New Releases

In more recent years, every Abbado recording has been an event, something special – whether his Mahler symphonies with Berlin, or the Mozart, Bach and Pergolesi projects with “his” Orchestra Mozart. And, of course, as a sponsor and champion of new orchestras he is unrivalled – not least with his most recent creations, the Lucerne Festival Orchestra and the Orchestra Mozart.

THE SYMPHONY EDITION – OVERVIEW

His Grand-Old-Man status assured Abbado remains a modest, unassuming but tenaciously demanding orchestral leader. Now, to celebrate the maestro’s reaching his 80th year, we have prepared an ambitious Symphony Edition as a birthday tribute:

• Limited-edition 41-CD box set

• Complete recordings of eight great symphonists – Mozart (with Orchestra Mozart), Haydn, Beethoven (with Berliner Philharmoniker), Schubert, Mendelssohn, Brahms, Bruckner and Mahler (with Berliner Phliharmoniker and Lucerne festival Orchestra)

• Featuring seven of the orchestras with whom Abbado is most closely associated (Orchestra Mozart, Chamber Orchestra of Europe, London Symphony, Berliner Philharmoniker, Wiener Philharmoniker, Mahler Chamber Orchestra and Lucerne Festival Orchestra)

• Complete symphonic cycles of Beethoven, Schubert, Mendelssohn, Brahms and Mahler (see attachment for complete track list).

• All recordings have been personally selected by Claudio Abbado

IN PARTICULAR…

• Bruckner’s First Symphony – a special “addition”: at Abbado’s request, we have licensed a live recording of Bruckner’s First Symphony with the Lucerne Festival Orchestra, being released here for the first time anywhere.

• He had previously recorded the first version (the “Linz” version, 1866) of the Symphony with the Wiener Philharmoniker, but has since discovered and championed the later expanded “Vienna” version (carried out by Bruckner in 1890–91) – a not uncontroversial step!

• Is this such a big deal? Anyone who has heard performances of the symphony that Abbado has given with the orchestra on tour in recent months will know that this is an electrifying account, one that changes the way we should regard the work. It’s the first CD to go for in the Edition (and will be offered as advance music)!

• In sum, a superb addition to the Symphony Edition, and to Abbado’s discogaphy (also to be released in a separate Bruckner box later).

• Parallel to this Edition, Decca is releasing a 7-CD set of the early Abbado recordings on Decca

PACKAGING

• The attractive cube features four striking, dynamic portraits of Abbado from the 1970s to the present day.

• The 96-page four-language booklet has an interview with Abbado by journalist Julia Spinola (formerly of the Frankfürter Allgemeine) plus many photos.

Composer, writer, lecturer and broadcaster Anthony Payne was born in London and educated at Dulwich College and Durham University.

His completion of Elgar’s Third Symphony in 1997 brought him worldwide acclaim and numerous awards, including the Elgar Medal and awards from the South Bank Show and Evening Standard as well as the New York Critics’ Circle. Its premiere recording on NMC is still our best-selling recording (NMCD053).

Commissions include four major premieres at the BBC Proms and works for the BBC Philharmonic and London Sinfonietta. He has won British Composer Awards for his orchestral piece Visions and Journeys and his Second String Quartet, commissioned by the Allegri Quartet.

His orchestrations include a suite of Warlock songs, Elgar’s Crown of India, and Vaughan Williams’s Four Last Songs.

Phoenix Mass, written in 1965, was originally to have been a liturgical setting only for school choir but soon turned into something much bigger and more technically demanding. As Anthony Payne elaborated the project he experienced what he recalled as ‘the natural emergence of a new manner – long sought but previously only partly envisaged’ and despite the Medieval and Baroque connotations of its techniques and scoring, and a few passing resemblances to Britten and Maxwell Davies, this is the earliest of Payne’s acknowledged works that reveals a completely integrated musical character of its own.

