London Philharmonic Orchestra / Vladimir Jurowski SHOSTAKOVICH Symphony No. 11 'The Year 1905'

 

SYMPHONY No. 11 "THE YEAR 1905"

 

London Philharmonic Orchestra and Choir / Vladimir Jurowski VLADIMIR MARTYNOV Utopia

 

UTOPIA

 

Rundfunk-Sinfonieorchester Berlin / Vladimir Jurowski MAHLER Das Lied von der Erde

DAS LIED VON DER ERDE

Alina Ibragimova / Vladimir Jurowski / State Academic Symphony Orchestra of Russia SHOSTAKOVICH Violin Concertos

VIOLIN CONCERTOS

Nicola Benedetti / London Philharmonic Orchestra / Vladimir Jurowski ELGAR Violin Concerto

VIOLIN CONCERTO

State Academic Symphony Orchestra of Russia "Evgeny Svetlanov" / Vladimir Jurowski TCHAIKOVSKY The Nutcracker

After the tremendous success of Swan Lake, Vladimir Jurowski and the State Academic Symphony Orchestra of Russia “Evgeny Svetlanov” continue their Tchaikovksy ballet series on PENTATONE with this recording of The Nutcracker. Tchaikovsky’s enchanting masterpiece is an absolute audience favourite, thanks to hits such as the Waltz of the Flowers, Trepak and Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy, but also due to the composer’s ability to evoke a sense of wonder in listeners both young and old. Vladimir Jurowski and his players tell this story about the power of fantasy with unprecedented zeal, demonstrating the symphonic refinement and orchestral brilliance of Tchaikovsky’s score.
The Nutcracker offers the third PENTATONE release of the State Academic Symphony Orchestra of Russia “Evgeny Svetlanov” together with its Artistic Director Vladimir Jurowski, after Prokofiev Symphonies 2 & 3 (2017) and Swan Lake (2018). Jurowski has recorded extensively for PENTATONE and is generally seen as one of the most prominent conductors of his generation.

London Philharmonic Orchestra / Vladimir Jurowski RACHMANINOFF The Isle of the Dead - Symphony No. 1

Recorded live at Southbank Centre’s Royal Festival Hall, London on 3 October 2014 (The Isle of the Dead) and 14 December 2016 (Symphony No. 1).

“Jurowski drove The Isle of the Dead forward... drawing exceptional intensity from the LPO.” - The Guardian, 2014

The performance of The Isle of the Dead was widely critically acclaimed. Bachtrack noted Vladimir Jurowski’s “hypnotic” conducting, noting particularly that “the clarity and control he exercised in [The Isle of the Dead] were very fine. He drew a sonorous cello sound, later matched by lower woodwinds, and the harp and pizzicato strings... brought an eerie chill to the Festival Hall.”

Rachmaninoff’s youthful Symphony No. 1 is not frequently performed or recorded. This is the first time it has been released on the label.

This is the second recording of The Isle of the Dead on the LPO’s own label. It was recorded live as part of the opening concert of the London Philharmonic Orchestra’s highly praised 2014-15 season Rachmaninoff: Inside Out, which explored the life and works of the composer.

Symphony No. 1 was also recorded live in concert. The Financial Times described the performance as “a fascinating experience” and Colin Anderson, in Classical Source, noted “The LPO was in superb form.”

David Aaron Carpenter / London Philharmonic Orchestra MOTHERLAND

For his second Warner Classics album, David Aaron Carpenter - "a star violist" in the words of the Los Angeles Times - brings together concertos by Dvořák, Bartók, Walton and a dance cycle by contemporary composer Alexey Shor. Carpenter identifies a connecting theme of "a longing for the homeland … a reverence for native musical folk tunes and language." He is accompanied by the London Philharmonic Orchestra under three distinguished conductors: Kazushi Ono, Vladimir Jurowski and David Parry.

