SACDs - Korngold

This is the 4th concerto album of Arabella Steinbacher on PentaTone.

All three albums were unanimously reviewed as top of the bill. Gramophone selected the Bartok album as ‘Editor’s Choice’.

Arabella constantly travels the world to perform with major orchestras, so check her concert schedule on http://www.arabella-steinbacher.com/concerts.html for opportunities to do venue sales. Arabella is always happy to do signing sessions.

The new album features popular romantic works and make it a very commercial item.

• Korngold’s chamber works are full of unusual and densely packed ideas • They are perfomed with precision and verve by camerata freden

The ravishing Australian soprano Cheryl Barker has an important career in many major opera houses – English National Opera, Scottish Opera, Welsh National Opera and The Royal Opera Covent Garden among them – and concert halls. She is widely celebrated for her riveting performances. Pure Diva: is her very personal tribute to her teacher, the great Dame Joan Hammond, a disc, Barker says, “that feels as if it’s been a long time coming”.

The orchestral scenes are high drama from the first note to the last reverberation. Cheryl’s glorious lyric soprano rides the wave of Guillaume Tourniaire’s orchestral texture in grand operatic scenes, arias and songs made famous by Hammond. They include Tatyana’s Letter Scene, Dido's Lament, Desdemona’s Willow Song, and other arias by Verdi, Dvořák, Korngold, and Offenbach. Cheryl’s visceral portrayals of these operatic heroines convey the full emotional depth of these multi-dimensional characters in extremis.

The tributes with piano accompaniment (by Timothy Young) provide a contrast to the preceding drama, encore pieces beloved of Joan Hammond, the biggest selling recording artist during the war. Her recording of The Green Hills o’ Somerset became a best seller and Cheryl includes it as a homage here. The delightful rarity Shadows is a song written for Hammond by the Australian composer Ronald Settle.

Illuminating CD notes are by the late and great vocal commentator John Steane who was an insightful witness to Dame Joan Hammond (1912-96) and all the great singers of her era and those that followed.

Cheryl Barker’s relationship with Melba Recordings stretches back almost to the label’s beginning: Puccini=Passions (MR301085) was her acclaimed 2003 collection of arias with Richard Bonynge conducting Orchestra Victoria.

Death is almost as natural an ingredient in our lives as love, but whereas love is something bright and beautiful, life-giving, death is dark and irreversible. A beautifully crafted CD, centred around Shakespeare’s poem Come, Away, Death, taken from Twelfth Night. The sublime performance of Marianne Beate Kielland, takes the listener on a journey through this dark subject but brings them through it, enlightened and glad to be alive!

Korngold began working on his 1st symphony in Vienna in 1951 and completed it in 1952. The work summarized his whole life, which had been lived between two worlds: opera and film and between Europe and the United States. It was intended as a tribute to his “refuge” America and was dedicated to President Roosevelt. Albrecht has been acclaimed for his commitment to 20th century music.