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See Terms & Conditions for p&p rates. | |  | Britten Songs
This release is one of three new recordings issued in 2013 by EMI & Virgin Classics in honour of Britten's 100th birthday. Ian Bostridge, the internationally acclaimed tenor whose "attention to the text always matches Britten's own scrupulous word-setting", has recorded this album of songs by Benjamin Britten accompanied by Antonio Pappano. Featured are works he has never before recorded: 'Seven Sonnets of Michelangelo', 'Hölderlin Fragments', 'Songs From the Chinese', 'Winter Words' and Four English Songs from the last cycle 'Who are These Children?'. “an intoxicating contribution to the composer’s centenary.” Financial Times, 20th April 2013 | 
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‘Layton has directed this annual St John Passion for several seasons now. His readings, which are becoming ever more dramatic and daring, have a raw intensity. It was easy to see why these concerts have become one of the highlights in London’s musical calendar’ (The Guardian) Polyphony and Stephen Layton present their celebrated performance of Bach’s most dramatic masterpiece. Accompanied by the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment and a starry team of soloists, Layton directs a vivid account, the excitement of the narrative drama contrasting with heartbreaking moments of reflection. In Ian Bostridge, we have the most iconic Evangelist of the last twenty years; an artist who is an incomparable communicator, a singer of technical brilliance, and an impassioned, experienced interpreter of Bach’s music. “[Bostridge is] a magnificent Evangelist though one aspect of his approach may not be to all tastes. He is highly expressive at all times and there are several occasions where some may feel he overdoes the expressiveness..Polyphony show vividly just what can be achieved in Bach singing by a fairly small professional choir, especially in terms of such things as flexibility, attack and agility...This desirable new recording deserves a place in the front rank.” MusicWeb International, February 2013 “Layton has honed his preferred version, but only aficionados will notice or mind. Concentrate instead on the purity of sound, the emotionally expressive yet restrained performance by all and the impeccable attention to text of the soloists. Ian Bostridge (Evangelist) lives every word of the narration but never over dramatises. Countertenor Iestyn Davies's almost disembodied account of Es ist vollbracht! (It is finished!) is unforgettable.” The Observer, 3rd March 2013 “the choral singing is wonderfully pure, buoyant and transparent...Ian Bostridge’s Evangelist, mannered and occasionally stretched but full of “narrative” character, dominates Layton’s performance” Financial Times, 9th March 2013 *** “when Bach’s goal is mellifluous comfort, as in the final chorus, Ruht wohl, Polyphony wins hands down.” The Times, 15th March 2013 **** “this new recording's credentials border on the unassailable...Layton's pacing is compelling - there's no mistaking the gambling fever as the soldiers cast lots for Christ's garment...[Neal Davies] reserves a melting tenderness for the utterances from the cross. It's crowned by Iestyn Davies's sublime account of 'Es ist vollbracht'...Both Carolyn Sampson's arias are priceless.” BBC Music Magazine, April 2013 **** “this St John Passion brings to the fore the traits of style and taste that are distinguished hallmarks of Layton and the forces he gathers around him...Bostridge is the tenor Evangelist, eloquent, pure of tone, fluent and strong in communicating the import of the German narrative...The choir sings with a well-rounded sound, firm accents and with diction that brings the text crisply to life” The Telegraph, 22nd March 2013 ***** “about as state-of-the-art a Bach Passion recording as you'll hear...Take as read the urgency, clarity, balance and delamatory unanimity of the chorus...Layton's reality is about cultivating the focus of each sentiment with supreme corporate executancy...Bostridge is the master story-teller who surveys all about him.” Gramophone Magazine, May 2013 |
