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Naxos continues to bring you specially-picked albums from its treasure trove.
Our selection for Easter includes Gregorian chant, church music, and other classical pieces for this blessed season.
Explore Guitar Music as Naxos.com celebrates International Guitar Month. The selection ranges from works by Paganini and Sor to guitar repertoire from Latin America.
Also in spotlight this month are two outstanding house artists – Ilya Kaler (violinist) and Marin Alsop (conductor). Immerse yourself in Kaler’s sensuous sound and velvet tone in such breathtaking recordings as Brahms: Violin Sonatas Nos. 1-3 8.554828 and the newly-released Szymanowski: Violin Concertos Nos. 1 and 2 8.557981, among others. Extend the passion of April with internationally acclaimed recordings of Marin Alsop, including Brahms’ symphonies with the London Philharmonic (8.557428, 8.557429, 8.557430) – orchestral tour de force just a mouse-click away. Take time to explore other Alsop recordings – Bernstein, John Adams, Philip Glass (including new release Heroes Symphony 8.559325), Kurt Weill, Bartók, and many more.
Finally, don’t forget to check out our April new releases, now available for streaming to subscribers.
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8.557981 SZYMANOWSKI: Violin Concertos Nos. 1 and 2 / Nocturne and Tarantella
Szymanowski’s Violin Concerto No. 1 was dedicated to his great friend, the violinist Pavel Kochanski, and is remarkable for its lyricism and clarity of texture. Inspired by Kochanski’s visit to Poland in 1932, the Violin Concerto No. 2 was written towards the end of Szymanowski’s creative life. The score shows influences of the music of the Polish mountain people. The intense and virtuosic Nocturne and Tarantella draws on the Impressionism of Debussy and early Stravinsky but also on Middle Eastern culture and folklore.
Ilya Kaler (violin), Warsaw Philharmonic Orchestra, Antoni Wit (conductor)
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Some releases may not be available on CD in all countries – please contact the
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distributor
in your territory. For a complete list of new releases available, click here
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8.557908 CHERUBINI: Symphony in D major / Opera Overtures
Beethoven considered Cherubini to be the greatest living composer of all. With its echoes of Schubert and Rossini, and a brilliant closing movement, the Symphony in D major is a highly inventive and beautifully proportioned work. The three opera overtures, once a familiar part of concert programmes, are dramatic works filled with suspense and intervening passages of lyricism.
Orchestra Sinfonica di Sanremo, Piero Bellugi (conductor) |
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8.557814 LISZT: Mephisto Waltzes / 2 Elegies / Grosses Konzertsolo (Liszt Complete Piano Music, Vol. 24)
Naxos’ Liszt Piano Edition continues this month with Giuseppe Andoloro’s spectacular rendition of the Mephisto Waltzes, Two Elegies and the Grosses Konzertsolo. Andaloro was the winner of the 2005 International Ferrucio Busoni Piano competition.
Giuseppe Andaloro (piano) |
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8.557935 HANDEL: Music for the Chapel Royal
This recording restores some of Handel’s finest but least known music to the choir for which he wrote it and to the building where he performed it, probably for the first time since his own performances there. Forming one of the most impressive areas of Baroque music, Handel’s English church music spans his entire active career in London, from his first anthem composed soon after his arrival, to his last works nearly forty years later.
Choir of the Chapel Royal, Musicians Extra-ordinary, Andrew Gant (conductor) |
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8.111244 LEHMANN, Lotte: Lieder Recordings, Vol. 3 (1941)
With her impassioned delivery, warm tone, telling word-painting and occasional use of portamento, Lehmann makes her own very personal yet utterly compelling case for Schumann’s Frauenliebe und-leben and Dichterliebe. In the excerpts from Winterreise, for many years the province of male singers, she offers a bold, romantic reading that identifies with the bleak setting. |
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8.111254 STRAUSS II, J.: Nacht in Venedig (Eine) (Schwarzopf, Gedda) (1954)
Johann Strauss II’s Eine Nacht in Venedig, heard on this recording in a version prepared by Ernst Marischka and Erich Korngold for a 1923 Berlin revival, is modelled, like so many of his stage works, on Offenbach’s French operettas. An outstanding operetta conductor, Otto Ackermann captures the Viennese lilt and phrasing to perfection.
