New Releases

Slovak-born composer and conductor Peter Breiner has received considerable international acclaim for his adaptations, and his Tchaikovsky arrangements are particularly impressive examples of his art. He has already arranged The Seasons (8553510) and Songs (8555332) but here he turns to opera. With deftness and subtlety he has taken motifs from Tchaikovsky’s first opera Voyevoda to craft six richly scored movements, two of which have rôles for solo strings. The Queen of Spades was composed in 1890 and Breiner’s selections fully explore the music’s romance and drama in their new form.

Peter Breiner has won a particular niche for his ingenious arrangements, and he has arranged and recorded a number of Tchaikovsky discs before. Here he tackles opera in the same spirit of rich communicative warmth bringing to an early opera (Voyevoda) and the later The Queen of Spades the qualities of orchestral eloquence that he has displayed elsewhere. These excerpted pieces, so cleverly transformed from their vocal origins to orchestral form, communicate the vitality and lyricism inherent in the music.

Ira Hearshen is one of America’s most popular and successful orchestrators and arrangers. He has written for many Hollywood films, such as Toy Story and The Scorpion King. He has also written for the concert stage, especially wind band, notably his Pulitzer Prize-nominated Symphony on Themes of John Philip Sousa, which is adventurously constructed, richly melodic and colorfully scored. His unique takes on Strike Up The Band and There’s No Business Like Show Business provide moments of rich humor whilst the Divertimento for Band mines the American jazz vernacular with true rhythmic verve.

Ira Hearshen’s music is colourful and hugely approachable. It’s often also laced with broad humour and wit. The Divertimento has been recorded on a compilation album called Rendezvous released by a number of American composers’ band music back in 2001 (Klavier Record) and on a couple of Mark Records discs by the US Air Force Band, again compilation CD. The Symphony is also on a Mark Records compilation disc released in 2003.

Three weeks after the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941, Shostakovich volunteered with the Home Guard in Leningrad. As the siege of the city intensified, he worked on his Seventh Symphony, completing three movements before being forced to leave Leningrad and travel east by train. The work was completed in December that year. Initially he gave each movement a programmatic title, but later withdrew them, leaving this epic work as an emblem of heroic defiance in the face of conflict and crisis: ‘I dedicate my Seventh Symphony to our struggle against fascism, to our coming victory over the enemy, to my native city, Leningrad.’ Shostakovich’s epic Seventh Symphony is a study in defiance and survival, written largely in the ruins of the besieged city in 1941. Its reputation has fluctuated over the years, with its immediate post war reputation largely low. But in recent years it has taken its rightful place in Shostakovich’s symphonic canon. As one of the Twentieth Century’s most recorded symphonists, the composer has been the subject of many recordings.

The award-winning Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra is the UK’s oldest continuing professional symphony orchestra, dating from 1840. The dynamic young Russian, Vasily Petrenko was appointed Principal Conductor of the orchestra in September 2006 and in September 2009 became Chief Conductor.

World Première Recordings

Orchestrated by Henning Kraggerud and Bernt Simen Lund

Grieg is one of the world’s best known composers, but the three Violin Sonatas are a relatively unfamiliar part of his output, despite being among his own favourite pieces. Grieg never wrote a violin concerto, and the foremost Norwegian violinist of his generation, Henning Kraggerud, assisted by Bernt Simen Lund, a member of the Tromsø Chamber Orchestra, has taken up the challenge of creating three new concertos from the sonatas. In these arrangements the solo violin is set against a string orchestra augmented by wind instruments in order to retain the feel of chamber music.

Published together in 1611, Gesualdo’s Fifth and Sixth Books of Madrigals can be seen as musical ‘twins’, concluding a collection of madrigals by a composer whose boundless invention and creativity was unrestrained by an employer’s demands or the constraints of courtly convention. Gesualdo returns to themes of love and rejection, death and suffering, joy and sorrow; creating music which has the power to surprise and enthrall anyone who hears it. This is Delitiæ Musicæ’s final volume of their highly acclaimed cycle of the complete Madrigals.