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Recorded live in 2011 at the Aldeburgh Festival, which Benjamin Britten founded in 1948, this performance of his dark, intense chamber opera The Rape of Lucretia stars Angelika Kirchschlager, Peter Coleman-Wright and Ian Bostridge, with Oliver Knussen conducting. “Everything, without exception, was right on the money,” said The Guardian,” ... a dazzling success.” Benjamin Britten’s chamber opera The Rape of Lucretia was given its premiere at the Glyndebourne Festival in 1946, with Kathleen Ferrier in the leading role. The composer founded his own festival two years later in Aldeburgh on the Suffolk coast, where he and Peter Pears had a home. This recording is drawn from a concert given in June 2011 at Aldeburgh’s acoustically superb Snape Maltings. “As this brilliantly vivid, impassioned concert performance reminded us,” wrote The Telegraph, “Lucretia is a problematic and disturbing piece. It's hard to think of another opera where the opposite poles of male violence and tender female intimacy are made so vividly real in purely musical terms, and brought into such horrifying proximity.” Representing those opposite poles are the Australian baritone Peter Coleman-Wright as the Roman prince Tarquinius and the Austrian mezzo-soprano Angelika Kirchschlager as Lucretia, the chaste wife of a Roman general. She commits suicide after Tarquinius has raped her, but, in an interview with The Independent Kirchschlager explained that: "There is absolutely a subtext. Lucretia is not happy where she is; both she and Tarquinius are longing for something more. People are not black and white: we long for things we don't allow ourselves. Perhaps these two should be a real couple, but circumstances have determined that they can't be together. You have to look carefully at the words and at every nuance Britten wrote, and it makes sense. They are both incredibly passionate people and Lucretia is a strong woman. I never see her as a victim." Joining them in the cast are some of Britain’s finest singers, including Ian Bostridge as the Male Chorus, Susan Gritton as the Female Chorus and, as Collatinus, Christopher Purves; the Aldeburgh Festival Ensemble is conducted by Oliver Knussen. The Guardian felt that the performance succeeded in “revealing the score as one of Britten's richest ... Everything, without exception, was right on the money. Bostridge and Gritton vied with each other for clarity of diction and gesture, while Kirchschlager's magnificent Lucretia was direct and powerfully sympathetic. Claire Booth and Hilary Summers, as maid and nurse respectively, sent the mellifluous flower duet wafting seductively around the Maltings' rafters. Best of all was the orchestra, revelling in its extraordinary palette of colours, and showing how the score so often hangs like gossamer off the vocal lines. Oliver Knussen conducted neatly, precisely and economically – in short, giving his players and singers everything they needed to make Britten's return to Aldeburgh a dazzling success.” “Britten's amazingly inventive score was played with scalding intensity by the Aldeburgh Festival Ensemble under Oliver Knussen,” enthused The Telegraph, while The Independent, describing the opera as “a masterpiece of psychological and musical acuity”, observed that: “Ian Bostridge and Angelika Kirchschlager, as the Male Chorus and protagonist, gave it a searing, declamatory force. But its chief glory lies in the menacing beauty of its orchestral sound: the textures which Oliver Knussen extracted from the Aldeburgh Festival Ensemble repeatedly took the breath away.” Likewise, The Sunday Times praised “Oliver Knussen's incisive and compelling conducting. He clearly believes in every note of the often ravishingly beautiful and coruscatingly violent score.” “Knussen draws out not only the pungency of Britten’s language but also its almost touchable beauty and Mediterranean warmth...Kirchschlager is a Lucretia of contrasting purity and sensuousness...All in all, it’s hard to imagine a more welcome addition to the Britten discography in his centenary year.” Financial Times, 12th January 2013 **** “[the score] emerges more pungent and fiercely dramatic than I've ever heard it before...the protagonists in the drama are presented in all their contradictions...this performance is surely the best of recent times, redemptive in a way that the work itself can never be.” The Guardian, 17th January 2013 ***** “I have rarely been as conscious of the salivating voyeurism with which the librettist Ronald Duncan describes the rape as in Ian Bostridge’s brilliantly creepy singing of the Male Chorus’s graphic description of Tarquinius’s rampant machismo, nor as gripped and moved as by Angelika Kirchschlager’s feisty but fruitless self-defence...Knussen’s conducting is exemplary.” Sunday Times, 3rd February 2013 “Although the story's brutality inevitably means that any performance of Lucretia is uncomfortable, Knussen and company ensure that Britten's score shines in a radiantly positive light, offsetting the skin-crawling nastiness with musical beauty” Graham Rogers, bbc.co.uk, 6th February 2013 “the opera’s musical strengths stand taller than ever