Also on this recording is the Horn Trio, a piece symbolising marital harmony, written in 2006; The World's Winter (1976) for soprano and piano, setting two early poems of Tennyson – Nothing Will Die and All Things Will Die and Paean (1971) for solo piano.

Phoenix Mass, Paean and The World’s Winter have been transferred from LP in the absence of the original masters. The Horn Trio was recorded live for BBC Radio 3.

This is the first time the quartet ever recorded a work by Arnold Schoenberg.

It is also the first time in almost 30 years they have recorded a work by Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky; they have never recorded "Souvenir de Florence".

“The repertoire selection is simple but evocative:

‘Verklärte Nacht’ is a journey of love and forgiveness, where moonlight shimmers to light and helps transfigure the night”

‘Souvenir de Florence’ is a work of uncommon beauty and excitement, but also of darkness lying beneath its often bright surface” (Phil Setzer)

The album was recorded in September 2012 in LeFrak Auditorium at Queen's College in New York City, with the same producer/engineer that the quartet has worked with for the past 14 years, Da-Hong Seetoo.

International release is scheduled for May 2013 to coincide with a concerts featuring the CD’s programme, at Carnegie Hall in New York. The cover is part of a picture painted by the quartet's violinist Phil Setzer's daughter. The Emerson String Quartet stands alone in the history of string quartets with an incomparable list of achievements over three decades: nine Grammy® Awards (including two for Best Classical Album, an unprecedented honor for a chamber music group); three Gramophone Awards; the coveted Avery Fisher Prize and an international reputation for groundbreaking chamber music projects including cycles of the complete Beethoven, Bartók, Mendelssohn and Shostakovich string quartets in the world's musical capitals.

The Quartet has collaborated in concerts and on recordings with some of the greatest artists of our time. After 36 years of extensive touring, the Emerson Quartet continues to perform with the same benchmark integrity, energy and commitment that it has demonstrated since it was formed in 1976.

Arcadi Volodos is one of the world’s best pianists, celebrated as a “genius” and the “new Horowitz” for the unique combination of outstanding virtuosity and profound and expressive musicality.

Volodos devotes his new CD to the hardly known Catalan composer Frederic Mompou. He believes that Mompou’s solo piano works are of outstanding quality and open new worlds.

The fact that Mompou’s music is hardly known is a key to success for this CD. It can only reveal its deep und unique quality in the magnificent interpretation of Volodos.

The music of Catalonian composer Federico Mompou (1893-1987) is almost completely unknown today. Unjustly so, in the opinion of Russian star pianist Arcadi Volodos, who has devoted his new solo CD to this remarkable musical personality.

Carrying on the tradition established by his Spanish colleagues Enrique Granados and Isaac Albéniz, Mompou's works are subtle and delicate, mysterious and intimate, with a shimmering Impressionist palette. Mompou's role models are always in evidence in his many piano pieces: Chopin and Scriabin, Satie and Debussy. Yet in quiet, unobtrusive fashion, Mompou evolves a musical cosmos entirely his own from these models: his music is a true discovery.

Volodos has chosen for this CD pieces from the Mompou cycles Scènes d´Enfants (1915-18), Charmes (1920/21) and Música Callada (1959-67), which were among the composer's own favourites. In the last few years, Arcadi Volodos has regularly played works by the Catalonian composer in his recitals, prompting the Süddeutsche Zeitung to refer to his "deep sensitivity for inspired nuance".

Nino Machaidze’s new recording for Sony Classical, “Arias & Scenes”, looks further ahead to the new roles she will sing in the future. Machaidze is joined by Orchestre national de France and their resident Maestro Daniele Gatti.

French repertoire has become a major part of Machaidze’s career and is represented in this recital with arias by Massenet, Bizet and Ambroise Thomas. Machaidze debuted the role of Thaïs last year alongside Plácido Domingo in the lead role of Athanaël in Seville. She will debut at the Vienna State Opera this June in the role of Juliette with Plácido Domingo conducting and Piotr Beczala as Roméo.

