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Recorded live at Southbank Centre’s Royal Festival Hall, London on 4 December 2010.

Mahler’s First Symphony: the opening chapter of his spiritual autobiography. And the music itself seems to awaken – emerging from hushed strings and woodwind cuckoos into its stride, marching forth, stamping towards an eerie realisation of a nursery rhyme and arriving at a final, blazing affirmation of confidence.

Vladimir Jurowski conducts the London Philharmonic Orchestra in this live 2010 concert performance including the Symphony’s original second movement, ‘Blumine’.

Composed during the Second World War, Shostakovich’s Eighth Symphony is a powerful work that juxtaposes music of unremitting bleakness and moments of shattering brutality, ending in a tentative expression of optimism. Today it stands not only as a chilling reminder of some of the darkest days of the 20th century, but also as a reminder of Shostakovich’s acute musical imagination and craftsmanship. Gennady Rozhdestvensky conducts the London Philharmonic Orchestra in this live 1983 concert recording from Royal Festival Hall.

Rozhdestvensky established his credentials as a Shostakovich conductor from 1955 when he deputised for Samuil Samosud in an early performance of Symphony No. 10.

This is a performance which is clearly informed from the conductor’s experience of living under Stalinist represssions.

Rozhdestvensky was in Shostakovich’s circle and is a respected authority on the composer. He gave the first performance of Symphony No. 10 outside the USSR at the 1962 Edinburgh Festival.

Renowned worldwide in his lifetime and remembered today as a double bass virtuoso, Giovanni Bottesini excelled in every branch of musicianship, but his operas and sacred works were overshadowed by those of Verdi and have fallen into neglect. Composed in response to the death of his brother Luigi, Bottesini’s large scale Requiem combines ecclesiastical counterpoint with formal innovation and the expressive lyricism and dramatic orchestration of operatic models.

With double bass virtuoso Thomas Martin stepping into conductor’s shoes in Bottesini’s unjustly neglected Requiem, this is one of our major releases of the season, which will be sure to generate wide interest. With an extremely strong set of soloists, The Joyful Company of Singers’ “conviction and a real depth of feeling” (Gramophone on 8557783, Williamson Choral Music), and the renowned London Philharmonic Orchestra, this is a large-scale work to stand alongside Verdi’s famous Requiem, but by contrast having the CD market entirely to itself.

Conductor Klaus Tennstedt enjoyed a close and enduring relationship with the London Philharmonic Orchestra that resulted in his appointment as the Orchestra’s Principal Conductor and Music Director in 1983, later becoming its Conductor Laureate. Renowned for his interpretations of the German Romantic repertoire, Tennstedt once said he loved the LPO so much because ‘it is a romantic orchestra’.

Here he conducts the Orchestra in live concert performances of Brahms’s Symphonies Nos. 1 & 3. This Symphony No. 1 performance in 1992 was one of the conductor’s last concerts with the LPO. As the conductor struggled with illness, every one of his late concerts in London became an event, as if any could be his last, and the acute atmosphere of his last London appearances shines through in this performance.

British composer Mark-Anthony Turnage is widely admired for his distinctive blending of jazz and contemporary classical traditions, high energy and elegiac lyricism. His music is colourful, rhythmic and always distinctive, with an innate dramatic sense.

Powerful in its contrasts, his music and texts hold up a mirror to the realities of modern life and make a broad appeal to an enquiring contemporary audience.

Turnage was the London Philharmonic Orchestra’s Composer in Residence from 2005–10, during which time the Orchestra released two highly acclaimed CDs of his orchestral music. This is the third and final volume of Turnage’s music to be released on the LPO Label. It features five works recorded for the first time, including the world première peformance of his violin concerto Mambo, Blues and Tarantella with soloist Christian Tetzlaff. The CD also features performances by soloists Lawrence Power (viola) and Michael Collins (clarinet).

Recorded at Southbank Centre’s Royal Festival Hall: On Opened Ground 19 October 2011, Texan Tenebrae 17 April 2010, Riffs and Refrains 13 Feb 2008, Mambo, Blues and Tarantella 24 September 2008. Lullaby for Hans recorded at Snape Maltings, 1 April 2007.

