Anna Netrebko / Orchestra del Teatro alla Scala / Riccardo Chailly AMATA DALLE TENEBRE

 

AMATA DALLE TENEBRE

 

Matthias Goerne, Seong-Jin Cho IM ABENDROT

 

IM ABENDROT

 

Théotime Langlois de Swarte / Tanguy de Williencourt PROUST, LE CONCERT RETROUVÉ

 

PROUST, LE CONCERT RETROUVÉ

 

Lise Davidsen / London Philharmonic Orchestra / Sir Mark Elder BEETHOVEN - WAGNER - VERDI

 

BEETHOVEN - WAGNER - VERDI

 

Ophélie Gaillard / Morphing Chamber Orchestra / Frédéric Chaslin CELLOPERA

 

CELLOPERA

 

Alexander Krichel AN DIE FERNE GELIEBTE

 

AN DIE FERNE GELIEBTE

 

CHRISTIAN LÖFFLER Parallels

 

PARALLELS

 

Gewandhausorchester / Andris Nelsons BRUCKNER Symphonies Nos. 2 & 8

 

SYMPHONIES NOS. 2 & 8

Camilla Nylund / Bayreuther Festspiele / Christian Thielemann WAGNER AT WAHNFRIED

 

WAGNER AT WAHNFRIED

Wiener Philharmoniker / Valery Gergiev / Jonas Kaufmann SOMMERNACHTS KONZERT 2020

SOMMERNACHTS KONZERT 2020

 

Stockholm Syndrome Ensemble VOICES OF ANGELS

VOICES OF ANGELS

Duisburger Philharmoniker / Axel Kober RICHARD WAGNER Siegfried

SIEGFRIED

Camille Thomas VOICE OF HOPE

VOICE OF HOPE

Frankfurt Radio Symphony / Andrés Orozco-Estrada RICHARD WAGNER Overtures & Preludes

Energy, elegance and spirit - this is what especially distinguishes Andrés Orozco-Estrada as a musician. In 2014/15, he took over the position as Chief Conductor of the Frankfurt Radio Symphony and became Music Director of the Houston Symphony Orchestra. In the 2020/21 season he becomes also Principal Conductor of the Vienna Symphony Orchestra.

Born in Medellín (Colombia), Andrés Orozco-Estrada began his musical studies on the violin. At the age of 15 he received his first conducting lessons and in 1997 he moved to Vienna in order to study at the University of Music and Performing Arts with Uroš Lajovic, himself a pupil of the legendary Hans Swarowsky. Orozco-Estrada lives in Vienna.

Lise Davidsen / Philharmonia Orchestra / Esa-Pekka Salonen LISE DAVIDSEN

Lyric dramatic soprano Lise Davidsen has attracted serious attention since she was crowned winner of both the Operalia and the Queen Sonja competitions in 2015. Growing up in Stokke, a rural town in south-eastern Norway, Lise has been an artist to watch since she began her musical training.

Lise began studying guitar and singing at age fifteen. At first she favoured the guitar but, with more training, singing took prominence. Lise’s early teachers included Mona Skatteboe and Runa Skramstad, who gave her an excellent foundation in classical music.

Lise achieved her bachelor’s degree in classical singing in 2010 from the Grieg Academy of Music in Bergen, Norway. During this time she worked with many notable singers including Bettina Smith and Hilde Haraldsen Sveen and joined the Norwegian Soloists Choir as a mezzo soprano, under artistic director Grete Pedersen.

While studying for a master’s degree at the Royal Danish Academy of Music, Lise’s teacher, Susanna Eken, urged her to develop her voice for the world of opera as a soprano. Lise’s first major engagement as a soprano was in 2011 at the Young Talent Concert in Bergen, singing arias by Strauss and Wagner with the Bergen Philharmonic Orchestra, conducted by Rory Macdonald.

Olivier Latry MIDNIGHT AT NOTRE-DAME

While Paris slept,’ reads the blurb, ‘Notre-Dame’s organist Olivier Latry recorded this musical celebration of well-known classics.’ Indeed, the absence of extraneous traffic noise, and the just-perceptible whisper of wind under pressure, ensure that the cathedral’s instrument is heard in ideal circumstances. The programme (recorded in late 2003) pays homage to the skills of a predominantly French group of transcribers. The exception is Liszt’s ponderous treatment of his future son-in-law’s Pilgrims’ Chorus. 

Dupré’s and Messerer’s Bach movements make excellent and invigorating bookends to this slightly uneven hour’s worth of music. Guillou’s transcription of Mozart’s Adagio and Fugue is a highlight: every contrapuntal detail of one of Mozart’s best fugues shines brilliantly. And Guillou’s virtuoso ‘colouring in’ of Prokofiev’s motoric Toccata takes one’s breath away. The en chamade reeds are used to wonderful effect. Resist the temptation to lower the volume level beforehand! Equally successful is Vierne’s transcription of Rachmaninov’s infamous Prelude in C sharp minor. It shouldn’t work on the organ, but it does. All that is missing from the luxurious tonal palette are distant chimes. 

Sizzling sounds abound, too, in Berlioz’s ebullient Hungarian March, though Latry applies a tad too much rubato at times (a complaint levelled at organists the world over) and the requisite rhythmic spring suffers. The two remaining tracks are of Duruflé’s nondescript transcriptions of Bach’s Jesu Joy of Man’s Desiring and Mortify Us. The former is taken too slowly and Latry makes a slightly labourious job of the latter. 