Arabella Steinbacher / Rundfunk-Sinfonieorchester Berlin / Vladimir Jurowski BRITTEN & HINDEMITH Violin Concertos

Breathtaking virtuosity flows seamlessly with expansive lyrical passages and fiendish passagework in this commanding performance by Arabella Steinbacher of the restless and technically demanding violin concertos of Britten and Hindemith, with the Rundfunk-Sinfonieorchester Berlin conducted by Vladimir Jurowski. 

Britten’s haunting and mesmerising violin concerto is considered one of the century’s finest. The three contrasting movements are replete with grand theatrical gestures, unabashed lyricism, and show-stopping pyrotechnics, and the work closes with an austere passacaglia of other-wordly beauty and power. Following the work’s enthusiastic reception at its premiere in 1940 at Carnegie Hall, Britten declared “So far, it is without question my best piece”. 

“Britten and Hindemith completed their concertos at about the same time,” writes Steinbacher, “both are absolutely bursting with emotional turmoil, persisting precariousness, and latent despair.” Steinbacher feels a particular affinity with the Hindemith concerto. “Every artist introduces his own life experiences and personal feelings into his interpretations ... with the Hindemith concerto, I have an extremely close, even private connection, as my father knew Hindemith rather well.”

Steinbacher’s previous recordings have received widespread praise. For her playing in the Mendelssohn and Tchaikovsky violin concertos, Gramophone commented “one could hardly wish for a more expressive account of both concertos”; for the Korngold and Bruch Violin Concertos, Gramophone noted Steinbacher’s “easy virtuosity with concern to find the right tone and nuance for every phrase”. And BBC Music Magazine said of her last album, Fantasies, Rhapsodies, Daydreams, that it was “recorded in glowing sound that feels astonishingly lifelike ... this recital is something of a triumph”. (PENTATONE)

MICHEL VAN DER AA Violin Concerto - Hysteresis

Michel van der Aa’s new Violin Concerto for Janine Jansen received its first performance on 6 November in Amsterdam, with the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra conducted by Vladimir Jurowski. Van der Aa has described the partnership of Jansen and the RCO as his “dream team”. It combines an orchestra with whom he now has a long-standing and intimate relationship, and a soloist with a magnetic stage presence and a heart-on-sleeve style of playing, ideally suited to Van der Aa’s direct and physically expressive music. As “house composer” for the RCO since 2011, he was able to work unusually closely with the players, checking details throughout the period of composition. He has also been free to write the works he chooses. In this case, it was Jansen’s personality that served as inspiration, and the composer claims that “If Janine had played the flute, I would have written a flute concerto.” 

The piece has its roots in the classical concerto – unusually for him, Van der Aa hasn’t even included any electronics – but he couldn’t resist giving it a distinctly theatrical quality. “As an opera director, I love the theatrical possibilities of having someone who is the embodiment of the work.” The theatre begins in Jansen’s presence and personality, but extends across the whole stage. The lead violinist and cellist are drawn in as secondary soloists, and with Jansen often form a trio of their own. 

Their energy spreads outwards to three percussionists, harp, the string groups and finally the whole orchestra. Those lines of transmission are articulated visually as well as aurally – the three percussionists are spaced among the orchestra not only because of the way that distribution sounds, but also because of how it looks. Visual considerations extend to the stage lighting and even to the type of dress the soloist wears. “Yes, I am a control freak,” admits Van der Aa, “But in addition to the music all these aspects are of great importance to the total experience.”
The concerto is composed in the traditional three movements. Van der Aa describes the first as abstract, the second as more direct and melodic, and the third as very fast, performed at breakneck speed and close to the edge of possibility. Like Van der Aa’s other recent pieces – the opera Sunken Garden and the clarinet concerto Hysteresis – it also includes allusions to popular styles; in this case to jazz and bluegrass. With no electronics or video, the alter ego role familiar from many other Van der Aa pieces is taken up by the orchestra, which mirrors and balances the soloist, rather than playing a traditional accompanying role. (Tim Rutherford-Johnson)

