Janice Watson • Catherine Wyn-Rogers • Andrew Kennedy
Alan Opie

Renowned for his fine musicianship, David Hill is widely respected as both a choral and an orchestral conductor. He became The Bach Choir’s ninth Musical Director in 1998; he is also Chief Conductor of the BBC Singers and Associate Guest Conductor of the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra.

Ulster Orchestra • JoAnn Falletta

Gustav Holst’s youthful enthusiasm for Wagner is reflected in his ebullient Walt Whitman Overture written in 1899. Shortly afterwards he composed The Cotswolds Symphony which embraces hints of contemporary British folk music but is dominated by the slow movement, a profound elegy for the utopian socialist William Morris.

Though completed at college, A Winter Idyll shows real orchestral assurance. Indra is an accomplished tone poem revealing Holst’s interest in the legends of India, whilst the glittering and evocative Japanese Suite was written in response to a request from a Japanese dancer appearing in London.

São Paulo Symphony Orchestra • Marin Alsop

Written in 1944, Prokofiev’s Fifth Symphony is one of his greatest and most complete symphonic statements. At its première he himself called it “a symphony of the grandeur of the human spirit”.  The Year 1941 is another wartime work, a symphonic suite written in response to the German invasion of the Soviet Union.

This is the first volume of a complete cycle of the Prokofiev Symphonies with the OSESP and Marin Alsop, the orchestra’s newly appointed Principal Conductor.

Krzysztof PENDERECKI

Fonogrammi; Horn Concerto ‘Winterreise’; Partita; The Awakening of Jacob; Anaklasis; De natura sonoris

Urszula Janik • Jennifer Montone • Elżbieta Stefańska • Michał Pindakiewicz
Konrad Kubicki • Barbara Witkowska • Jerzy Cembrzyński

Warsaw Philharmonic Orchestra • Antoni Wit

Penderecki’s orchestral works are some of the most sonically spectacular of our time. He is one of the greatest of living composers and his music appeals to those who are fascinated by his earlier, more sensational works as by his later, more neo-Romantic turns of phrase.

Véronique Gens

Orchestre National des Pays de la Loire • John Axelrod

Véronique Gens is recognised internationally as one of the great sopranos working today. She has forged her career in the baroque repertory and the music of Mozart, but French repertoire, especially Berlioz and Ravel, are ‘as natural to her as the air that she breathes’. Her French remains a model of immaculate diction, both fluid and luminous.

Véronique Gens has a very special relationship to Berlioz’s Les Nuits d’été and Herminie, and here combines them on this disc with Shéhérazade by Ravel, which conjures up a totally different world.