These criticisms apart, the engineers have done a magnificent job in capturing the soul of this Romantic, symphonic organ. Latry’s mastery of both instrument and repertoire is undeniable. I recommend it to even those who have an aversion to organ discs or transcriptions. For those with an SACD player the aural experience will be overpowering. (Malcolm Riley / Gramophone)

Martin James Bartlett LOVE AND DEATH

Since his 2014 victory in BBC Young Musician of the Year competition, Martin James Bartlett has built a considerable international reputation. Love and Death, with its imaginatively conceived programme, gives proof of his artistic range.

"I'm absolutely thrilled to have signed with Warner Classics and to release my debut album Love and Death,” he says. “These are two elemental themes that have inspired breathtaking masterpieces from poets and composers for centuries. My album will feature gloriously beautiful music by Bach, Schumann, Wagner, Liszt and Granados, culminating with an impassioned and fiery 'War' Sonata of Prokofiev and I can't wait to share it with everyone."

In creating the programme, Bartlett’s starting point was Liszt’s transcription of Schumann’s passionate song ‘Widmung’ (‘Dedication’), set to a poem by Friedrich Rückert. “It is a love song that also speaks of death,” he explains, “and it concludes with a quote from Schubert’s Ave Maria, introducing the idea of heavenly love.” These themes are explored throughout the album.

Gewandhausorchester / Andris Nelsons BRUCKNER Symphonies Nos. 6 & 9

Andris Nelsons’ revelatory readings of Bruckner’s symphonies are permeated by his understanding of the many contradictions within the composer’s character – not least the opposition between an essential awareness of his own talent and the insecurity that compelled him to rework his scores again and again. Set for release on 3 May 2019, the latest title in the Latvian conductor’s ongoing cycle for Deutsche Grammophon, performed with his Gewandhausorchester Leipzig, prefaces Bruckner’s Sixth and Ninth Symphonies with Wagner’s Siegfried Idyll and Prelude to Parsifal respectively. Light and dark, triumph and tragedy, life and death coexist here in a state of uneasy tension, resolved but never reconciled.

Bruckner’s symphonies are a minefield of multiple versions, confusing revisions and clashes between manuscript and published sources. Nelsons has opted to follow Leopold Nowak’s critical edition for these performances. The Sixth Symphony (1879-81), notable for its structural economy and clarity, was one of Bruckner’s favourites among his own works. Much of the work is striking for its dynamism, but at its emotional centre is the dark and troubled Adagio, whose music, as Nelsons observes, anticipates the soundworld of Mahler. While the Sixth was written within two years and spared from later revision by the composer, Bruckner laboured on his ninth and final symphony for much of the final decade of his life. Nelsons has followed convention to perform the Ninth in its three-movement form. The closing Adagio echoes the rising melody of the so-called “Dresden Amen” in homage to Wagner, who made prominent use of the theme in Parsifal.

As he told Gramophone in April 2018, Nelsons is determined, above all, “to show Bruckner the human being, with all his doubts, obsessions, as well as Bruckner the man who is very religious and lives according to certain strong rules, and how that sometimes conflicts with and sometimes fulfils his approach in his music.”

The Gewandhausorchester players bring the ambiguities inherent in Bruckner’s scores vibrantly to life. The composer is in the orchestra’s collective DNA. It embraced him when it gave the world premiere of his Seventh Symphony in 1884 and made history again soon after the First World War by performing the first complete cycle of his nine symphonies. “The Gewandhausorchester’s ability to play this music is very special”, says Nelsons, “there’s a sensitivity and intimacy that I like very much.”

Stéphanie d'Oustrac / Pascal Jourdan SIRÈNES

In recording this first recital for harmonia mundi, Stéphanie d'Oustrac and Pascal Jourdan wished to measure themselves against three cornerstones of Romantic music, three composers who each in their own way made a decisive contribution to the evolution of the lied (Liszt), or even to the birth of the French mélodie, in the case of Berlioz's Les Nuits d'été. Much more widely known in their sumptuous orchestration, these songs take on a completely different dimension when accompanied by the sobriety of a piano. This artistic approach found its ultimate resonance in the five Wesendonck-Lieder, which Wagner originally intended as a simple duo for voice and piano, though they were eventually to form one of the most famous cycles in the history of the lied.

Alexander Krichel AN DIE FERNE GELIEBTE

From Hamburg to the international stage of classical music stars: raised and educated in Hamburg and London, Alexander Krichel – who has not yet turned 30 – already has several CD recordings and concert performances across the globe to his name. His debut album even won him an ECHO Klassik award as »Newcomer of the Year«.

Born in Hamburg in 1989, Alexander Krichel started to play the piano at the age of six and became a pre student at Hamburg University of Music and Drama at the age of 15. From 2007, he continued his studies with the legendary Vladimir Krainev at Hanover University of Music and Drama. He has also studied with Dmitri Alexeev at Royal College of Music in London, completing his studies in June 2016 with distinction. From 2012 to 2015, Alexander was part of the stART programme for young artists at Bayer Kultur. He is also a scholarship holder of Oscar and Vera Ritter Foundation, Berenberg Bank Foundation, PE Förderungen and the Otto group.