First complete take of Bach's Toccata and Fugue in D minor for Stokowski Transcriptions, Vol. 2 (8.572050). It is performed by the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Jose Serebrier, and recorded on 17 April 2008 at The Lighthouse Arts Center, Poole, UK.
Lars Aksel Bisgaard's Walking , with the subtitle Hommage a Thoreau , was written in 2014. The piece is based on some youth sketches from 1984, and is inspired by the American author Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862) and his essay Walking from 1862. The simple main theme, which uses the available notes corresponding to the letters in Thoreau's name (B [=H] - E - D - A), gradually 'wander' further and further away from the starting point, and in the end come back again - like any good walking tour. Walking is dedicated to Carl Petersson with great gratitude and respect for his formidable musicianship, which becomes apparent not least on this recording.
A period of twenty-one years separates Johannes Brahms' Cello Sonatas Nos. 1 and 2 . Suffused with lyricism and expressive ardour, the First has become one of his most popular chamber works. The Second is more sober and succinct than the earlier work, yet strikingly original not least for the wide range required of the cellist to reach unusually high notes from the very low register. Chosen to suit the cello's particular colour and articulation, the six songs are heard in idiomatic and sensitive arrangements which stay as close as possible to the originals.
Session recording of Debussy's Preludes, Book 1, arranged for orchestra by Colin Matthews. The recording was made at the Royal Concert Hall Glasgow by the Royal Scottish National Orchestra conducted by Jun Märkl in June 2011. This is the eighth and final volume of Debussy's complete orchestral works, and it is scheduled for release with catalogue number 8.572584.
No brass series would be complete without Giovanni Gabrieli , and his music is the starting point as Septura continue on their counterfactual course, imagining that four titans of the counter-reformation had written for brass.
The Hours is Stephen Daldry's movie realization of Michael Cunningham's 1999 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel. The soundtrack, composed in 2002, is one of Philip Glass' most passionate, obsessive and eerie scores.
The soundtrack received plaudits from critics and audiences alike. It won BAFTA's Anthony Asquith Award for Film Music and was nominated for an Oscar, a Golden Globe and a GRAMMY. Publisher Paramount Music assigned Michael Riesman (Glass' long-time musical director) and Nico Muhly to issue a book of arrangements for solo piano.
Metamorphosis I-V , features piano transcriptions of pieces written in 1988. Two of them, Nos. 3 and 4, were composed as incidental music for a play based on Kafka's novel The Metamorphosis (Die Verwandlung); Nos. 1, 2 and 5 derive from the soundtrack to Errol Morris' The Thin Blue Line. Although assembled in this manner the work could seem like an opportunistic patchwork, the cycle has the ability on the concert stage to stop time and let us enter a new realm of perceptions.
This volume focuses on love, one of Philip Glass' most glorious themes. The timeless melancholy of his BAFTA award-winning music for The Hours forms an organic suite driven by the film's three powerful characters, here complete with three unpublished movements. The breathtakingly energetic Modern Love Waltz expands the limits of minimalism by combining Glass' style with Viennese dance tradition, while his transcription of Notes on a Scandal is a recording premiere. Steve Reich described the iconic Music in Fifths as being 'like a freight train'.
Composed in 1977 for a radio reading of Constance DeJong's novel Modern Love and then used for The Waltz Project (a dance performance of the same novel), Modern Love Waltz is - like The Cafe from Orphee on GlassWorlds, Vol. 1 - another example of Glass' desire to expand the limits of minimalism. Combining the Viennese tradition of the waltz with his own style (as was so often done in the nineteenth century) the bass ostinato and the intoxicating improvisation in the upper voice generate a breathtaking expression of pure energy.
Irish-born Victor Herbert was one of the most celebrated names in American music in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. A cellist, conductor, and composer of light operas, he was also a recording artist. His two Cello Concertos are full of graceful melodies, the First having a songlike slow movement and a spirited Polonaise finale that earned praise at its 1885 premiere in Stuttgart. The Second Concerto, scored for a large orchestra,
is more tightly constructed than the First. It was hearing this work that inspired Herbert's boss at the National Conservatory in New York, Antonin Dvorak , to write his own great B Minor Cello Concerto.
