanised the Baltimore Symphony into an orchestra of national prominence, releasing several albums on Vox. This classic recording of Mendelssohn's 'Scottish' Symphony is coupled with a previously unreleased recording from 1977 of excerpts from A Midsummer Night's Dream. Remastered in high definition from the original tapes.

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Mendelssohn: Symphony No. 3, A Midsummer Night's Dream / Comissiona, Baltimore Symphony
Vox Sep 2024
CD
$19.99

Mendelssohn: A Midsummer Night's Dream; Wagner / Ormandy, Philadelphia

RCA

$17.99 Apr 08, 2010

*** This title is a reissue of a Japanese release with liner notes in Japanese. ***

The distinctive point about Ormandy's version of the Midsummer Night's Dream music is that the vocal sections are given in German. On the sleeve the producer notes the significant point that in the Schlegel-Tieck translation "You spotted snakes" becomes "Bunte Schlartgen", and that Mendelssohn wrote it with two quavers instead of quaver plus two semi-quavers at the beginning of the phrase. It was for a Berlin performance that Mendelssohn wrote his extra incidental music, and therefore there is an historic case, too, for preferring Schlegel-Tieck to Shakespeare... [W]ith finely disciplined playing from the Philadelphians, Ormandy is a fraction heavier [than Previn and Leppard], less playful, but the discrepancy is slight, and with such glorious sound recorded fully and richly with plenty of inner detail, no one will feel disappointed... Both Previn and Leppard include even the briefest melodramas, where Ormandy omits three of them (No. 4 before the Intermezzo, No. 10 before the ironic "Funeral March" and No. 12 before the finale, all of them very brief). The last one consists of a fragment of the "Wedding March" fading into the distance to be followed by fairy music, and I am sorry to lose it. Instead Ormandy opts to transpose the Melodrama No. 8 to that point with a fragment of the "Nocturne" plus a radiant violin descant.

The casual listener may well not register any of these details, and certainly the Ormandy record, beautifully played and recorded, can be confidently recommended...

-- Edward Greenfield, Gramophone [6/1978, reviewing the original LP release of the Mendelssohn]

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Mendelssohn: A Midsummer Night's Dream; Wagner / Ormandy, Philadelphia
RCA Apr 2010
CD
$17.99

Britten: A Midsummer Night's Dream at Glyndebourne / Haitink, London Philharmonic

Opus Arte

DVD

$24.99 Sep 01, 2023

Glyndebourne’s production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream is pure magic. Brilliantly adapted from Shakespeare’s play, the opera follows the adventures of four lovers and a group of naïve rustics who, in a wood on a moonstruck midsummer night, fall foul of Oberon and Tytania, the quarrelling king and queen of the fairies. In Peter Hall’s remarkable staging, the very wood comes alive as logs and trees move and rustle, creating ambiguous silhouettes in the dark mysterious woodland, lit only by designer John Bury’s wonderful rising sun and moon.

Recorded 1983.

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Britten: A Midsummer Night's Dream at Glyndebourne / Haitink, London Philharmonic
Opus Arte Sep 2023
DVD
$24.99

Brahms: Symphony No. 1 - Mendelssohn: A Midsummer Night's Dr

ICA Classics

DVD

$26.99 Nov 13, 2012

Recorded in 1971 the film on this DVD is taken from the Chicago Symphony Orchestra's appearance at the Edinburgh Festival in the same year: their first ever concert outside America. This is the first release of this material on DVD and is the first in a series of Sir Georg Solti/CSO releases to come from ICA Classics to celebrate Solti's centenary.

