Varduhi Abrahamyan / Les Musiciens du Prince-Monaco / Gianluca Capuano RHAPSODY

 

RHAPSODY

 

Oksana Volkova / Kaunas City Symphony Orchestra / Constantine Orbelian POISON D'AMOUR

 

POISON D'AMOUR

 

Olga Peretyatko / Alfred Eschwé / Tonkünstler Orchester NEUJAHRSKONZERT

 

NEUJAHRSKONZERT

 

Natalie Dessay À L'OPÉRA

 

À L'OPÉRA

 

Stephen Hough VIDA BREVE

 

VIDA BREVE

Aida Garifullina / ORF Radio-Symphonieorchester Wien / Cornelius Meister AIDA GARIFULLINA

 

AIDA GARIFULLINA

 

Karine Deshayes / Delphine Haidan / Johan Farjot DEUX MEZZOS SINON RIEN

DEUX MEZZOS SINON RIEN

 

Carolyn Sampson / Joseph Middleton FLEURS

FLEURS

Ekaterina Siurina / Kaunas City Symphony Orchestra / Constantine Orbelian AMOUR ÉTERNEL

AMOUR ÉTERNEL

Marina Rebeka / Sinfonieorchester St. Gallen / Michael Balke ELLE

FRENCH OPERA ARIAS

Benjamin Bernheim / PKF - Prague Philharmonia / Emmanuel Villaume BENJAMIN BERNHEIM

“Working in partnership with Deutsche Grammophon, a label with such a long and illustrious history, is both an enormous honour and a huge responsibility,” says Bernheim, for whom the world’s most prestigious opera houses are already homes from home. “It’s given me an even greater incentive to perform at the very highest level.” Born in Paris in 1985, Bernheim studied in Lausanne then became a member of Zurich Opera’s renowned International Opera Studio. Before long he was one of the most sought-after lyric tenors worldwide, and he is now regularly invited to appear at La Scala, Milan, the Berlin Staatsoper, the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, the Vienna Staatsoper and the Salzburg Festival, among many others. Wherever he goes, he captivates audiences with his mesmerising vocal and dramatic interpretations.

Accompanied by the Prague Philharmonia under the baton of Emmanuel Villaume, on his debut DG album Bernheim presents a varied programme drawn from the Italian, Russian and French operatic repertoire. His vocal and expressive versatility can be heard, for example, in Lensky’s aria from Tchaikovsky’s Eugene Onegin, an opera in which he enjoyed huge success at the Deutsche Oper in Berlin, and in Edgardo’s “Tombe degli avi miei” from Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor. Another of the characters featured here is Puccini’s Rodolfo (La bohème), a role he sees as “steeped in tradition”, and therefore one for which he needed to find his own personal interpretation – “a challenging but hugely rewarding experience”. The music of his birthplace is particularly close to his heart, and is represented on the album by arias such as “En fermant les yeux” from Massenet’s Manon, “L’Amour! Oui, son ardeur” from Gounod’s Roméo et Juliette and “Salut! demeure chaste et pure” from the same composer’s Faust. “The French repertoire requires perfect diction and the ability to convey the meaning behind the text as well”, observes Bernheim. “There is so much poetry in these pieces and there are so many details to discover in them. My aim is to bring all of this out in my performances. These are works in which I can give 150% and use every different facet of my voice.”

Iceland Symphony Orchestra / Yan Pascal Tortelier GOUNOD Symphonies

After winning the Prix de Rome for his cantata Fernand in 1839 and spending two years in Rome, Gounod should have gone on to study in Germany, but he managed in 1842 to persuade the authorities that he should remain in Rome to work on a symphony.

In 1843 he visited Mendelssohn who (while trying to dissuade him from wasting his time on Goethe’s Faust!) urged him to write another symphony. We do not know how much of the First Symphony Gounod had completed by then, but it is not surprising that Mendelssohn figures as one of the key influences on both symphonies. After performances of individual movements in 1855, premieres were given of the First on 4 March that year and of the Second on 13 February 1856.

Yan Pascal Tortelier and his Iceland Symphony Orchestra demonstrate outstanding precision and musicality in these unjustly neglected works.

