New Releases

The music of the Ukrainian composer Boris Lyatoshynsky (1895–1968) is familiar in his home country but sorely neglected abroad.

Lyatoshynsky’s songs are neglected even there: this anthology of his best romantsiy for low voice and piano contains many first recordings.

The songs meld intense Scriabinesque expressionism with elements of Ukrainian folksong in a language that embraces both the lyrical and the dramatic.

His setting of Shelley’s Ozymandias, with its warning of the impermanence of power, was a brave act in the Soviet Union of 1924.

The booklet contains full sung texts, with English translations by Russian-music expert Anthony Phillips, who also provides an extensive introduction to Lyatoshynsky, his songs and his artistic milieu.

Judith Bingham’s music for chorus and organ has been released on CD but this is the first recording of her piano music.

Born in Nottingham in 1952, she has been London-based since 1970 and used to live near Westminster Cathedral, the inspiration for the opening work on the CD, The Moon over Westminster Cathedral.

She spent several years as a member of the BBC Singers, which may help explain the lyricism of her music.

The works on this CD also reveals her strong response to poetry and to place: Limehouse Nocturne was inspired by the Hawksmoor church, St Anne’s, Limehouse, and portrays the gentle movement of the Thames at night.

Byron, Violent Progress is a set of variations portraying the poet’s struggle with his own conscience.

Most of the music on this disc is receiving its first recording.

The rediscovery of the three Sérénades for flute and strings by the Franco-German Romantic Théodore Gouvy (1819–98) – two of them commissioned by the Philharmonic Club of New York – brings a welcome expansion to the repertoire of nineteenth-century chamber music for flute.

Gouvy’s charming melodic language disguises the expert craftsmanship of a composer who, not belonging to any national school, has not had the attention his warm-hearted music deserves.

Gouvy’s music is now being rediscovered for the first time in a century, with a symphonic cycle underway on CPO.

All the music on this CD is receiving its first recording.

Although György Ligeti composed only three works for the organ, 'Volumina', 'Harmonies' and 'Coulée', these pieces mark significant stages in the course of his compositional development; more importantly, they revolutionised the world of organ music and provided the initial spark for an entire wave of New Music for the organ. 'Volumina' completely dispenses with the parameters normally used to structure time in a musical work, such as melody, rhythm and harmony.

The only active structural parameter in this music is the tone colour. The music is perceived more in a spatial than a temporal sense, with the title referring to differently dimensioned 'stationary' sound spaces.

In the 11-movement piano cycle 'Musica ricercata' Ligeti explores the possibilities of using the 12 chromatic semitones for composition. One of the movements was arranged for the organ by Ligeti himself; the others have been arranged by the organist Dominik Susteck. Susteck, who performed and recorded these works on the organ of Kunst- Station Sankt Peter in Cologne, also presents an original composition: his organ improvisations 'Sprachsignale' which are inspired by Ligeti’s piece 'Artikulation'. Play loud!

Awarded the prestigious title of ‘Instrumentalist of the Year’ by the Royal Philharmonic Society in 2006, British violinist Anthony Marwood is internationally celebrated for his engaging and insightful performances. For Schumann’s three Violin Sonatas, he is joined by Aleksandar Madžar, recently praised by Classical Music Magazine as matchless ‘in terms of technique and interpretation’.

Considered by many to be the product of a tired mind hovering on the edge of insanity, these richly impassioned works are filled with restlessness, melancholy and fractured lyricism.

Much has been written about the music of Hildegard von Bingen over the last few decades due to the mysterious uniqueness of her compositions which make her songs stand out.

VocaMe is an ensemble made up of four renowned female vocalists who are specialists in their fields, here performing a selection of von Bingen’s works entitled Songs and Visions.

Kurt Sanderling would have been 100 years old on September 19, 2012. He very nearly reached that age, for he died last year just one day before his 99th birthday. This great conductor’s biography is packed with the events of a turbulent century. He began his career as a rehearsal pianist in Berlin in the early Thirties, before being stripped of his citizenship as a Jew. He emigrated to Moscow in 1936 to join his uncle and after a period in Kharkov was appointed to the Leningrad Philharmonic at the age of only 29, serving as second principal conductor under Yevgeny Mravinsky until 1960. He then returned to East Berlin and assumed the direction of the Berlin Symphony Orchestra until 1977. From 1964 to 1967, he also conducted the Staatskapelle of Dresden. Apart from Dmitry Shostakovich, a lifelong friend whose works Sanderling championed before and after his death in 1975, Gustav Mahler was the composer closest to his heart. A score of Mahler’s "Song of the Earth” accompanied him into exile, and he gave the Deryck Cooke completion of Mahler's Tenth Symphony its first performance in East Germany in 1978, soon after the conducting score had been published. When Sanderling took over the BSO in 1960, Mahler was still “off the radar" in East and West alike. Yet he featured his works from the very start. The Fourth was joined in his programming by Mahler's late works, which move on from the sweeping affirmatives of the Eighth to deal with life and farewell in many different ways – with none of the three works ending in triumphant full orchestra. Only after months or years of concert performance did Kurt Sanderling assemble his BSO before the microphones in the late Seventies and early Eighties, in order to capture this deeply moving music on gramophone records. To mark his centenary, those recordings of Gustav Mahler's last three symphonic works are now brought together in an informative and well presented special edition.

Stella Doufexis has the ability to shape her lucid singing in accordance with the cadence of the language and, with the sensitive support of her accompanist Daniel Heife, to form poems in music that are rich in mysteries and small miracles.

This recording of a broadcast performance by North West German Radio of Debussy’s The Martyrdom of St. Sebastian comes from 1952. It features one of the greatest conductors of the time, Ernest Ansermet, conducting the Cologne Radio Symphony Orchestra, the Cologne Radio Choir, and leading soloists from the period.

The legendary Swiss conductor Ernest Ansermet had been a friend of Claude Debussy, and was highly respected for his readings of composer’s works. He was the first to conduct Debussy’s poetic drama “Le Martyre de Saint Sébastien” in Germany, at the Wallraffplatz broadcasting studios in Cologne on May 5, 1952. At its Paris premiere in 1911, the piece had provoked a regular scandal with its mixture of unabashed eroticism and religious ecstasy. North West German Radio commissioned a German translation for the broadcast which was used in this recording. All the soloists were female, with internationally acclaimed soprano Anny Schlemm joined by Margot Guilleaume, Anni Bernards and Martha Deisen.

This 4-CD set is devoted to recordings of symphonies by Brahms and Bruckner under by one of the greatest German conductors of the post-war period, Gunter Wand. Wand, who died in 1992, is considered to be one of the supreme interpreters of the music of these two renowned composers. The works are Brahms’s Second and Fourth Symphonies, and Bruckner’s monumental Eighth, and the recordings date from 1958, 1960, and 1971.

Throughout his life the great German conductor Gunter Wand returned again and again to the symphonies of Beethoven, Schubert, Brahms and Bruckner, and the recordings presented here are of great historic importance and some of the finest he made. After the Second World War, Günter Wand was Germany’s youngest General Music Director, and in 1946 he assumed the direction of the concerts given by the Cologne’s famous Gürzenich Orchestra, the orchestra featured on these recordings.