Bizet: Jeux d'enfants (Petite Suite), Op. 22 (Children's Games)

Daniel Barenboim was born in Buenos Aires in 1942 and received his first piano lessons at age five from his mother. Later, he studied under his father, who would remain his only piano teacher. He gave his first public concert when he was seven and in 1952, he moved with his parents to Israel. At the age of ten, Barenboim gave his international debut performance as a solo pianist in Vienna and Rome, followed by Paris (1955), London (1956) and New York (1957). He began his recording career in 1954 as a pianist. He signed exclusively to EMI in 1966 and in the space of a few years he recorded the Beethoven Piano Sonatas, the Beethoven Piano Concertos (with Otto Klemperer), the Brahms Piano Concertos (with Sir John Barbirolli), and all the Mozart piano concertos with the English Chamber Orchestra, directing from the keyboard. Ever since his conducting debut in 1967 in London with the New Philharmonia Orchestra, Daniel Barenboim has been in great demand with leading orchestras around the world. He made his debut as an opera conductor at the Edinburgh Festival in 1973 with Mozart’s Don Giovanni and in 1981 he conducted for the first time in Bayreuth, where he would conduct every summer until 1999. His career continues to flourish with even-increasing success and he is now one of the most respected and admired musicians in the world.

The first CD is devoted to Barenboim performing music by Mozart, beginning with the Piano Concerto No.23 in A (K488) with the English Chamber Orchestra directed from the keyboard by the young Barenboim soon after he began recording for EMI. Then we hear Barenboim in chamber music, in Mozart’s Piano Trio in G K564, recorded almost 40 years later, with the outstanding Danish violinist Nikolaj Znaider and the young Belarusian cellist Kyril Zlotnikov, whom Barenboim admires so much that he has loaned him the Peresson cello that had belonged to Barenboim’s wife, the late Jacqueline du Pré. Next comes Mozart’s set of Variations on ‘Les hommes pieusement’ by Gluck, and then Barenboim moves to the role of operatic conductor with the Mask Trio from Don Giovanni, recorded with the cast he conducted at the Edinburgh Festival in 1973. The CD concludes with the finale from Mozart’s famous ‘Jupiter’ Symphony in which Barenboim conducts the Orchestre de Paris, of which he was principal conductor from 1975 to 1989.

CD 2 presents Barenboim in a wide range of contrasting repertoire, illustrating his extreme versatility as both pianist and conductor. The programme begins with Beethoven’s ‘Choral Fantasy’ which Barenboim conducts from the keyboard – no mean feat since the work involves a full symphony orchestra, a chorus and six vocal soloists, as well as the piano! The two movements from Bizet’s charming Jeux d’enfants are a further reminder of Barenboim’s time with the Orchestre de Paris, and then the opening movement from Bartók’s powerful First Piano Concerto gives Barenboim the opportunity to demonstrate his keyboard virtuosity in music of the 20th century. Chopin’s Prelude No.4 in E minor is a brief glimpse of Barenboim’s understanding of the music of this Polish genius before we move to the romantic third movement of Brahms’s monumental Second Piano Concerto with Barenboim as an inspired soloist. The last two pieces put Barenboim back in the role of conductor, firstly in Fauré’s hauntingly beautiful Pavane recorded in Paris and then in Bruckner’s magnificent Te Deum with the forces of the New Philharmonia Chorus and Orchestra and four distinguished vocal soloists.

A Czech conductor who excelled worldwide. Martin Turnovsky recordings for the first time on CD.

Paradoxically, a greater opportunity to witness the artistry of the remarkable Czech conductor Martin Turnovsky, whose teachers included Karel Ančerl and George Szell, has been afforded to audiences abroad.

After winning the international conducting competition in Besancon (1958), he had to wait almost a decade for the real launch of his international career, since the totalitarian regime in Czechoslovakia prevented him from travelling around the world.

He was chief conductor of the Dresdner Staatskapelle and Staatsoper, and, after emigrating to the West at the end of the 1960s, led the Operas in Oslo and Bonn, guest-conducted the New York Philharmonic, the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra, the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic and other major orchestras. Only after the regime change in Czechoslovakia in 1989 could he renew his work with orchestras on home soil. In the 1960s he made numerous recordings for Supraphon. The majority of those presented on these discs are now available on CD for the first time. They bear witness to Turnovsky’s distinct talent, which several years later would dazzle to the full in front of the world’s most renowned orchestras.