Elsa Dreisig / Orchestre National de Montpellier Occitanie / Michael Schønwandt MIROIR(S)

Miroirs is the debut album from the young French-Danish soprano Elsa Dresig. The winner of Plácido Domingo’s Operalia singing competition in 2016, she has performed opera in Berlin, Paris, Zurich and Aix-en-Provence and sung with Sir Simon Rattle and the Berlin Philharmonic in Berlin, Salzburg, Lucerne and Paris.

Miroirs showcases her vocal and dramatic range with different ‘reflections’ on a situation or character in arias and scenes from operas by Gounod, Massenet, Rossini, Mozart, Puccini, Richard Strauss and the rarely-heard Daniel Steibelt. The album includes two world premiere recordings.

Eunsie Hong / Kristin Okerlund THE FIRST

Praised as one of South Korea’s greatest soprano of the generation, Eunsie Hong carries incredible amounts of performance experience in orchestral concert and opera. Her exceptional dynamic control in her voice sways her audience in happiness and tears. 

Highlights of her 2018 season starts with a concert tour as a soloist for the Mozart Requiem at the world-renowned Musikverein Golden Hall in Vienna, Mozarteum Salzburg in Austria and Music Institute of Zagreb in Croatia. 

She also performed with orchestra Sinfonia Rotterdam at Concertgebouw in Amsterdam, singing arias of Strauss and Gounod. She performed with many orchestras including Hradec Králové Orchestra at Smetana Hall of Municipal House in Prague, Ukraine Symphony Orchestra, Kiev Radio Symphony Orchestra and Prime Philharmonic Orchestra, Korail Symphony Orchestra. 

She launched her career appearing in the leading roles; Violetta in La Traviata at Sejong M-Theater, and Adina of L'elisir d'amore. 

Thibaut Garcia BACH INSPIRATIONS

The 24-year-old Franco-Spanish classical guitarist Thibaut Garcia’s third recording – his second for Erato – revisits the music of Bach and Latin America. But where the first, ‘Demain dès l’aube’, included Bach’s Sixth Partita, BWV830, and the second, ‘Leyendas’, Piazzolla’s Estaciones Porteñas, ‘Bach Inspirations’, as its title suggests, focuses on Bach’s influence on subsequent composers, not just from Latin America but also from Poland and the Balkans.

In his flowing, pellucid interpretations Garcia himself seems to be inspired by Bach’s name, and throughout much of the programme there’s a compelling tension between the rippling enunciation of lighter paragraphs and the precipitous propulsion of more dramatic passages. This is most obvious in Garcia’s thrilling, magisterial performance of Bach’s D minor Chaconne, where he also relishes the ringing campanella effects while injecting a mesmeric fluidity into the rapid scale and arpeggio passages that throw into sharper relief the cleanly etched architecture of the sunlit major section. But it is also there from the beginning, with Barrios’s melancholy La catedral, and later, in the less often-heard Inventions of Alexandre Tansman and Dušan Bogdanović’s superb Suite brève.

An expressive, sweet-toned Elsa Dreisig joins Garcia for the Bach/Gounod Ave Maria and the aria from Villa-Lobos’s Bachianas Brasileiras No 5, while the latter’s Bachian Prelude No 3 looks past the Bogdanović to the most sheerly beautiful takes on Bach’s ‘Wachet auf, ruft uns die Stimme’ and ‘Jesus bleibet meine Freude’ I’ve heard from any guitarist to date: clear, relaxed and full of feeling. (William Yeoman / Gramophone)

Eugénie Warnier / Marine Thoreau La Salle / Quatuor Les Heures du jour SOIR - BERCEUSES (MAIS PAS QUE...)