The Ulster Orchestra entered into an exciting new relationship with Naxos in October with the recording of a CD of lesser-known music by Gustav Holst. Under its new principal conductor JoAnn Falletta, the orchestra has committed to a multi-year recording relationship with Naxos.
The Armenian pianist Karine Poghosyan made her orchestral debut at fourteen playing Beethoven's Piano Concerto No.1 , and her solo Carnegie Hall debut at 23, and has since gone on to win numerous awards as well as performing in some of the world's most prestigious concert halls. Her music studies began in her native Yerevan in Armenia at the School of the Arts No. 1, continuing at Romanos Melikian College and the Komitas State Conservatory. Her teachers in Armenia included Irina Gazarian, Vatche Umr-Shat, and Svetlana Dadyan. After moving to the United States in 1998, she received her BM, summa cum laude, from California State University in Northridge under Francoise Regnat, and her MM and D.M.A. degrees at the Manhattan School of Music under Arkady Aronov, completing her D.M.A. in a record-breaking two years with a thesis on Aram Khachaturian's works for piano. She is currently based in New York, where she teaches at the Manhattan School of Music.
Sofi a Lourenco was born in Oporto, where she completed graduate studies at the Conservatory and University. From the age of ten she was a pupil of Helena Sa e Costa and was also guided by several distinguished pianists, including Sequeira Costa, Vitaly Margulis and Alicia de Larrocha. She obtained a Soloist Diploma at the Berlin Universitat der Kunste and was awarded a Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation scholarship. She has been a professor at the Escola de Musica e das Artes do Espetaculo do Oporto since 1991. She completed the degree of Doctor of Music and Musicology at the University of Evora in 2005, under the guidance of Rui Vieira Nery and Ulrich Mahlert. Since 2007, been a member of the Centre for Research in Science and Arts Technology at the Universidade Catolica Portuguesa, where she is currently undertaking post doctoral studies. She enjoys an active career as a performer in Portugal and abroad, with a number of recordings to her credit.
Prize-winning French composer Laurent Petitgirard has written accomplished music in many forms, notably symphonic works and music for film and television, but it is as an operatic composer that he has received perhaps the greatest acclaim. His opera on the subject of Joseph Merrick, the Elephant Man, was hailed as "a compelling and moving score - the composer's melodic gift is very much his own" (Sunday Telegraph). Guru, completed in 2009, is a work of similar stature. Ostensibly it concerns mass suicides in a cult, reminiscent of the 1978 Jonestown suicides, but Petitgirard's pleas for humanity and against manipulation are expressed with tremendous and very personal power and with compelling theatrical immediacy.
Between 30 August and 3 September 2010, acclaimed young Chinese violinist Tianwa Yang joined Sinfonia Finlandia Jyvaskyla and conductor Patrick Gallois at Hankasalmi Church in Finland to record Mendelssohn's Violin Concerto D minor, Violin Concerto E minor and selections from Songs Without Words for release on Naxos 8.572662.
Featuring the composer's early piano works, Per Norgard's Piano Sonata consisting of three movements has a neo-classical overall style with hints of Stravinsky and Prokofiev 'light'. The character is playful and quasi-improvisatory, with a skilfully judged balance between seriousness, lightness and bravura.
It is particularly interesting to note that in the development of the first movement we hear an ostinato bass figure, the movement patterns of which already anticipate the melodic infinity series, discovered a decade later and first used twenty years later, that became especially characteristic of Norgard's mature music.
Stretching back from the stark Soviet soundscape of Shostakovich , through the early modernism of Prokofiev to the pre-revolutionary opulence of Scriabin and Rachmaninov , Septura redresses a lack of original music for brass by these great composers by charting a turbulent seventy years of Russian history. Brass instruments feature prominently in these composers' symphonic output, and Septura is a natural fit for their chamber music.