Children’s author Michael Morpurgo narrates his book The Mozart Question, an eloquent and ultimately uplifting story charting a small boy’s discovery of his love for the violin, and of his parents’ traumatic past in a concentration camp during the Second World War. This CD weaves together the book’s narration with musical extracts to bring the story alive, featuring pieces by Beethoven, Vivaldi, Bach and Mozart performed by the London Philharmonic Orchestra.

The musical extracts interpersed with the narration include movements from Beethoven’s Violin Concerto, Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons, Mozart’s Eine kleine Nachtmusik, and Messiaen’s Quartet for the End of Time.

Nicholas Collon conducts the London Philharmonic Orchestra with violin soloist Jack Liebeck.

Michael Morpurgo is one of Britain’s best-loved children’s authors. He has written more than 100 books and has won the Smarties Prize, the Whitbread Award, and most recently the Blue Peter Book Award for Private Peaceful. He is also the author of War Horse, which has been made into a Tony Award-winning Broadway play and a Golden Globe-nominated film. Michael was Writer in Residence at The Savoy Hotel from January to March 2007, and previously he was Children’s Laureate from 2003–2005, a role that took him across Britain to inspire a love of reading in children.

Finnish conductor Paavo Berglund, who passed away in January 2012, was one of the last remaining conductors with a direct personal connection to Sibelius. With the Second and Seventh Symphonies already released on the LPO Label, Berglund’s Sibelius legacy is further cemented in these live concert recordings with the London Philharmonic Orchestra, in which he vividly captures the natural flight of the Fifth Symphony and the freefall journey of the Sixth.

The affinity Berglund felt with the music of Jean Sibelius went beyond shared nationality and personal acquaintance. Berglund revealed a rare physicality in Sibelius’s scores. It was there in his three recorded symphony cycles, but in these late London performances it emerged in a different, darker light. Berglund wasn’t as meticulous about observing marked tempi as some of his younger compatriots are. Instead he was impulsive, rugged and heartfelt. But his instincts always seemed to serve the musical architecture, the curious symphonic meta-flow unique to Sibelius. His death in January 2012 was talked of as a goodbye to one of the last conductors of the ‘old school’.

Throughout his life, Tchaikovsky was preoccupied with the idea of Fate, describing it as ‘that fatal power which prevents one from attaining the goal of happiness’. This dark force haunts both the Fourth and Fifth symphonies, which each juxtapose some of Tchaikovsky’s most beautiful and graceful melodies with music of intense power and dark despair. Principal Conductor Vladimir Jurowski continues his journey through the composer’s six symphonies, leading the London Philharmonic Orchestra in these live concert recordings.

Since his appointment as Principal Conductor of the London Philharmonic Orchestra in 2007, Vladimir Jurowski has led the Orchestra in some of the finest recordings on the LPO label, including 2011’s popular and critically acclaimed Mahler Symphony No. 2.

This 2CD set reveals two sides of Walton, the composer of music for the voice. CD1 features the extravagant side of the composer with multiple choirs and a huge orchestra for swaggering performances of the Coronation Te Deum and Belshazzar’s Feast, both with Sir Georg Solti conducting. CD2, with all items released on CD for the first time, features the more intimate side of the composer, with settings of choral miniatures, from the earliest setting (Drop, drop, slow tears of 1917) up to the 1972 Jubilate. Simon Preston’s LP was released on Argo to mark Walton’s 70th birthday. The remainder of the items come from a L’Oiseau-Lyre LP coupling songs by Walton and Machonchy and performed by Heather Harper. A Song for the Lord Mayor’s Table was commissioned by the Worshipful Company of Goldsmiths for the first City of London Festival; the texts were chosen by the English dramatist and poet Christopher Hassall and the poems come mostly from 18th-century verse related to London. The collection is rounded off with Walton’s Three Songs to poems by Dame Edith Sitwell date from 1932, all based on the composer’s Façade.