Since her momentous breakthrough replacing Anna Netrebko as Juliette alongside Rolando Villazon’s Roméo in Salzburg’s 2008 production of Roméo et Juliette (Gounod), Nino’s career has taken off.

In an astonishingly short amount of time she debuted at many of the world’s major opera houses, in the lead heroine-roles alongside some of the greatest singers of our time, including Plácido Domingo (Thaïs) , Vittorio Grigolo (Roméo et Juliette at both La Scala and LA Opera) and Juan-Diego Flórez (I Puritani) among others.

39 CD-box with recordings of Bruno Walter’s later years in a high quality LP-sized box.

32 page LP-sized booklet with elaborate liner notes in German and English.

This box set contains the complete symphonies of Beethoven and Brahms, the later symphonies of Mozart, symphonies of Mahler and Bruckner, CDs with rehearsals and many more.

The German born conductor Bruno Walter (1876-1962) was known primarily for his interpretations of the Viennese school. Though out of step with 20th century trends he was such a fine musician that he became a major figure - filling the wide gulf between the extremes of his day - Arturo Toscanini and Wilhelm Furtwängler.

He was an associate of Gustav Mahler and a long and faithful proponent and interpreter of Mahler's music.

He conducted the world premieres of “Das Lied von der Erde” (1911) and the “Symphony No. 9” (1912).

In 1925, he helped institute the Salzburg Festival and was named musical director of the Berlin Staatsoper. In 1929, Walter had a falling out with the Berlin opera management and departed to succeed Wilhelm Furtwängler at the Leipzig Gewandhaus.

In 1933 he left Germany when the Nazis came to power and went to Austria and from there in 1938 to France. Walter finally left Europe in 1939 and settled in the United States where he already had a strong following. He built up a reputation as a respected conductor under whom musicians enjoyed working. Amongst other orchestras, he frequently conducted the New York Philharmonic.

In 1957 a West Coast recording ensemble named Columbia Symphony Orchestra was specially put together for Walter to produce new recordings of famous works by Bruckner and Mahler in stereo.

Not only violinists are eternally grateful to Antonio Vivaldi for the sheer abundance of concert works he bequeathed. The instrument he wrote for with the second greatest frequency is the bassoon (!), for which he created about forty concertos. Two of the most celebrated bookend Václav Vonášek’s debut recording and are supplemented by pieces by other 18th-century masters, J. S. Bach, C. P. E. Bach and G. F. Handel. Vonášek has primarily arranged for the bassoon compositions intended for the flute, as was customary in the Baroque period. They demonstrate the soloist’s exceptional qualities, for which he has garnered a number of accolades – first prizes at the International Double Reed Society competition (Melbourne, 2004) and the Prague Spring international competition (2009), third prize at the ARD Competition in Munich (2008). Václav Vonášek, accompanied by the distinguished young ensemble Barocco sempre giovane, makes the bassoon sing, unleashes a tempest and conjures up the dreamy atmosphere of the night...

The bassoon in the hands of a true master – virtuosic, colourful, enchanting.

The “Earth Requiem” is a gigantic work performed and recorded in Beijing in May 2011 in remembrance of the devastating Sichuan earthquake in 2008.

This is the first Chinese Requiem ever composed

This massive work by renowned Chinese composer Guan Xia is scored for 100 instrumentalists, a choir of 150 singers, an organ and 4 vocal soloists.

The well-established China National Symphony Orchestra invited the legendary French conductor Michel Plasson, who has long had a close association with EMI Classics, to work on the project. This partnership between West and East gives the recording a universal breadth as well as an overarching theme: the Earth. The emotional strength of the work is empowered by its gargantuan scale.

A concert and press conference will be held in May 2013 in Beijing's National Centre for the Performing Arts to mark the 5th anniversary of the Sichuan Earthquake.