Pianist Boris Giltburg sees Rachmaninov's Etudes-tableaux, Op. 39 as cinematic short stories or colourful tone paintings. In contrast, the unashamedly beautiful Moments musicaux are concentrated explorations of a single idea or mood, from struggle and pain towards light and genuine joy. In these collections, which contain some of the composer's most affecting music, Rachmaninov shows himself to be a master of the meticulously crafted short-form genre.
An iconic product of the Mexican Revolution, Redes (1935) combines the talents of a master composer, Silvestre Revueltas , and a master cinematographer, Paul Strand . Its marriage of music and the moving image attains heights of epic grandeur. The co-directors are Fred Zinnemann (en route to Hollywood) and Emilio Gomez Muriel . Because dialogue rarely overlaps music, it is possible to rerecord Revueltas's galvanizing score and discover musical riches inaudible on the original monaural soundtrack. As the Redes concert suites by Revueltas and Erich Kleiber omit much, the present DVD is the world premiere recording of Revueltas's full score, one of the highest achievements in the history of film music.
Between 26-29 October 2009 in the Karjaa Church, Finland, Pauliina Fred (flauto traverso), Aapo Häkkinen (harpsichord) and Heidi Peltoniemi (cello) recorded Franz Xaver Richter's Sonate da camera IV, V and VI for release on Naxos 8.572030.
Between 8-10 July 2010 in Wyastone Concert Hall, Monmouth, Chinese pianist Duanduan Hao recorded keyboard sonatas by Domenico Scarlatti for release on Naxos 8.572586.
Schubert composed his three sublimely alluring Sonatas for Violin and Piano in the spring of 1816, though they had to wait until 1836 for posthumous publication by Diabelli , who re-named them 'sonatinas'. With their sometimes subordinate role for the violin and deceptively uncomplicated style, these pieces sidestep the influence of Beethoven and return more to the world of Mozart's later violin sonatas. The minor key works develop Schubert's gift for drama and vocal melody further, including hints of his famous song Erlkonig from the previous year.
Featured in this recording is the Violin Sonata in A Minor, D.385, Op. 137, No. 2 . It opens with a wide-spaced theme for the piano, the violin following with even wider-spaced dramatic intervals, and a second subject entrusted at first to the piano.
Schubert composed his three sublimely alluring Sonatas for Violin and Piano in the spring of 1816, though they had to wait until 1836 for posthumous publication by Diabelli , who re-named them 'sonatinas'. With their sometimes subordinate role for the violin and deceptively uncomplicated style, these pieces sidestep the influence of Beethoven and return more to the world of Mozart's later violin sonatas. The minor key works develop Schubert's gift for drama and vocal melody further, including hints of his famous song Erlkonig from the previous year.
Featured in this recording is the Violin Sonata in A Minor, D.385, Op. 137, No. 2 . It opens with a wide-spaced theme for the piano, the violin following with even wider-spaced dramatic intervals, and a second subject entrusted at first to the piano.
Stretching back from the stark Soviet soundscape of Shostakovich , through the early modernism of Prokofiev to the pre-revolutionary opulence of Scriabin and Rachmaninov , Septura redresses a lack of original music for brass by these great composers by charting a turbulent seventy years of Russian history. Brass instruments feature prominently in these composers' symphonic output, and Septura is a natural fit for their chamber music.
The Basel Sinfonietta, conducted by Mark Fitz-Gerald, has recorded Shostakovich's 1928 score for Grigori Kozintsev and Leonid Trauberg's silent black-and-white film New Babylon at the Volkshaus in the orchestra's home town. The recording, which took place between 1st and 3rd May 2011 and was produced by Andreas Werner, was made between a run of live performances in Switzerland and Luxembourg.
Stretching back from the stark Soviet soundscape of Shostakovich , through the early modernism of Prokofiev to the pre-revolutionary opulence of Scriabin and Rachmaninov , Septura redresses a lack of original music for brass by these great composers by charting a turbulent seventy years of Russian history. Brass instruments feature prominently in these composers' symphonic output, and Septura is a natural fit for their chamber music.
Session recording of ballet excerpts from Verdi's I vespri siciliani . The recording was made at the Poole Arts Centre by the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra conducted by Jose Serebrier, in 15-18 May 2011. Released with catalogue number 8.572818-19.