before, helped by the vivid accompaniment of the Aldeburgh Festival Ensemble...Kirchschlager’s heroine combines sensuous appeal with gut-wrenching horror, while Peter Coleman-Wright’s bestial Tarquinius definitely belongs behind bars...Overall, the recording’s triumph is to make the opera seem horrible, certainly, but not inhumane.” The Times, 1st March 2013 **** “Without hurrying, Knussen conducts a tight, vivid account, surpassing Britten's own...Ian Bostridge and Susan Gritton as Male and Female Chorus project their rhetorical commentaries with exemplary diction...Kirchschlager's passionate, full-voiced Lucretia is beautifully balanced by Claire Booth's bright Lucia and Hilary Summers's more mature Bianca.” BBC Music Magazine, April 2013 ***** “The folding of the linen is a real highlight of this recording, a definite improvement on Britten’s own reading in its sense of timeless suspension... Knussen yields nothing whatsoever to Britten in his careful pacing of the score, and the newer recording does enable us to hear details that were muffled before...a tremendous recording for a new generation” MusicWeb International, April 2013 “Knussen's keen sense of pacing tells in the grip of the drama...[Kirchschlager] is the lightning rod for the electricity of the drama...she creates a Lucretia entirely her own - not so much a formal classical Greek heroine, more a modern woman whose feelings are very close to the surface...this new Virgin set ranks as one of the very best of the new generation of Britten opera recordings.” Gramophone Magazine, April 2013  BBC Music Magazine
Opera Choice - April 2013 |
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| |  | Strauss: Horn Concertos Nos. 1 & 2New Colours of Piccolo Trumpet
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Brian Asawa (Oberon), Sylvia McNair (Tytania), Brian Bannatyne-Scott (Theseus), Hilary Summers (Hippolyta), John Mark Ainsley (Lysander), Paul Whelan (Demetrius), Janice Watson (Helena), Ruby Philogene (Hermia), Robert Lloyd (Bottom), Gwynne Howell (Quince), Ian Bostridge (Flute), Stephen Richardson (Snug), Neal Davies (Starveling), Mark Tucker (Snout) London Symphony Orchestra, New London Children's Choir, Sir Colin Davis “Everything is heard with great clarity, the sensuousness of Britten's ravishing score, with all its mysterious harmonies and sonorities, is fully realized, action and reaction among the singers are keenly heard...Another plus for the new set is the casting of the lovers with young singers in their early prime.” Gramophone Magazine, December 1996 “Scintillating pace and quality, with Brian Asawa's classy Oberon and Robert Lloyd's Bottom outstanding. Sylvia McNair's Tytania is beautiful but mannered.” BBC Music Magazine, November 2012 **** | | | (Sorry, download not available in your country) | In stock - usually despatched within 1 working day. |
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1. Act I - Einleitung (Orchester) 2. Sritte Szene - Weh, ach wehe! Dies zu dulden! (Brangäne/Isolde) 3. Fünfte Szene - Tristan!/Isolde!/Treuloser Holder (Isolde/Tristan/Schiffsvolk Ritter und Knappen/Brangäne/Kurwenal) 4. Zweite Szene - O sink hernieder, Nacht der Liebe (Tristan) 5. Zweite Szene - Lausch, Geliebter!/Laß mich sterben! (Isolde/Tristan) 6. Zweite Szene - So starben wir, um ungetrennt (Tristan/Isolde/Brangäne) 7. Dritte Szene - O König, das kann ich dir nicht sagen...Als für ein frem des Land (Tristan/Isolde) 8. Zweite Szene - O diese Sonne! Ha, dieser Tag! (Tristan/Isolde) 9. Dritte Szene - Kurwenal! Hör! Ein zweites Schiff (Der Hirt/Kurwenal/Der Steuermann/Brangäne/Melot/Marke) 10. Dritte Szene - Mild und leise wie er lächelt (Isolde)
Placido Domingo (Tristan), Nina Stemme (Isolde), Mihoko Fujimura (Brangäne), Olaf Bär (Kurwenal), Jared Holt (Melot), René Pape (König Marke), Ian Bostridge (Hirt), Rolando Villazon (Junger Seeman) & Matthew Rose (Steuermann) The Royal Opera Chorus, Covent Garden & Orchestra of the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, Antonio Pappano Enhanced CD with Libretto | | | In stock - usually despatched within 1 working day. |
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| |  | OPERA 2011
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Ian Bostridge (Orfeo), Natalie Dessay (La Musica), Patrizia Ciofi (Euridice), Véronique Gens (Proserpina), Alice Coote (Messaggiera), Sonia Prina (Speranza), Carolyn Sampson (Ninfa), Paul Agnew (Eco/Pastore), Christopher Maltman (Apollo/Pastore), Lorenzo Regazzo (Plutone), Mario Luperi (Caronte), Pascal Bertin, Richard Burkhard (Pastori) Le Concert d'Astrée, Emmanuelle Haïm Recording Country: France Recording Location: 15-22 January 2003. Eglise Notre Dame du Liban, Paris. Mix Date: 22 Jan 2003 Executive Producer: Alain Lanceron Producer & Editor: Daniel Zalay Balance Engineer: Jean Chatauret (Musica Numeris) | | | In stock - usually despatched within 1 working day. |
