1.54 (2016)

Annie Fischer enjoys a singular reputation within the great tradition of Hungarian pianists due to her deeply moving and romantically intimate performances. She became famous and admired on account of her uncompromising, spiritually absorbing interpretations. But she left behind only a few studio recordings; like many other musicians, she was critically opposed to working in the studio. Her recordings of the Mozart concertos for EMI, however, became benchmark interpretations. Most of Annie Fischer’s commercial recordings appeared in the 1950s and 1960s, up until her husband’s death in 1968. She retired from the podium in grief for some time afterwards.

Annie Fischer enjoys a singular reputation within the great tradition of Hungarian pianists due to her deeply moving and romantically intimate performances. She became famous and admired on account of her uncompromising, spiritually absorbing interpretations. But she left behind only a few studio recordings; like many other musicians, she was critically opposed to working in the studio. Her recordings of the Mozart concertos for EMI, however, became benchmark interpretations. Most of Annie Fischer’s commercial recordings appeared in the 1950s and 1960s, up until her husband’s death in 1968. She retired from the podium in grief for some time afterwards.

Nikolaus Harnoncourt The Complete Sony Recordings brings together for the first time Harnoncourt s complete recordings from 2002-2015 with his Concentus Musicus Wien, the Wiener Philharmonike, the Chamber Orchestra of Europe and the Symphonieorchester des Bayrischen Rundfunks. The Sony Classical edition features his famous symphony recordings of Mozart, Haydn, Beethoven and Bruckner, alongside his celebrated performances of great choral works such as the Verdi, Brahms and Mozart Requiems and Haydn's Die Schöpfung, as well as Mozart's opera Zaide, Haydn's Orlando paladino and Gershwin's Porgy and Bess. Also included are previously authorized but unreleased recordings of J. S. Bach s Cantatas Nos. 26 & 36, Beethoven's Christus am Ölberge and Dvorák's Stabat Mater.

As a composer of orchestral music, Alexander Scriabin is best known for his last two idiosyncratic symphonies, the Poem of Ecstasy and Prometheus: The Poem of Fire, which are essentially symphonic poems, not symphonies in the conventional sense. The Symphony No. 1 (1900) and the Symphony No. 2 (1901), however, are more recognizable as symphonies in their multiple-movement forms, and their durations are comparable to the expansive symphonies of Scriabin's contemporary, Gustav Mahler. They also share the post-Romantic tendency toward Wagnerian harmonies, rhapsodic melodies, and lush orchestration, which, in Scriabin's case, were developed to express heightened emotional states and mystical transcendence. This 2016 double SACD by Valery Gergiev and the London Symphony Orchestra presents each of the symphonies on its own disc, and the high-quality multichannel sound is ideal for bringing across the subtle nuances of tone color and the shifting of dynamics that are characteristic of his style.]

Orange Mountain Music presents this new limited edition 11 disc boxed set - The Symphonies by Philip Glass. This collection features conductor Dennis Russell Davies who has arranged the commission of nine of ten Glass symphonies, leading the orchestras over which he has presided during the past 15 years including the Bruckner Orchester Linz, Vienna Radio Symphony Orchestra, Sinfonieorchester Basel, and the Stuttgart Chamber Orchestra. This collection is the fruit of a 20 year collaboration between Glass and Davies and showcases a wide variety within this surprising body of work by Glass.