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Brahms: Symphony No. 1 - Mendelssohn: A Midsummer Night's Dr
ICA Classics Nov 2012
DVD
$26.99

Shakespeare: A Midsummer Night's Dream

Opus Arte

DVD

$29.99 Feb 28, 2025

On Midsummer's Night, the real and fairy worlds collide. Four young lovers, faced with the prospect of unhappy marriage or worse, flee the court of Athens and stumble into an enchanted forest. Nearby, a group of amateur actors rehearse a play to celebrate an upcoming royal wedding. As these mere mortals cross paths with a warring fairy King and Queen, chaos reigns in the natural world. The lines between reality and illusion start to blur and no one but mischievous Puck knows what is true and what is magic. Let Shakespeare's captivating comedy transport you to the most magical of midsummer nights. Director Eleanor Rhode's production of A Midsummer Night's Dream is both epic and intimate, and completely full of wonder

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Shakespeare: A Midsummer Night's Dream
Opus Arte Feb 2025
DVD
$29.99

Mendelssohn: A Midsummer Night's Dream & Overture The Fair Melusine / DuoKeira

Brilliant Classics

$6.99 ~~$13.99~~ Save 50% Aug 28, 2020

The piano duet was an opportunity to have fun and make music with friends for Mendelssohn as it was for many other 19th-century composers, who wrote pieces that far transcended their domestic origins and often arranged their larger-scale works for the medium so that it could be appreciated by listeners where full orchestral performances were much harder to come by. In 1844 Mendelssohn made his own piano-duet arrangement of the Incidental music he had composed to accompany a production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream in Potsdam two years earlier, a suite which itself drew on the precociously immortal Overture he had composed as a 16-year-old. The magical purity of the orchestral score is here translated into a limpid graininess which renders each phrase even more crystalline than in the symphonic version, especially in its most rapid passages. The relationship between the two versions might be likened to that between a sketch and a painting, though with no certainty as to which had been composed first. A comparison of the full-colour orchestral score with the ‘black and white’ of the piano-duet arrangement reveals how the timbres of Mendelssohn’s orchestral imagination stem from the conceptual outlines and regular forms first devised on a keyboard. Thus the arrangement has plenty to reveal about the score to even to listeners intimately familiar with the fully scored original. Having given the triumphant premiere of the overture to The Fair Melusine in Leipzig in 1836, Mendelssohn then arranged it for piano duet the same year. Again, every phrase of the symphonic original resounds with greater emphasis: the yielding swell of the waves is evoked by a delicacy of touch rendered almost liquid by brushing of the damper pedal.

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Sale

Mendelssohn: A Midsummer Night's Dream & Overture The Fair Melusine / DuoKeira
Brilliant Classics Aug 2020
CD
~~$13.99~~ $6.99

Sale

Mendelssohn: A Midsummer Night's Dream
Oehms Classics Sep 2010
CD
~~$14.99~~ $7.49

Mendelssohn: Midsummer Night's Dream - Tchaikovsky: Manfred Symphony [Blu-ray]

Accentus Music

Blu-Ray

$41.99 Jun 29, 2018

In the Overture and Incidental Music to William Shakespeare’s ‘Midsummer Night’s Dream,’ Felix Mendelssohn brings the illustrious company of elves, lovers’ passions and the solitude of the forest or a moonlit night to musical life. It became a model for other literary reflections in music like Peter Tchaikovsky’s ‘Manfred Symphony.’ It’s four movements- or “images,” as the composer himself named them- capture the world-weariness of George Byron’s ‘Manfred: A Dramatic Poem’ in music. Riccardo Chailly and the Lucerne Festival Orchestra awaken the musical imagery of both works in a colorful, fresh, and enchanting performance. This release was recorded live at the Concert Hall of KKL Luzem, Lucerne Festival in August of 2017.

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Mendelssohn: Midsummer Night's Dream - Tchaikovsky: Manfred Symphony [Blu-ray]
Accentus Music Jun 2018
Blu-Ray
$41.99

Sale

Mendelssohn: A Midsummer Night's Dream - Beethoven: Symphony
ICA Classics Nov 2011
CD
~~$14.99~~ $11.99

Mendelssohn: Songs without Words, Vol. 2 / Donohoe

Chandos

$21.99 Apr 14, 2023

Lieder ohne Worte – Songs without Words – seems to be a description invented by Mendelssohn himself for these short, lyrical and descriptive piano pieces which he composed so prolifically. Indeed, it is arguable that these works define his pianistic output in the same way that the Mazurka defines Chopin’s. Publishing them in sets of six, Mendelssohn composed Lieder ohne Worte throughout his career – they proved a type of composition to which he had a lifetime attraction. For the first volume, rather than approaching them chronologically or as complete sets, Peter Donohoe selected pieces to build a satisfying programme. Here he does the same with all the pieces that remain.

