Search
Special Offers
Awards
Online Payment
Visit us
Presto News - 20th July 2009Sir Edward Downes |
 British conductor Sir Edward Downes and his wife Joan died last weekend at an assisted suicide clinic in Zurich. They had been married for 54 happy years and decided to end their own lives together rather than continue to struggle with serious health problems. He was 85 and had become almost blind and increasingly deaf, while she had recently been diagnosed with cancer. I met Sir Edward a couple of times while I was reading music at Birmingham University. He was then the president of our University Music Society having previously also been a student there, and he came across as one of the kindest and most down to earth people you could ever meet.  Sir Edward and Lady Joan Downes In fact by general consensus he was a thoroughly nice man, well loved by orchestras for his kind persona and unassuming way. He was also completely devoted to the music, and his passion inspired many singers and musicians to some truly great performances. His long and fruitful association with the Royal Opera House began in 1952 as an assistant to Rafael Kubelik and over the next fifty years conducted 950 performances of 49 different operas. Elsewhere he became Music Director of Opera Australia in 1970 and conducted the first performance in the Sydney Opera House in 1973 (the Australian premiere of Prokofiev’s War and Peace). He was also closely associated with the BBC Philharmonic Orchestra (previously the BBC Northern) with whom he also made a number of recordings. In the opera house Downes was renowned for his performances of Verdi, particularly the early works. In 1993 he gave the first professional British performance of Stiffelio, in an edition that he had prepared himself. In all, he conducted 25 of Verdi’s 28 operas and at the end of the 1990s he was the driving force behind a scheme to perform Verdi’s complete operatic oeuvre to mark the centenary of his death. He was also an expert in Russian music and gave many first performances in the west of works by Prokofiev, Shostakovich and Tchaikovsky, translated many Russian librettos, prepared performing editions and completed scores to Prokofiev’s Maddalena and Eugene Onegin. He also championed the works of modern English composers, premiering among other works, Richard Rodney Bennett's Victory (1970), Peter Maxwell-Davies's Taverner (1972) and John Tavener's Thérèse (1979). Once asked why he had never achieved the fame and recognition that some of his colleagues had achieved he replied “I suppose because I wasn’t enough of a bastard. Solti, you see, he was a bastard – a marvellous man and a great conductor, but a complete bastard when he needed to be. That sort of ruthlessness just wasn’t in my nature." What mattered most to Downes was making great music with great musicians. He did plenty of that and will be sadly missed. Unlike some of his contemporaries he didn't make a huge number of recordings, and a fair number of those are not currently available but if you want to browse through what is currently available you can do so here.
|
Share
Chris O'Reilly - chris@prestoclassical.co.uk |
New Releases20th July 2009 |
This is just the pick of the recent releases. The New Releases and Future Releases pages are always available for browsing all the new and forthcoming releases. |
 Wagner - Die Walküre (Bayreuth 1955)Chor & Orchester der Bayreuther Festspiele, Joseph KeilberthIn 2006/07 Testament released for the first time ever (on 14 CDs – SBT14 1412) the legendary stereo recordings made by Decca at Bayreuth of the first cycle of the 1955 performances of the Ring, conducted by Joseph Keilberth and staged by the Festival’s co-director, the radical regisseur Wieland Wagner. Partly for recording security, partly out of interest, Decca’s engineers under producer Peter Andry also recorded the second cycle, from which this first-ever release of Die Walküre is drawn, providing a chance to appreciate the depth of New Bayreuth’s casting resources. Martha Mödl took over as Brünnhilde (she and Astrid Varnay regularly alternated in the Festival cycles between 1953 and 1956) and Varnay took over the role of Sieglinde from Gré Brouwenstijn, thus returning to the role with which she had made her first appearance anywhere on a professional stage – at the Metropolitan Opera in 1941. |
 Beethoven - Symphony No. 9Swedish Chamber Orchestra Örebro, Thomas DausgaardThomas Dausgaard and the Swedish Chamber Orchestra, with Boris Berezovsky as soloist in the piano concertos, have received excellent reviews and several awards for their series of the complete orchestral music of Beethoven. They are joined on this the latest recording in the cycle by leading vocal soloists from Sweden and Denmark – among them Inger Dam-Jensen – and the DR Vocal Ensemble and Choir. |
 England My EnglandChoir of King’s College, CambridgeThere is surely no more quintessentially English sound than that of the Choir of King’s College, Cambridge, its unaccompanied voices – evocative of immemorial sandstone, of cool cloisters, of evensong in church, chapel and cathedral – serene in the music of Shakespeare’s contemporaries Byrd and Gibbons, ethereal in Delius heard of a summer’s night across the Backs of the River Cam. |
 The Bohemian AlbumAmsterdam SinfoniettaAmsterdam Sinfonietta has combined a romantic masterpiece of the string orchestra repertoire with two wild compositions from the inter-war period. Dvorák, Haas, and Schulhoff hardly make a conventional mixture, but all three of these composers had their roots in a region which was known for many centuries as “Bohemia.” One can hear this common ground in the rhythmic diversity, the influence of folk music, and the melodic inventiveness that characterizes their music. |
 Ingudesmann and Joo - A Little Nightmare Music“The funniest show on music and the life of musicians since the great Victor Borge. I couldn’t stop crying of laughter for the whole evening. Go see these gifted musicians. What they show is life at its funniest side. It isn’t just entertaining, it is hilarious!” Gidon Kremer, violinist |
 MelodiyaThis month's latest Russian importsThis month there are seven more fascinating releases to come out of Russia, including the last recordings of Leonid Kogan (a violinist who I consider one of the finest of all time), Mark Ermler recording of Prokofiev's massive War and Peace, and Svetlanov recording a whole disc of Glinka. |
 Frederick Chopin InstituteFirst 10 releases in a new series of Chopin's works played on historical instrumentsThis project is realised on historical instruments from Chopin's times: pianos by Erard (Paris, 1849) and Pleyel (Paris, 1848). Both instruments are excellently preserved, meeting every requirement for concert performance, and allow Chopin's music to be heard just as it was written. Key features of the instruments' construction and mechanism, allied to their characteristic tonal qualities, create a different set of possibilities for interpretation from those of modern-day pianos. These new recordings of the complete works of Chopin allow contemporary listeners to discover the historical models, bringing us closer to Romantic times and revealing the long forgotten soundworld of that era. |
 EMI 20th Century Classics5 new re-issuesAmonst the latest batch of releases are discs of Stockhausen, Prokofiev, Poulenc, Britten and Bartok. This series is almost unique in that it can offer both an ideal introduction to a composer or part of a composers' oeuvre, but also some of the very finest versions of certain works available on disc. |
Your details will be used only in accordance with our Privacy Policy. |
Copyright © 2002-13 Presto Classical Limited, all rights reserved.