New Release Round-up,
New Release Round-Up 10th April 2020
Today's new releases include the Bach Cello Suites from Alisa Weilerstein, Mascagni's Cavalleria rusticana from Marek Janowski, Schubert's piano music for four hands from Richard Egarr and Alexandra Nepomnyashchaya, and a recital exploring many and varied depictions of Eve from Anna Prohaska and Julius Drake.
For her second album on Pentatone, Weilerstein tackles the cellist’s Everest – she’s been performing the complete Suites in recital on a regular basis over the past couple of years, with the Los Angeles Times observing that ‘her command of the cello, of its sound and of Bach, was consummate’ in a review of a 2018 performance in Costa Mesa, and Classical Source describing her playing at St John’s Smith Square the previous year as ‘formidable in all departments’.
Available Formats: 2 CDs, MP3, FLAC, Hi-Res FLAC
Following her award-winning album Serpent and Fire (which focused on Dido and Cleopatra), Prohaska teams up with Julius Drake for this exploration of representations of Eve; the programme includes music by Purcell, Messiaen, Fauré, Wolf, Reimann, Brahms, Stravinsky, Ravel and Bernstein.
Available Formats: CD, MP3, FLAC, Hi-Res FLAC
Using a French Pleyel from 1848, husband-and-wife duo Richard Egarr and Alexandra Nepomnyashchaya explore Schubert’s music for four hands, with the great Fantasie in F minor D940 as the centrepiece; the programme also includes two rondos (D608 and D951), the Sonata in B flat D617, and the Duo in A minor 947 from which the album takes its title.
Available Formats: CD, MP3, FLAC, Hi-Res FLAC
JS Bach, Complete Keyboard Edition Vol. 3: In the French Style / À la française
Benjamin Alard (harpsichord/organ)
Volume Three of the French organist and harpsichordist’s Bach odyssey focuses on the interplay between French and German styles in works including three English Suites, the Overture in F BWV820, the Minuets BWV841-3, and the Aria in F major after Couperin BWV587; excerpts from Couperin’s own L'Art de toucher le clavecin also feature, alongside music by Johann Kaspar Ferdinand Fischer, Nicolas de Grigny, and André Raison.
Available Formats: 3 CDs, MP3, FLAC
This third and final instalment of the quartet’s historically-informed, modern-instrument Beethoven cycle presents two of the late quartets (Nos. 13 & 14) alongside Nos. 5, 6 and 11; previous volumes in the series have been described as ‘strong, muscular but sensitive’ (The Observer), ‘magnificently multi-layered’ (Classical Music), and ‘profoundly Beethovenian’ (The Sunday Times).
Available Formats: MP3, FLAC, Hi-Res FLAC
The mainstay of the Taiwanese pianist’s programme is the composer’s own twenty-minute Lisztian paraphrase on themes from his controversial first opera Powder Her Face; the album also includes the Dowland-inspired Still Sorrowing and Darknesse Visible, Blanca Variations (commissioned for the Clara Haskil International Piano Competition in 2016), the Mazurkas Op. 27, and ‘Souvenir’ from the soundtrack for the 2018 film Colette.
Available Formats: CD, MP3, FLAC, Hi-Res FLAC
Le secret de Monsieur Marais
Vittorio Ghielmi (viola da gamba), Il Suonar parlante Orchestra, Luca Pianca
The ‘secret’ of the title refers to the special codes which the French composer and violist used to denote ornamentation on his manuscripts - a notation system which appears to have been shared only with his direct students, according to Vittorio Ghielmi’s research on autographs at the Salzburg Mozarteum. Ghielmi plays an instrument by the Parisian luthier Michel Colichon, who was a friend of Marais’s teacher Sainte-Colombe.
Available Formats: CD, MP3, FLAC, Hi-Res FLAC
Taking its cue from lutenist, singer and composer Thomas Mace’s 1676 book Musick’s Monument, this collection of music from seventeenth-century London features works by composers including Alfonso Ferrabosco, Giovanni Coperario, William Lawes, John Jenkins and Christopher Simpson; L’Achéron play a set of viols built to specifications laid out in Mace’s treatise.
Available Formats: CD, MP3, FLAC, Hi-Res FLAC, Hi-Res+ FLAC
Mascagni: Cavalleria rusticana
Melody Moore (Santuzza), Brian Jagde (Turiddu), Elisabetta Fiorillo (Lucia), Lester Lynch (Alfio), Roxana Constantinescu (Lola); Dresdner Philharmonie, Leipzig Radio Choir, Marek Janowski
Recorded live in concert in Dresden last March, this is a rare foray into verismo for the octogenarian conductor, whose discography on Pentatone includes a widely acclaimed set of Wagner’s complete mature operas. The cast features American tenor Brian Jagde (in his Pentatone debut) as Turiddu, a role which he subsequently performed with ‘explosive bravado’ (BachTrack) at De National Opera in Amsterdam and is set to reprise at the Lyric Opera of Chicago this autumn.
Available Formats: CD, MP3, FLAC, Hi-Res FLAC
The world premiere recording of Glass’s incidental music for Sam Gold’s 2019 Broadway production of King Lear, which starred Glenda Jackson, Ruth Wilson and Matt Maher. In a recent interview with Playbill, Glass (who also composed music for Cymbeline and Henry IV in the early 1990s) spoke of his mission to create something which ‘really becomes part of the bone and muscle of the piece’; the four musicians were integrated into the on-stage action for the production.
Available Format: CD
Released digitally to mark Good Friday (the CD will follow on 1st May), this all-Pärt programme from the 40-voice Massachusetts-based choir includes the Salve Regina, Magnificat & Nunc dimittis, L'Abbé Agathon and Peace Be Upon You, and finishes with the 1985 setting of the Stabat Mater. You can read more about the project here.
Available Formats: MP3, FLAC, Hi-Res FLAC, Hi-Res+ FLAC
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