In addition, the album features three free-standing significant works. The 17 Variations serieuses, from 1841, is one of Mendelssohn’s largest solo piano works, and was published in an album to raise funds for a monument to Beethoven. The Phantasie on ‘The Last Rose of Summer’ is a much earlier work, based on the Irish folk melody that – with added words by the Irish poet Thomas Moore – took Europe by storm in the early 1800s. The album concludes with Rachmaninoff’s piano transcription of the Scherzo from A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

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Mendelssohn: Songs without Words, Vol. 2 / Donohoe
Chandos Apr 2023
CD
$21.99

Mendelssohn: A Midsummer Night's Dream / Dausgaard, Swedish Chamber Orchestra

BIS

SACD

$21.99 Jan 08, 2016

Following a series of acclaimed recordings of 19th-century music including complete cycles of the symphonies by Schubert and Schumann, Thomas Dausgaard and his Swedish Chamber Orchestra turn to Felix Mendelssohn. The team’s latest offering unites three of the composer's four celebrated concert overtures, written between 1826 and 1835 and setting new standards for this emerging genre: Mendelssohn’s overtures are also tone poems, combining a Classical conception with Romantic expressivity. The earliest of the three – A Midsummer Night’s Dream – Mendelssohn composed at the age of seventeen, and his sister Fanny later remarked how Shakespeare's play had been a constant presence at their home, and ‘how at various ages we had read all the different roles, from Peaseblossom to Hermia and Helena…’ The overture immediately became one of Mendelssohn’s signature pieces, and seventeen years later he returned to it, composing additional incidental music for a stage production of the play. Written for soloists, women's choir and orchestra, the complete Midsummer Night score is included here. The disc opens with the last of the four overtures to be composed, however: The Fair Melusine, which Mendelssohn wrote after having heard an opera based on the old French tale of the water spirit Mélusine and her sad fate. Actively disliking the opera, Mendelssohn was provoked into his own musical setting of the subject matter in the form of a concert overture. Water – and its depiction in music – also plays an important role in The Hebrides, the closing work on the present recording. Inspired by the poems by Ossian – which captured the imagination of an entire generation at the beginning of the Romantic era – Mendelssohn visited Scotland and the Hebrides in 1829, and already during this trip he sent a postcard to his family, with the overture's famous opening written down in a four-part setting.

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Mendelssohn: A Midsummer Night's Dream / Dausgaard, Swedish Chamber Orchestra
BIS Jan 2016
SACD
$21.99

Mendelssohn: A Midsummer Night's Dream, Symphony No 4 / Abbado

Sony Masterworks

$17.99 Jun 29, 2012

Abbado’s Mendelssohn is as fresh and vivacious as ever. The Italian Symphony positively crackles with energy, and the collaboration with Branagh passes with flying colors.

It’s good to be able to report that Abbado’s Mendelssohn is as fresh and vivacious as ever. His LSO recordings of the symphonies (on DG) were very fine, but this new Berlin account of the Italian Symphony – recorded live at the Berlin Philharmonic’s 1995 New Year’s Eve Concert – positively crackles with energy, especially in the whirlwind finale. The second movement’s procession is beguilingly phrased and Abbado even convinces me that the weak Minuet is worth its place in this otherwise utterly marvellous work. The performance of Mendelssohn’s equally delightful incidental music to A Midsummer Night’s Dream is taken from the same concert, though Kenneth Branagh’s narration was added later (he projects well and the acoustics are well matched, so the result feels perfectly natural). The extracts Branagh uses fit well with Mendelssohn’s music (of which we hear all the important numbers) and concentrate on the central tussle between Titania and Oberon and the latter’s confused conspiracy with Puck to untangle the love lives of the young Athenians. It’s a heroic attempt to capture some of the magic of the play, and Branagh passes with flying colours (though I’m not totally convinced by Puck as a leprechaun). A delightful disc, then, beautifully packaged – though, curiously, without programme notes.

