Coming Soon,
Handel's Agrippina starring Joyce DiDonato and other forthcoming highlights
Highlights for early 2020 include Handel’s Agrippina from Il Pomo d’Oro and Maxim Emelyanychev with Joyce DiDonato in the title-role, two Charpentier works depicting Orpheus’s descent into the underworld from Vox Luminis and Lionel Meunier, and Mariss Jansons’s final recording – Strauss’s Vier letzte Lieder with Diana Damrau and the Symphonieorchester des Bayerischen Rundfunks.
Recorded shortly before DiDonato gave ‘one of her finest performances’ (The Guardian) as the power-hungry empress in Barrie Kosky's Covent Garden staging this autumn, this starrily-cast Agrippina also features Franco Fagioli as Nerone, Jakub Józef Orliński as Ottone, Elsa Benoit as Poppea and Luca Pisaroni as Claudio. DiDonato will reprise the role in David McVicar's production at the Metropolitan Opera in the spring. Released 31st January.
Available Formats: 3 CDs, MP3, FLAC, Hi-Res FLAC
The American mezzo Kate Lindsey will sing the role of Nerone opposite DiDonato in the Met Agrippina next year, but for this second solo album on Alpha she explores three cantatas which depict a very different Classical heroine: Alessandro Scarlatti’s Ebra d’amor fuggia, Handel’s Ah! Crudel, nel pianto mio, and Haydn’s Arianna a Naxos. Released 31st January.
Available Formats: CD, MP3, FLAC, Hi-Res FLAC
This performance of the Eighth was recorded live in Philadelphia, just a week after the hundredth anniversary of the work’s US premiere, which was given by the orchestra under Leopold Stokowski; the soloists are Angela Meade, Erin Wall, Lisette Oropesa, Elizabeth Bishop, Mihoko Fujimura, Anthony Dean Griffey, Markus Werba and John Relyea. Released 17th January.
Available Formats: MP3, FLAC, Hi-Res FLAC
Strauss: Vier letzte Lieder
Diana Damrau (soprano), Helmut Deutsch (piano), Symphonieorchester des Bayerischen Rundfunks, Mariss Jansons
Almost a decade on from her highly acclaimed album of Strauss orchestral songs with Christian Thielemann and the Münchner Philharmoniker (which prompted The Telegraph to describe her as ‘among the leading lyric Strauss singers of the day’), Damrau turns to the Four Last Songs with Mariss Jansons on what would be the Latvian conductor’s final recording. Her regular collaborator Helmut Deutsch joins her for songs including Morgen!, Befreit, and Strauss’s final song Malven. Released 31st January.
Available Formats: MP3, FLAC, Hi-Res FLAC
This is the third and final release in the Norwegian orchestra’s superb series of Strauss tone-poems with their Chief Conductor (who departs at the end of next season to become Music Director of the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra); previous instalments have been praised for their ‘patient musicality and sense of coherence’ (Gramophone) and ‘standards of orchestral virtuosity’ (The Sunday Times). Released 14th February.
Available Formats: CD, MP3, FLAC, Hi-Res FLAC, Hi-Res+ FLAC
Hot on the heels of their outstanding debut album of Korngold (one of our 2019 Recordings of the Year), Wilson and the newly-resurrected Sinfonia of London turn to French orchestral music of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries; the programme includes favourites such as the Méditation from Massenet’s Thaïs and Chabrier’s España, and relative rarities like Saint-Saëns’s Le Rouet d’Omphale. Released 31st January.
Available Formats: SACD, MP3, FLAC, Hi-Res FLAC
Liszt: Dante Symphony, Künstlerfestzug & Tasso
Staatskapelle Weimar, Knabenchor der Jenaer Philharmonie, Damen des Opernchores des Deutschen Nationaltheaters Weimar, Kirill Karabits
Following their riveting account of the single completed act of the opera Sardanapalo back in March (which was crowned Rediscovery of the Year in our 2019 awards earlier this month), Karabits and his Weimar forces undertake more Lisztian excavation with the world premiere recording on CD of the Künstlerfestzug zur Schillerfeier from 1859, initially conceived as a prelude for the melodrama Vor hundert Jahren. Released 17th January.
Available Formats: CD, MP3, FLAC
Drawing chiefly on music from both books of The Well-Tempered Clavier, A Musical Offering and the Clavier-Übung III, the award-winning ensemble explore Bach's links with the English genres of the Fantasy and In nomine, which have been the subjects of several of their previous albums. A second instalment will appear in 2021. Released 31st January.
Available Formats: CD, MP3, FLAC, Hi-Res FLAC
The Turkish pianist and composer began his preparations for next year’s Beethoven anniversary back in May 2017, at which point he had fourteen of the piano sonatas under his belt (including The Tempest, Waldstein, Moonlight and Appassionata, which he recorded for Naïve in his thirties) and eighteen to learn from scratch; he describes the results as ‘some of the very sincerest work I [am] capable of’. Released 17th January.
Available Formats: 9 CDs, MP3, FLAC, Hi-Res FLAC
Charpentier: Orphée aux enfers
Reinoud Van Mechelen (tenor), Vox Luminis, A Nocte Temporis, Lionel Meunier
Following several albums of English and German baroque repertoire, Meunier and his ensemble make their first recorded foray into French music with two works depicting Orpheus’s descent into the underworld: the incomplete 1687 opera La descente d'Orphée aux enfers and the Carissimi-influenced Orphée descendant aux Enfers, composed three years earlier and scored for three voices. Look out for David’s interviews with both conductor and soloist early next year. Released 17th January.
Available Formats: CD, MP3, FLAC, Hi-Res FLAC
For her Pentatone debut, the Mannheim-born soprano (who will reprise her role as Eva opposite Jonas Kaufmann’s Walther in the Bavarian State Opera’s Meistersinger next summer) presents a programme of French and German song, featuring Schumann’s Sechs Gesänge Op. 107 and Gedichte und Requiem, Poulenc’s Fiançailles pour rire and La courte paille, and Zemlinsky’s Walzergesänge nach toskanischen Liedern. Released 7th February.
Available Formats: CD, MP3, FLAC, Hi-Res FLAC
This will be Nelsons’s first New Year’s Day visit to Vienna, though he’s conducted the orchestra regularly since 2010 (their joint discography includes a recent cycle of the Beethoven symphonies and Mahler’s Symphony No. 2). The programme includes the traditional waltzes and polkas by the Strauss family, Ziehrer’s Overture to Die Landstreiche, Suppé’s Light Cavalry Overture, and (in deference to the 2020 anniversary) excerpts from Beethoven’s Twelve Contredanses, WoO 14. Released 10th January.
Available Formats: 2 CDs, MP3, FLAC, Hi-Res FLAC
Released 31st January.
Available Format: DVD Video
Released 31st January.
Available Format: Blu-ray
Chris O'Reilly - Chief Executive