Elisabeth Schwarzkopf , Nicolai Gedda, Erich Kunz, Karl Dönch, Peter Klein, Emmy Loose, Hanna Ludwig, Philharmonia Orchestra and Chorus, Otto Ackermann (conductor) |
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8.111260 ELGAR: Symphony No. 2 / Cello Concerto (Harrison, Elgar) (1927-28)
Elgar’s second recording of his Symphony No. 2, made only eighteen months after the previous acoustic set had been released, coincided with the innovation of electrical technology and the opportunity to mark the composer’s seventieth birthday on 2nd June 1927. Both the Symphony and the equally famous recording of the Cello Concerto offer unique insights from being composer-conducted.
London Symphony Orchestra, New Symphony Orchestra, Edward Elgar (conductor) |
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8.559263 SIERRA: New Music with a Caribbean Accent
The earliest works on this recording, Conjuros and Vestigios rituales, are based upon Afro- Cuban ritual chants of the Lucumí tradition. The virtuosic Cinco bocetos for solo clarinet draws inspiration from Caribbean pop music, Catalonian folksong, and the sound of the Puerto Rican tree frog. Like Vestigios rituales and Descarga, Sierra’s song-cycle Glosa a la sombra was written for Continuum, which has performed his music frequently and internationally since the early 1980s.
Continuum®, Cheryl Seltzer and Joel Sachs (directors), Virginia Gutiérrez (soprano), Ellen Lang (mezzo-soprano), David Krakauer (clarinet), Mark Steinberg (violin), Mia Wu (viola), Maria Kitsopoulos (cello), Cheryl Seltzer (piano), Joel Sachs (piano, conductor) |
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8.559325 GLASS: Symphony No. 4, "Heroes" / The Light
Having achieved success in 1993 with his Low Symphony, a reworking of David Bowie and Brian Eno’s classic rock album Low, three years later Glass repeated the experiment with another Bowie/Eno collaboration, Heroes, an album that drew its inspiration from the then-divided city of Berlin. The six movements of Heroes Symphony function as independent pieces that between them build into a self-sufficient musical work. The Light has its inspiration in a very different source: the Michelson-Morley experiment confirming the uniform speed of light.
Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra, Marin Alsop (conductor) |
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8.559329 COOMAN: Symphonies Nos. 2 and 3 / Partita / Piano Concerto
Cooman’s Symphony No. 2 was inspired by a poem by Kathleen Wakefield about love and the desire for rain, and Symphony No. 3 takes as its source material the plainchant Ave maris stella. Partita explores the baroque flute’s unique sonic properties, and the Piano Concerto is filled with allusions to classical symphonic form and style.
Stephen Schultz (flute), Nora Skuta (piano), Rachel Gough (violin), Rupert Gough (organ),
Bohuslav Martinu Philharmonic Orchestra, Slovak Radio Symphony Orchestra, Kirk Trevor (conductor) |
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8.120822 REINHARDT, Django: Belleville (1940-1942) (Reinhardt, Vol. 10
Europe’s first great jazz guitarist, Django Reinhardt is best remembered for his Hot Club performances with violinist Stephane Grappelli. The 20 tracks here immediately follow the end of that partnership, recorded in Nazi-occupied Paris between December 1940 and May 1942. This anthology features various bands, American jazz standards and Reinhardt originals, all paying testament to the irrepressible music-making of an unforgettable talent.
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8.120847 WRIGHT / FORREST: Kismet (Original Broadway Cast) (1953)
Kismet (Fate) was a huge success on Broadway, won a Tony Award for Best Musical (1953) and became a hit film. The score by Robert Wright and George Forrest adapts works by Russian composer Alexander Borodin and contains a wealth of melodies. This release adds six bonus tracks to the Broadway Cast album and features the perennially popular Stranger in Paradise.
Alfred Drake, Doretta Morrow, Richard Kiley, Joan Diener, Henry Calvin, Hal Hackett, Richard Oneto, Lucy Andonian, Conductor – Louis Adrian |
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8.558200-01 BARTOK: Bela Bartok - A Portrait (JOHNSON)
Well over half a century after his death, Béla Bartók is held up as one of the twentieth century’s great musical modernists, routinely coupled with revolutionaries like Stravinsky, Schoenberg, Webern and Varèse. But Bartók’s was a very different kind of journey. He sought ways forward by turning music back to its primal, natural roots. He was a great conservationist, collecting and cataloguing his country’s folksongs, looking for new ideas in the sounds of nature. |
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