As a composer of art-song, Ian Venables is considered to be one of the most important writing today. The Songs of Ian Venables (8572514), Volume 21 of Naxos’ critically acclaimed English Song Series, was the first devoted to a living composer. This new recording introduces us to his music for solo piano and brings together works written between 1975 and 2001. It is Venables’ singular melodic gift and highly inventive use of harmony that combine to give us works that range from the deeply reflective and wistful to those in a lighter vein, full of charm and joie de vivre.

Venables is certainly best known as an art-song composer, one of his country’s currently most acclaimed, but between 1975 and 2001 he composed a number of pieces for solo piano. They are tonal, sometimes nostalgic, rhythmically exciting and filled with the kind of lyricism that listeners will recall from his songs. Four of the pieces in this disc are heard in world première recordings.

Described by The Observer as “a contemporary hero of British Choral Music”, Bob Chilcott is one of today’s most widely performed composers of choral music. This programme includes première recordings of favourites such as A Little Jazz Mass, songs and carols on a variety of texts, and the wit, wisdom and drama of Aesop’s Fables in which Chilcott makes musical references to Brahms and Schubert. Winner of the coveted BBC Choir of the Year award in 2010, the Wellensian Consort is one of the United Kingdom’s leading chamber choirs.

Bob Chilcott’s music has previously been included in the Naxos albums “A Winter’s Light” (8573030) and the children’s choral selection “Pigs Could Fly” (8572113) described as “first- rate, especially Bob Chilcott’s ‘Lily and the Rose’” by American Record Guide, but these are just the tip of a vast iceberg as far as his superbly crafted output is concerned. This program includes première recordings of some of Chilcott’s most widely performed works, and the performances are in the safe hands of the young and vibrant Wellensian Consort: “This is a hugely accomplished choir, demonstrating technical mastery, smooth musicianship, and wonderful phrasing, producing a warm, fantastic sound throughout the range.” (BBC Music Magazine)

Stefano Pavesi’s work was swept away by the Rossini operatic avalanche and he is now almost forgotten, but while his vibrantly entertaining (though not without a touch of melancholy) melodramma giocoso Ser Marcantonio has many Rossinian features the young Gioachino’s operatic career was yet to begin when it was first staged. The libretto sets up a typical late eighteenth-century opera buffa plot full of intrigue, buffoonery, disguises and cases of mistaken identity, which may be summarised as “about preventing an old fool from making an ill-advised marriage and stopping his heir from gaining his rightful inheritance”.

Stefano Pavesi’s Ser Marcantonio may be the only of his many operas to have survived beyond the subsequent mania for Rossini, but it has taken this vibrant 2011 production from the Rossini in Wildbad festival to see it appear on CD. Highly enjoyable in its own right, this comic opera also has historic significance to recommend it, serving as it does as a model for both Rossini and Donizetti in his Don Pasquale both musically and in the links formed by librettist Angelo Anelli. Of the young and vibrant festival cast, Marco Filippo Romano (Mercantonio) has been described as singing “with glorious clarity and… perfect comic timing.” (Inquirer.net)

Rossini wrote some of music’s most masterful and lovable operas. His gift for comic and tragic forms was matched by a relish for characterisation, qualities that are always evident in his overtures. La gazza ladra (The Thieving Magpie) is perhaps the most famous, one of the world’s most popular concert openers. Guillaume Tell, with its overture in four movements, includes a scene for five solo cellos. La scala di seta (The Silken Ladder) opens with an overture of charm and élan, and Le siège de Corinthe is dramatic and colourful. All of Rossini’s overtures display sparkling themes, rich lyricism and theatrical excitement.

Ondine proudly presents a disc of works by German composer Jörg Widmann. This release features his Violin Concerto (2007), Insel der Sirenen for Violin and 19 Strings (1997) and Antiphon for Orchestral Groups (2007-08).

The acclaimed violinist Christian Tetzlaff, for whom the Violin Concerto was written, plays the solo part in these works and handles their challenges with incredible precision. He considers this Violin Concerto to be one of the greatest contemporary concertos.

Daniel Harding, one of the brightest conductors of his generation, is a frequent guest conductor for the world’s top orchestras. As Music Director of the Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra he has helped the orchestra to become one of the most interesting and diverse ensembles of today.

The Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra – one of Europe’s foremost orchestras – collaborates regularly with leading conductors, soloists and composers. Their strong commitment to contemporary music is also reflected in this recording.