My singing debut was very abrupt, a matter of urgency. I was at the time an intern in gynaecology and obstetrics, and one evening, returning home from attending a performance of Rusalka at the Bastille Opera, I knew I had to sing. Starting to work your voice at the age of 25 is a difficult challenge, I ‘did’ everything as a matter of urgency. I use this word because despite my desire to learn to sing I had above all to do it very quickly, almost immediately on stage. I was able to enter the great temple through the door of early music. Little by little, by learning as I went, I was able to make progress, ‘carve out my space’, often with a certain form of violence, because I had to get ahead as fast as possible. The idea of this disc was born, I believe, a very long time ago and it has been shaped slowly, delicately. It was a journey towards peaceful reassurance, a gentle desire for songs that came from afar, for a melodious childhood, music-loving, melodic, for the love of the beautiful : a text, an air, easy to remember, soothing, reposeful. This ever present desire took form, became reality. With maturity came a self-confidence built up day after day until its first manifestation at Bordeaux Opera where I met an audience that was open-minded, moved, receptive and that had rejuvenated my desire to touch and move... the seed had been planted. (Eugénie Warnier)

Anneke Scott / Steven Devine LE COR MÉLODIQUE

Renowned period hornist Anneke Scott returns to Resonus with a programme of works for horn that chart a fascinating and pivotal period in the development of the instrument and its repertoire in nineteenth-century France.

Joined by Steven Devine, this album, which celebrates 200 years since the birth of Charles Gounod, features a selection of works composed for both natural and piston horns by Charles Gounod, Joseph-Émile Meifred and Jacques-François Gallay, as well as a Gounod arrangement by François Brémond, all performed on original period horns and a grand piano by Érard.

Nicole Cabell / Alyson Cambridge SISTERS IN SONG

Nicole Cabell and Alyson Cambridge, acclaimed sopranos and close friends, record together for the first time on an album of opera duets by Mozart, Offenbach, Humperdinck, and Delibes and specially commissioned duet arrangements of classical songs, folk tunes, and African-American spirituals.
Cabell, 2005 winner of the BBC Cardiff Singer of the World Competition, is “a faultlessly gleaming soprano” (Financial Times). Cambridge is “radiant, vocally assured . . . and artistically imaginative” (Washington Post), known for her “revelatory, sensual, smoky readings” (Opera News). Joining them in the “Soave sia il vento” trio from Mozart’s Così fan tutte is the “mellow-voiced and charismatic” (New York Times) baritone Will Liverman. They’re accompanied on their Cedille debut by the Lake Forest Symphony under 2015 Sir Georg Solti Conducting Award winner Vladimir Kulenovic.
Inspired by opera stars Kathleen Battle & Jessye Norman’s spirituals recording from the early 1990s, the sopranos describe their album as a “dream project” that’s “uniquely us,” reflecting their multi-ethnic heritages and showcasing pieces that profoundly influenced them both. Composer-arranger Joe Clark, whose music has been performed by Reneé Fleming, Yo-Yo Ma, and jazz singer Kurt Elling, among other classical, jazz, and pop artists, created arrangements expressly for Cabell and Cambridge’s distinctive voices.

Brass Ensemble of the Sistine Chapel THE SILVER TRUMPETS

The Silver Trumpets: the first large brass CD of the pontifical Sistine Music Chapel published by Deutsche Grammophon.
Since October 2010 the brass group is present at all the solemn celebrations presided over by the Pope in the Vatican Basilica and st. Peter's square, and in this album is collected the best of what has been performed in these years. These are live recordings during the papal celebrations, recordings ordered according to the criterion of the unfolding of the liturgical year.
The " Silver trumpets " with the March and the " wide religious " open the album. Worthy of note are the sonata " Pian And Forte " by Giovanni Gabrieli, performed during the cardinals created by the galleries of the Vatican Basilica, the " Fanfare " on the Gregorian theme of " you es petrus " composed in 2013, in the last months of the pontificate of Benedict XVI, in place of the "March de longhi". there are also some of the most beautiful music pages and escapes of J. S. Bach, the result of appropriate processing by Giuseppe Calabrese, which are normally performed at the end of the papal celebrations.

Carolina López Moreno / Doriana Tchakarova IL BEL SOGNO

‘My aim with this recording is not only to realize a beautiful dream, to conquer the stage and to touch people’s hearts, and to lead my listeners on a journey of great emotions in the world of music. I would like to uncover the dreams that lie dormant in all of us and that are yearning to be brought into the open – desires which often reveal themselves in our dreams, where they seem tangible and achievable. Dreams of love, and phantasies of the world we would like to live in.’ (Carolina López Moreno)