Barber, S: Overture to The School for Scandal, Op. 5

The eight popular pieces on this disc illustrate a variety of aspects of American music. From the impudent piquancy of 18th-century Europe; the picture-postcard colour of Latin America; the urban neon of New York and the metropolitan appeal of the French capital, to the sombre reflection of Barber's thoughtful-provoking Adagio: all are masterpieces of succinct characterisation and orchestral refinement.

Samuel Barber (1910-1981) is best-known today for his Adagio for Strings, which was originally written as the slow movement for an early string quartet, and has become one of most played pieces of classical music. The Adagio was first perfomed in its orchestral form by Toscanini, with the Essay for Orchestra in the same concert. These works are typical of Barber's output, being overtly European in outlook and language.Barber composed music in most genres: two symphonies; concertos for piano, cello and violin, two grand operas; ballets; choral works; chamber music and a great number of songs. This selection of works includes the beautifully reflective Knoxville: Summer 1915, written to a sensitive text from James Agee's unfinished novel A Death in the Family. Also included is the Violin Concerto with it's lovely slow movement and the Overture to a School for Scandal, which was the first of Barber's works to be performed by a major orchestra.

This year, we celebrate the thirty-year conducting career of Neeme Järvi with Chandos Records, as well as the conductor’s own seventy-fifth birthday.

We mark the occasion with this two-disc set of highlights, featuring a varied selection of concert hall rarities and core classics, along with some popular showpieces and examples of Järvi’s championing of Estonian and American music.

In the course of his conducting career, Järvi has amassed a distinguished discography of more than 440 recordings, well over 150 of them for Chandos.

Järvi has a rare ability to galvanise an orchestra into giving an interpretation of exceptional vigour and drive. Gramophone said of his recently concluded Halvorsen series (from which La Mélancolie and Bojarernes Indtogsmarsch are taken): ‘Järvi finds in the music a drama and pathos that might come as a revelation even to the composer.’

Also on this disc is the ‘Jester’s Dance’ from Tchaikovsky’s The Snow Maiden, a personal favourite of the conductor’s, and one that Järvi often performs as an encore at his many concerts around the world.

This triumvirate of composers represents an essentially lyrical impulse in American music. Leonard Bernstein’s Arias and Barcarolles was completed in 1988 but had existed in some form since 1955. The cycle of songs about love and marriage was written for voice and piano (four-hands) but orchestrated, under Bernstein’s supervision, by Bright Sheng, and premièred by Gerard Schwarz. Eclectic, exciting, jazzy, and Mahlerian, it reflects Bernstein in all his multifaceted glory. Barber’s concert overture is a vibrant work, fizzing with energy, whilst Diamond’s Elegy offers a poignant, noble and at times violent lament for Ravel.