8.573188

Completed in 1936 but withdrawn during rehearsal and not performed until 1961, the searing Fourth Symphony finds Shostakovich stretching his musical idiom to the limit in the search for a personal means of expression at a time of undoubted personal and professional crisis. The opening movement, a complex and unpredictable take on sonata form that teems with a dazzling profusion of varied motifs, is followed by a short, eerie central movement. The finale opens with a funeral march leading to a climax of seismic physical force that gives way to a bleak and harrowing minor key coda. The Symphony has since become one of the most highly regarded of the composer’s large-scale works.

8.573186

Prokofiev’s imposing Fourth Symphony and his final ballet for Sergey Dyagilev, The Prodigal Son, share common roots but are entirely distinctive in character. The vivid depictions in the ballet’s moral tale include sensual temptations, drunken debauchery, robbery and remorse. The 1947 revision of the Fourth Symphony, lengthened and enriched in orchestration by the addition of a piccolo clarinet, piano and harp, makes extended use of themes from The Prodigal Son as well as unused material. Prokofiev’s Fifth Symphony with Marin Alsop and the São Paulo Symphony Orchestra (8.573029) was described as “an outstanding achievement” by BBC Music Magazine.

8.572276

This volume concludes Tianwa Yang’s internationally acclaimed series of recordings of Pablo de Sarasate’s works for violin and orchestra. This stunning programme includes the popular Introduction et Tarantelle and two delightful jotas. Sarasate’s scintillating flying staccato technique is heard in the Fantaisie on Weber’s ‘Der Freischütz’, while Le Rêve is a remarkable work in every way. “Yang is splendidly equipped as a Sarasate violinist, with her clear tone, pure intonation, impressive dexterity and light touch … startlingly beautiful.” (Gramophone on Volume 3, 8.572275)

8.573251

Good original music for two cellos is quite rare to find and over the years arrangements have greatly enriched the classical repertoire. In this recording internationally celebrated cellist Julian Lloyd Webber has taken music from Monteverdi to Arvo Pärt – much of it originally written for two voices – and adapted it to the medium of two cellos and accompanying piano, sometimes including other instrumentation. These unique arrangements, which he performs with his wife Jiaxin Lloyd Webber, allow their cello voices to blend together as they explore music of lyricism, quiet melancholy and tuneful energy.

8.573271

Composed in 1947-48 but unperformed until 1955, Shostakovich’s First Violin Concerto is one of the great concertos of the twentieth century. The wide emotional range of its four-movement structure encompasses an opening of brooding, elegiac melancholy, a manic scherzo, a harrowing and deeply felt passacaglia, and a brilliant, concluding burlesque. Wolfgang Rihm has been described as ‘one of the most approachable, engaging and profound composers writing music today’ (The Guardian). The solo violin in Gesungene Zeit (Time Chant) plays one long fine-spun melody, the work creating a maximum of expression with a minimum of means.

8.573201-02

Hindemith wrote much varied music for the piano with orchestral accompaniment. He intended his Theme with Four Variations (The Four Temperaments) as an experimental ballet, and it was first performed in this way in 1946 with choreography by George Balanchine. The manuscript of the Piano Music with Orchestra was found amongst pianist Paul Wittgenstein’s papers after his wife’s death in 2001. The Concerto for Piano and Orchestra is astutely conceived, whilst the Concert Music for Piano, Brass and Two Harps reveals Hindemith’s constant search for varied sound colour in his instrumentation.