Tapiola Sinfonietta

This programme is well conceived and draws some truly moving playing. The coda to Bridge’s Oration makes a serious challenge for the title of ‘most beautiful ending to a cello concerto’ Isserlis.

Schelomo is an extraordinary work where Bloch seems to have created a new musical language inspired by Jewish music dating back thousands of years. Often mistaken for film music, Schelomo’s immediacy and descriptiveness has influenced many film composers.

Isserlis plays the ‘Marquis de Corberon’ Stradivarius of 1726, formerly owned by Zara Nelsova who was the first to record Bloch’s Schelomo with the composer conducting.

Jean-Jacques Kantorow follows his critically acclaimed recording of music by Édouard Lalo with a second disc featuring two further works that were originally intended for Sarasate, the brief Fantaisie-ballet on themes from Lalo’s ballet Namouna, and the large-scale Concerto russe.

The Concerto russe borrows themes from two wedding songs included by Rimsky-Korsakov in his collection 100 Russian Folk Songs.

The disc closes with the Piano Concerto from 1888 – the composer’s final major work, played by Pierre-Alain Volondat.

This new release features the first-ever commercial recording of three newly discovered viola concertos by German-born Swedish composer Joseph Martin Kraus.

Joseph Martin Kraus was one of the most innovative composers of his time. With Mozart, he was described by Haydn as one of only two geniuses he knew.

Recipient of the 2011 Leonard Bernstein Award and of the 2010 Avery Fisher Career Grant, David Aaron Carpenter has emerged as one of the world's most promising young artists. The Philadelphia Inquirer describes him as being “in a league with the best.”

This release follows on the success of David’s earlier recordings, including the Elgar and Schnittke concertos with the Philharmonia Orchestra and conductor Christoph Eschenbach (ODE11532), which was an Editor’s Choice in Gramophone.

One of the leading chamber orchestras in the world, the Tapiola Sinfonietta has enjoyed critical success from their recordings of key Classical repertoire, including the Complete Beethoven Piano Concertos with piano soloist Olli Mustonen.

The Tapiola Sinfonietta here performs Kalevi Aho’s three chamber symphonies: three works that stretch the expressive capabilities of a string orchestra, and are thus highly demanding for the players.

The solo alto saxophone part in Chamber Symphony No.3 was written for the soloist John-Edward Kelly who appears here. Aho describes the piece as ‘a hybrid of chamber symphony and saxophone concerto’.

The Tapiola Sinfonietta has earned high praise from reviewers around the world for its recordings ranging from Arvo Pärt to Saint-Saëns and von Weber.

The conductors Jean-Jacques Kantorow and Stefan Asbury are both close collaborators with the orchestra.

The second volume of cpo’s Bruckner cycle with Mario Venzago features the so-called ‘Symphony No. 0’ and Symphony No. 1. Venzago has assigned each pair of symphonies a specific orchestra of very different size, culture, and tradition. In Finland’s Tapiola Sinfonietta Venzago has found a relatively small but first-class orchestra that is especially receptive to his efforts towards refinement and classical limpidity.

One of the finest pianists performing in the world today, Stephen Hough here turns to composition in a disc of his works. This disc was compiled to celebrate Hough’s 50th birthday.

Having composed music from the age of six, The 2005 work The Loneliest Wilderness was the ‘first serious piece in two decades’, but this has been followed by a steady stream of works.

The principal work on this disc is the Sonata for Piano Broken Branches, with the première taking place at Wigmore Hall in June 2011. At a glance, the work looks to be a set of miniatures, but Hough maintains there are lots of links between the pieces. And the end marks a return to the beginning, but now autumn has become spring.”

This work is accompanied by some of Hough’s other important works: Was mit den Tränen geschieht was commissioned in 2009 by members of the Berlin Philharmonic, and 5 Herbstlieder – a setting of five autumnal poems by Rilke, here performed by baritone Jacques Imbrailo who performed the world première of the work in 2010.

The elegiac The Loneliest Wilderness is based on a previous song setting by Hough of a poem by Herbert Read, and again the work was written for a close collaborator of the composer, namely Steven Isserlis who performs it here together with the Tapiola Sinfonietta conducted by Gábor Takács-Nagy.

'There’s something awe-inspiring about the sheer multifariousness of Stephen Hough’s achievements.' The Daily Telegraph

Although celebrated as the father of German Romantic opera, Carl Maria von Weber is today generally known for one opera alone: Der Freischütz. However the overtures of his other operas and music for stage plays have survived the test of time and are popular concert additions.

The present disc includes ten of these gems, from the overture to Weber’s first surviving opera Peter Schmoll und seine Nachbarn – composed at the age of fifteen – to that of Oberon, written in London for Covent Garden less than two months before his death from tuberculosis, aged 39.

The team of Jean-Jacques Kantorow and the Tapiola Sinfonietta have recorded numerous discs for BIS, by composers as diverse as Saint-Saëns, Mozart, Shostakovich and Rautavaara as well as Weber.