Performance: 5 (out of 5), Sound: 5 (out of 5)

-- Stephen Maddock, BBC Music Magazine

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Mendelssohn: A Midsummer Night's Dream, Symphony No 4 / Abbado
Sony Masterworks Jun 2012
CD
$17.99

Satin Doll

SteepleChase

$22.99 May 05, 2012

Another magical summer night of 1967 from the Jazzhus Montmartre in Copenhagen finds Dexter Gordon in company of drummer Art Taylor who heats up the evening’s temperature. “Dex's idiosyncratic spoken intros to tunes like "I Should Care" and "Come Rain or Come Shine" are charming, and the gritty soulfulness of his playing reminds us just how much we miss the greats of his generation. They don't make 'em like this anymore.” (JazzTimes’ Chris Kelsey on Loose Walk SCCD 36032) “…a welcome program that finds Gordon in a limber and exploratory mode. Foibles in fidelity aside, Dex aficionados will be sold on the disc's face value. But casual listeners will probably also be pleasingly surprised by the calibre of this classic conclave.” (Derek Taylor of AllAboutJazz on Lady Bird SCCD 36035)

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Satin Doll
SteepleChase May 2012
CD
$22.99

JUJU (BLUE NOTE CLASSIC VINYL EDITION)

BLUE NOTE RECORDS

Vinyl

$31.99 Aug 16, 2024

Limited 180gm vinyl LP pressing. 1964 was a momentous year in the musical life of Wayne Shorter. At the start of the year the saxophonist was still a member of Art Blakey & The Jazz Messengers, appearing on classic Blue Note albums like Free for All and Indestructible. Shorter made his own auspicious label debut that spring with Night Dreamer and that summer he joined the Miles Davis Quintet cementing a line-up that would become one of the seminal bands in jazz history. When he returned to the studio for Blue Note in August it was in the company of three musicians with strong ties to John Coltrane: pianist McCoy Tyner, bassist Reggie Workman, and drummer Elvin Jones. The resulting album JuJu is a marvel in Shorter's formidable discography which presents six of his evocative original compositions including the churning title track, the mesmerizing "House of Jade," and the brightly swinging "Yes Or No."

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JUJU (BLUE NOTE CLASSIC VINYL EDITION)
BLUE NOTE RECORDS Aug 2024
Vinyl
$31.99

Stenhammar: Piano Music / Scafarella

Piano Classics

$20.99 Jun 25, 2021

Carl Stenhammar (1871-1927) trained as a pianist, and Brahms’s epic D minor Concerto held no fears for him. His writing for the instrument is accordingly bold and heroic from the outset, as his G minor Sonata from 1890 demonstrates. Held together by Wagnerian leitmotifs but often drawn into Schumannesque dreaming, the four-movement Sonata wears Austro-German passion on its sleeve, and Brahms continued to be a clear influence on Stenhammar’s piano writing in the three Fantasies Op.11 from 1895, but the harmonies are now clearer and more limpid, in the manner of Chopin but also singing with a more native Swedish or at least Nordic accent. Still more Franco-Russian in idiom are the Three Small Pieces from the same year, in the spirit of Grieg’s Lyric Pieces and Tchaikovsky’s The Seasons, each distilling Stenhammar’s individual melodic style within a minute or two. The high point of his solo piano output – as distinct from the mighty Second Piano Concerto which has found a place on the fringes of the Romantic repertoire – is reached with the Late Summer Nights Op.33, a five-movement cycle of concise tone-pictures which ventures into speculative harmonic realms like Fauré’s late Nocturnes, demanding the most refined of responses from the pianist. The Italian pianist Paolo Scafarella is fast becoming a Stenhammar specialist. He has been engaged to record the concertos with the Orchestra Filarmonica Campana in Pagani, near Naples, and he performs in the major halls of his native country. This release marks his debut on Piano Classics.

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Stenhammar: Piano Music / Scafarella
Piano Classics Jun 2021
CD
$20.99