Janine Jansen PROKOFIEV

Janine Jansen is the most subtle of interpreters, and always a sensitive partner. In the Second Violin Concerto, she keeps sentiment at bay, holding back for a sense of mystery in the first movement's counter subject, and capturing an icy purity in the Concerto's central song. She responds cannily to Prokofiev's pared-back orchestral forces. This is not the usual patchwork of ideas, but an argument that Vladimir Jurowski keeps urgently on the move with the LPO soloists . . . Jansen's colleagues in the companion pieces are her equals, too. Boris Brovtsyn marches her otherworldly poise in the first and third movements of the Sonata for two violins. In Prokofiev's dark, masterful Violin Sonata No. 1, the moments of headlong attack are . . . fully realised by pianist Itamar Golan. (David Nice, BBC Music Magazine)

This splendidly recorded performance of the Second Concerto accentuates its stark and sudden contrasts -- the first movement's swings of mood and texture, the Andante's pairing of romantic melody with mechanical accompaniment . . . Jansen's playing, notable for its confident manner and wide expressive nuance . . . persuades us of the validity of her view of the concerto . . . In the Sonata for two violins, Jansen and Brovtsyn employ a wide range of tone colour, matching each other in expansiveness and virtuosity. In the quicker movements they allow the tempo to slow down for quieter passages . . . For me, the highlight of the disc is the Violin Sonata, surely one of Prokofiev's greatest works. Its sombre power is fully revealed in Jansen and Golan's account, from the first movement's anguished double-stopping, brittle pizzicato and icy scale passages, through the ferocious combat and sweet regret of the two middle movements, to the finale's manic energy and intensity.(Duncan Bruce, Gramophone) 

. . . her silvery tone and searching musicianship ensure maximum intelligence and beauty . . . simple, unaffected magic . . . [Concerto]: splendidly played by a soloist in happy harness with the London Philharmonic and Vladimir Jurowski, a conductor who understands Prokofiev's changing moods better than most . . . equally gripping accounts of the Sonata for Two Violins of 1932 and the dark and worried Sonata for Violin and Piano . . . Itamar Golan (piano) and Boris Brovtsyn (violin) play with Jansen as if joined at the hip. Whether the music's fiery or delicate, this superb disc, gorgeously recorded, should give lasting pleasure. (Geoff Brown, The Times)

Patricia Kopatchinskaja / Vladimir Jurowski PROKOFIEV & STRAVINSKY

 

A masked ball. Two figures came up to me. One with a large wig, a long nose, and a black poodle on a leash. The other dark red, with an immense tear glistening in his eye . . .

‘Who are you?’ I ask.
‘We are the souls of the two pieces that you have recorded. We’re slightly related.’

The one with the long nose and the poodle says,

‘I start every movement with a slap. Did you find it amusing to slip inside me? ‘

‘Oh yes,’ I answer, ‘but tell me – how could your master have brought you into the world without those cheeky opening chords? Would you be here at all? And your disguise – is it supposed to be a provocation? Sergey Sergeyevich said it was all just “Bach with smallpox” . . . But, if you don’t mind my saying so, there isn’t much Bach there at all: where are the piety, the deep seriousness? There’s only his wig and his Baroque costume. And, wrapped up in that, pagan energy and sarcastic wit. Did the devil himself instil that in your master during a card game?’ The poodle looked at me suddenly.

The other mask was silent. I nudged him and said: ‘I was the melody of love in you. Did you feel that?’
The mask was silent.
‘I heard the ticking clock of destiny beneath me, but I flew over everything, worried about nothing, because I knew I had become a part of eternity . . .
There was melancholy, resignation . . .’
At the beginning, a dark prophecy. An old Russian woman in the fog . . . Was your master not running away from himself, feeling a fracture deep inside him? Did he not take refuge in a childlike dream world? Does the first move- ment not evoke images from fairy tales old and new, like Chagall? But alongside the human world is another one, inhuman, mechanical, the hum and ticking of machines and clock mecha- nisms. And constant scene changes, as in ballet or films. And in the last movement, the castanets, which to my ears don’t sound so much Spanish as like rattling skeletons. Really it’s all very eerie, a ‘danse macabre’ leading to death by exhaustion!