The 2010-11 season sees Paavo Järvi take up his position as Music Director of the Orchestre de Paris. Marking the launch of this collaboration, Virgin Classics is releasing a programme of orchestral works by Bizet, the first recording from this leading French orchestra and its Estonian-born conductor.

With the 2010-11 season, Paavo Järvi assumes his new role as Music Director of the Orchestre de Paris, taking over from Christoph Eschenbach, who spent 10 years with the orchestra, and following in the footsteps of figures such as Charles Munch, Herbert von Karajan, Georg Solti and Daniel Barenboim.

To date, Järvi’s Virgin Classics recordings have focused on music by Nordic and Russian composers, and – in his recent work with the Frankfurt Radio Symphony Orchestra – Mahler and Brahms. Now, with the Orchestre de Paris, he presents a programme by Bizet, a quintessentially French composer, who, as Järvi points out, receives insufficient recognition for his works beyond Carmen. The release comprises the vernal Symphony in C, written when Bizet was still a teenager, the delightful suite Jeux d’Enfants (Children’s Games) and the composer’s second symphony, Roma, a work he revised on a number of occasions, and which is rarely heard.

Bizet's Carmen was misunderstood at its premiere in 1875. The Opera-Comique was a place where respectable families could be entertained, and where virginal daughters could be introduced to blameless sons with marriage in mind. No one expected to see uncouth gypsies, dirty smugglers and vulgar cigarette girls on its stage, let alone unvarnished human passions and murder, as Bizet so vividly portrayed them in Carmen!

This 2CD set brings together Ansermet's complete Bizet stereo recordings for Decca, are good-natured and piquant without being showy for showiness's sake. The 'rural' element of so much of the music in the Bizet suites is emphasised and in L'Arlesienne, Ansermet ensures that the Provence sun and starlight shine clearly through the music's textures. Likewise, his approached to the early Symphony is summery and there is an unpressured willingness to give the symphony space in which to breathe. Nothing is forced, and melodies are allowed to come into happy bloom.

Joaquin Turina was born in Seville, the city in which most of Carmen is set, so he could hardly avoid composing 'Spanish music'. Turina's Danzas fantasticas are more abstract and less stereotypical than some of the other Spanish repertory Ansermet recorded, but they require no less of a visceral response. Ansermet's languid, sensual, intoxicating, and sometimes even sinister reading of this score, brilliantly captured by Decca's engineering team, remains a standard by which other recordings should be judged.

At the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries, the artlessness, tenderness and magic of the child's world fascinated several French composers. In these sets of pieces for piano duet, each transports the listener to the land of dreams and takes a nostalgic look back to his own early life. With restful languor and penetrating timbre, Gabriel Fauré guides us into the intimate universe of the young 'Dolly' (1893-96). In 'Jeux d’enfants' (1871), Georges Bizet evokes juvenile joys with typically French finesse, poetry and clarity. In his 'Petite Suite' (1889), Claude Debussy offers four tableaux that so charmed listeners to his elegant, supple playing; and finally it is the turn of Maurice Ravel, with his passionate devotion to the theme of childhood, to tell us the tales of 'Ma mère l'Oye' (1908-10), thereby creating one of the most poetic and discreetly lyrical works of his time.

Winners of a number of awards, the sisters Mona and Rica Bard now present their first CD, a pas de deux though 80 years of French piano music. At one and at two instruments, they create a panorama of piano sound, ranging from the simulation of orchestral colours, percussive and motoric élan to the suggestion of an intensive song-like quality. With Bizet‘s Jeux d’enfants, Ravel‘s Rapsodie espagnole and Poulenc‘s Sonata for Two Pianos, this SACD contains three 'secret' masterworks by their respective composers. With its combination of elegance, irony and samba rhythms, the Scaramouche Suite quickly became Darius Milhaud‘s most popular work. Four hands, two sisters, one pulse – Mona & Rica Bard have won national and international awards at competitons; among them the German Music Competition, the Concorso Internazionale di Musica da Camera Palma d`Oro (Finale Ligure) and the Concorso Internazionale per Duo Pianistico Twenty Fingers (Rome). The Ensemble was accepted in the National Selection of Young Artists’ Concerts of the German Music Council and in the artists’ list of the association Yehudi Menuhin – Live Music Now. Extensive concert engagements have taken Mona & Rica Bard throughout Europe, to Asia the USA and to numerous festivals such as the Mecklenburg-Vorpommern Festival, the Schleswig-Holstein Music Festival, the NCPA May Festival Peking and the Chicago Piano Duo Festival.