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| |  | Ian Bostridge: The Three Baroque Tenors
John Beard, Francesco Borosini, Annibale Fabri: these three men helped to revolutionized music in the 18th century. Their voices moved the greatest composers of the time to increasingly write for tenors, a move from the Castrati, which had dominated opera since 1600. Now, three centuries since this trio’s brilliance encouraged a surge of new repertoire for the vocal range, world renowned tenor Ian Bostridge celebrates their legacy with his stunning new release, Three Baroque Tenors. This recording features works by the masters of the age, including six world premier recordings of arias by Caldara, Conti, Gasparini, Handel, Scarlatti and Vivaldi. The previously unrecorded Handel aria is ”Scorta siate a passi miei”, from the “Borosini” edition of his famous opera Giulio Cesare. In this version, Borosini sang the role of Sesto, which was traditionally performed by a castrato with different arias. Much of the repertoire selected by Bostridge has rarely been performed in modern times. Three Baroque Tenors is a recording that is as fascinating as it is magnificent. It is an overdue homage to this neglected musical evolution and the men who inspired it. It illustrates both Bostridge’s gift for interpreting repertoire from this period, as previously heard on his Great Handel recording, and his skills as a historian. Bostridge, who received his D.Phil in History from Corpus Christi College, Oxford, is well respected in historical and journalism circles. His new collection of essays, On Music, will be published by Faber & Faber in spring 2011. “I was totally disarmed by this CD. Ian Bostridge is at his most vivid, expressive and delicately ornamental in homage to three baroque singers...Bostridge avoids that wearying tendency to fizz the music up breathlessly, opting instead for clean edges and eloquence. The English Concert, conducted by Bernard Labadie, add real verve.” The Observer, 24th October 2010 “It's a rich collection, imaginatively adumbrating the talents of three master-singers of different vocal types and weights united by superior technique and musicianship.” BBC Music Magazine, December 2010 *** “He's a graceful performer and a superb word-painter: he sings the word 'sweet' in different arias with surprising varieties of meaning...accompaniments are lively and stylish.” Classic FM Magazine, December 2010 **** “Fabri evidently had the breath controlled for extended runs on one syllable: Here Bostridge is first-rate, whether slow, as in Vivaldi's Arsilda, or in the vigorous roulades of Poro...The English Concert provides excellent support, with a lovely bassoon obbligato from Alberto Grazzi in the air by Boyce.” Gramophone Magazine “his smooth, supple voice is well able to deal with the multiple styles, the virtuosity, and even the baritone-register passages that one might have anticipated his light tone struggling to do justice to. His superb diction means that you don't miss a word, his ornamentation is elegant and precise, and texts are intelligently interpreted.” Charlotte Gardner, bbc.co.uk, 12th December 2010 “Bostridge has the vocal flexibility needed...[Rise, glory, rise] is simply magnificent, with trumpet triumphng in martial bravura...this enjoyable selection may be an eye-opener for those who do not associate Bostridge with this type of music or with such technical agility” International Record Review, December 2010 | | | In stock - usually despatched within 1 working day. |
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| |  | Bach: Magnificat & CantatasLive Recording from The Kloster Melk Benedictine Monastery, 2000
The programme of this concert, recorded at one of Austria‘s finest baroque monasteries, is dedicated to the works which Johann Sebastian Bach wrote for Advent, two of his finest cantatas and his Magnificat. The performances of these three works are excellent. Not only are the choir and orchestra of the quality one expects from a conductor such as Nikolaus Harnoncourt, but the soloists including Christine Schäfer and Ian Bostridge are all top-notch as well. A must-have disc for collectors of Bach DVDs. Sound Format: PCM Stereo, DD 5.0, DTS 5.0 Picture Format: 16:9 DVD Format: DVD 9, NTSC Subtitle Languages: DE, GB, FR, ES, IT Running Time: 82 mins FSK: 0 | | | In stock - usually despatched within 1 working day. |
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Gramophone Magazine