The mask was silent. (Patricia Kopatchinskaja)

The two violin concertos coupled on this recording display as many affinities as they do divergences. Both stem from creators in conflict with their native Russia – one choosing to return there, the other settling permanently in exile; both belong to the aesthetic of the ‘return to order’ observed from 1920 onwards and characterised by the reappropriation of models from the past. If Prokofiev preserves the traditional bases of the concerto, he combines them with a search for a new lyricism. As for Stravinsky, he reworks tried and trusted models while offering a deliberately neutral, distanced expressivity.

Hélène Grimaud BEETHOVEN Concerto No. 5 "Emperor" / Piano Sonata No. 28

The French pianist Hélène Grimaud is one of the most sagacious of today's keyboard artists - a philosopher at the concert grand. Now she has taken on one of the greatest works of the piano literature, Beethoven's “Emperor" Concerto. The result is a major event. Without pathos Grimaud delivers the contemporary update on a classic. She gives you thoughts, reflections and ideas instead of blood, sweat and tears. And yet the last piano concerto of the Bonn master, in her hands, is a work of musical extremes, a journey of the soul through the vales of worldly despair and over the peaks of ideologies. A musical journey to a world viewed from a melancholic interior, time-travelling from Beethoven's to ours. She makes music into one of the great struggles of our time.

Sound for Hélène Grimaud is space for thought - a place where everything is possible. It also means taking the world apart in order to put it back together in a new form. And that's precisely what she does, while remaining true to her idol Ludwig van Beethoven. There is no composer who described the current zeitgeist better than he did, none who went as far in extending existing formal boundaries in order to describe the struggle between the individual and the world order.
 Following a concert, the musician explains why the composer is one of her heroes: “He had to struggle with the problem of living at a time of discord, riven with disruption and contradiction. Truths that held one day were already passé the next. But none of that prevented Beethoven, ill, nearly deaf, from holding fast to his musical universalism. He was ready to overturn old forms and conventions in order to find new ones. It was not the world that was 'out of joint', but the language used to make sense of it." For Grimaud, this is the real challenge of Beethoven for our time: the doubting individual views a world gone awry. To bring it back under control Beethoven needed music.

“One can hear the struggle in Beethoven's compositions, his wrestling with every note, with every chord. He conceived the world in a way that I find absolutely contemporary, not to say modern. We too live in a world that we can hardly comprehend, one in which confusion exceeds our grasp of its overriding complexities. We too are desperately longing to give form to this world. Beethoven showed us that working to repair the fissures and flaws in human existence can result in beautiful music. He strove for a heaven on earth. He was always prepared to stand the world on its head."

For a long time, Beethoven's Fifth Piano Concerto was interpreted as a heroic battle painting. Of course, Grimaud also hears galloping horses and the carnage of battle in the “Emperor" Concerto, and of course it also represents for her a piece of contemporary history - not a historical illustration of the past but rather of “philosophy cast in music, a philosophy that sets out to neutralize human contradictions". And this calls for a show of strength.
“Beethoven is one of the most fascinating of all period-spanning composers", says Grimaud. “Of course he was formed by the classical figures of the Viennese School, he not only brought their ideas to culmination, especially in the Fifth Piano Concerto, but also broke new ground." This development can also be heard in the Sonata op. 101, dedicated to Beethoven's pupil Dorothea von Ertmann, which Grimaud has chosen to complement the concerto.

