BBC Symphony Orchestra ANNA CLYNE Mythologies

MYTHOLOGIES

 

Royal Stockholm Philharmonic Orchestra VICTORIA BORISOVA-OLLAS Angelus

ANGELUS

Royal Stockholm Philharmonic Orchestra ANDERS HILLBORG Eleven Gates

ELEVEN GATES

Royal Stockholm Philharmonic Orchestra ANDERS HILLBORG Sirens - Cold Heat - Beast Sampler

SIRENS - COLD HEAT - BEAST SAMPLER

BBC Symphony Orchestra / Sakari Oramo ALWYN Miss Julie

MISS JULIE

BBC Symphony Orchestra / Sakari Oramo ETHEL SMYTH Mass in D - Overture to "The Wreckers"

Ethel Smyth was one of England’s foremost Victorian composers, and a prominent suffragette. She was the first female composer to be honoured with a Damehood. She studied composition with Carl Reineke in Leipzig (alongside Dvorák, Grieg and Tchaikovsky) and then privately with Heinrich von Herzogenberg (who introduced her to Brahms and Clara Schumann). Her Mass in D is her only large-scale religious work, although it was certainly composed for the concert hall rather than the church. Scored for 4 soloists, choir, and orchestra, the Mass in D sets the usual six parts of the mass, but is performed with the Gloria at the end, not second, at the instruction of the composer. Her opera The Wreckers, set in mid-eighteenth-century Cornwall, is considered by some critics to be the ‘most important English opera composed during the period between Purcell and Britten’. The Overture sets the scene wonderfully, as well as introducing the main thematic material to follow. Sakari Oramo and his BBC forces are joined by an outstanding quartet of soloists for this Surround Sound recording.

Markus Maskuniitty / Royal Stockholm Philharmonic Orchestra / Sakari Oramo SCHUMANN - SAINT-SAËNS - GLIÈRE

Markus Maskuniitty’s debut recording together with the Royal Stockholm Philharmonic Orchestra together with its chief conductor Sakari Oramo, showcases four concertante works for horn and orchestra covering a period of one hundred years (from 1849 to 1951). Robert Schumann described the horn as the ‘soul of the orchestra’ and he had a profound affinity with the instrument. The most substantial of Schumann’s works featuring the horn is the Konzertstück for four horns and orchestra, Op. 86. Schumann considered the work as one of his best achievements as a composer. During 1849, Schumann wrote a total of three works featuring the valve horn. The Adagio and Allegro for horn and piano Op. 70 may be considered a precursor to the Konzertstück and is a central work in the Romantic horn repertoire. This recording includes an orchestration by conductor Ernest Ansermet. Camille Saint-Saëns wrote a large number of concertante works, including a masterfully crafted concert piece for horn and orchestra in 1887. It highlights Saint-Saëns’s mature skills in orchestral writing and as a composer of solo instrumental music. The final piece of the recording is Glière’s Horn Concerto. Completed in 1951, it was the composer’s swansong. In this romantic concerto one can hear echoes of Tchaikovsky and other great masters of Russian classical music.

Javier Perianes / BBC Symphony Orchestra / Sakari Oramo EDVARD GRIEG Piano Concerto - Lyric Pieces

Javier Perianes’s account of Grieg’s Piano Concerto was recorded live at London’s Barbican last October, at the end of a BBCSO tour. And it is an interpretation into which soloist and orchestra seem, gratifyingly, to have grown together. In the first movement, Sakari Oramo leads the orchestra off at a tempo that seems rather steady, but which leaves space for some careful phrasing: once the main theme gets to Perianes, it sounds almost like a statement and then a comment, rather than a single entity. Somehow, Oramo and Perianes make this sound interesting rather than fussy, and the romantic expansiveness that marks their interpretation overall is tempered by playing from both pianist and orchestra that is as crisp and highly charged as one could want. Paired with this is a selection of 12 of the solo Lyric Pieces, recorded in the studio, all individually characterised but reaffirming Perianes’s warm, spacious approach to Grieg’s music. (Erica Jeal / The Guardian)