Beethoven in his symphonies and piano concertos has fused the private with the political, the internal with the external, and it is this individualized, almost literary view of the single human being in the world that fascinates the pianist: “When you read Beethoven's letters, you get to know someone with misanthropic tendencies, who often reacted brusquely and rudely, who was easily disillusioned and offended by others - but, at the same time, in his sensibility, developed an incredible strength. Even as questionable as Beethoven's behaviour may at times have seemed, he firmly believed that things could also be different - that they could be better. His music is marked by these assertions and disappointments, and by an endless sense of hope. He formulated the ambivalence of every individual - and because of that Beethoven's music reaches us."

Something genuinely new in her Beethoven interpretations is Grimaud's handling of the composer's effects, which for her are never an end in themselves but extreme pronouncements: “I think that the real idea of Beethoven's music is found where the extremes collide", she says. “It's not about hollow pathos or empty, unquestioningly marching heroism, not about misanthropic melancholy or a concomitant world-weariness." Grimaud in her interpretations prefers to listen for the overtones, to expound theses in order immediately to develop antitheses.

Monumentality in her playing is entirely subjugated to the search for meaning. “The piano concerto is like a beast", says Grimaud, “for whom one has incredible respect. You study it - and in the end this beast reveals itself as a teacher. As a teacher who challenges you to consider things for yourself, who, through the overwhelming form the interpreter has to deal with, forces one to reflect on one's own contradictions and bring them into an individual form - to transcend one's own limits and toss old preconceptions overboard. Beethoven compels the artist to acquire knowledge, because in his music the emotional is developed out of philosophical logic. With emotion alone, one doesn't get very far."
 When you hear Grimaud's “Emperor", the work's heroic attributes take on a new significance. For this pianist, heroes aren't found on the battlefield. Her heroes attempt to bring order to the world as they find it. To save the world, they call themselves into question. Grimaud's new Beethoven also represents the birth of a wise new hero.

Alina Ibragimova MENDELSSOHN Violin Concertos

Felix Mendelssohn was, famously, one of the most extraordinarily precocious composing talents the world has ever seen. Presented in this new Hyperion release, alongside his well-loved mature Violin Concerto in E minor, is the earlier D minor concerto, written when he was just 13.

The soloist is young Russian star Alina Ibragimova, 2007 graduate of BBC Radio 3's New Generation Artists scheme, partnered by the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment (on period-instruments) under Vladimir Jurowski.

Ibragimova adopts a historically-informed style on her 1775 Anselmo Bellosio violin, the sound lighter than we are used to hearing in Mendelssohn's mid-19th century E minor masterpiece. But her svelte, unforced tone is just right in this context – and, with sparing use of vibrato, she conjures some beguilingly sweet tones. In the brooding opening movement she is marvellously fleet-footed, never underpowered.

Clear orchestral textures and crisp articulation heighten the intensity of the romantic sweep. The first movement brims with fervent passion – Jurowski driving forward excitingly, but also allowing space for reflection. Refreshingly, Ibragimova takes the sumptuous Andante at a genuine, gently flowing, “walking pace”, her violin singing eloquently and tenderly, followed by a daringly fast finale that she’s never in any danger of not pulling off.

Her absolute unanimity with the woodwind, which joins her in the scampering main theme, is breathtaking, and her occasional discrete use of portamento feels completely apt. This is a delightful, compelling performance from beginning to end, the equal of any in the catalogue.

The early D minor concerto, scored for string orchestra, is less distinctively Mendelssohnian, displaying, unsurprisingly, the juvenile composer's classical heritage. But it is also forward-looking – there are shades of Weber in the cloak-and-dagger stalking motif that opens the first movement.

An attractive work in its own right, Ibragimova approaches the concerto with no less commitment than the E minor, and the result is a rewarding experience. With rhythmically taught OAE strings, the folk-like dancing finale is an exhilarating ride.

Sandwiched between the two concertos is an atmospheric account of the famous Hebrides overture, Jurowski tangibly evoking romantic Highland mists and an adventurous spirit with pungent woodwind, churning cellos and majestic brass. (Graham Rogers)