Alps 3D Paradise of Europe (2013)

If you’re approaching these familiar Bach concertos for the first time, or want inexpensive performances that still provide decent musical rewards, then you won’t go far wrong with this Eloquence disc. Salvatore Accardo (who also directs the Chamber Orchestra of Europe) is soloist in the violin concertos in A minor and E major. Both are earnest, direct readings that hardly differ from Accardo’s EMI remakes.

How appropriate that Harnoncourt, a conductor who through recordings has probably done more than anyone else to allow us to explore Bach's choral music, should now turn his attention to Mendelssohn; a composer who, as a conductor, was responsible in his time for the revival of Bach's fortunes, not to mention revising the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra's programmes to ensure that Mozart, Beethoven, Haydn, Handel and Bach formed the backbone of the repertoire—exactly those composers, in fact, who form the core of Harnoncourt's discography.

Maisky takes the dual role of soloist and conductor on this single disc issue. It receives a well-deserved Penguin Rosette in The Penguin Guide to Recorded Classical Music 2009. I wasn't familiar with the works on this CD before buying it. I'm an avid classical music CD collector and not too shabby amateur pianist (heavy emphasis on the amateur) and am currently listening to a course on Papa Haydn by Robert Greenberg from "The Great Courses" (formerly The Teaching Company), in addition to personally working on a Haydn Piano Sonata. As such, I've got a new found appreciation for this composer.

For over a decade, Yannick Nézet-Séguin and the Chamber Orchestra of Europe (COE) have been reunited each summer in the German spa town of Baden-Baden. In 2021, their work there led to a well-received complete Beethoven symphony cycle, released on DG in 2022. In the summer of 2022 Nézet-Séguin became artistic director of the Festspielhaus’s new La Capitale d’Été festival and during that and the next year’s residencies, the COE and Nézet-Séguin performed and recorded all four of Brahms symphonies. The performances were euphorically received.

Beatrice Rana, partnered by the Chamber Orchestra of Europe and conductor Yannick Nézet-Séguin, performs the piano concertos of Robert Schumann and Clara Wieck-Schumann. She complements them with Liszt’s transcription for solo piano of Robert’s song ‘Widmung’, an exuberant dedication of love, composed in the year of Robert and Clara’s marriage. The previous year (1839), Robert had written to Clara: “You complete me as a composer, as I do you. Every thought of yours comes from mysoul, just as I have to thank you for all my music.”

It would be difficult to speak about the life and work of Finnish conductor Paavo Berglund without mentioning the name of his illustrious compatriot, composer Jean Sibelius—but the reverse is also true, as Berglund spent a lifetime exploring the profound depths of Sibelius's music and bringing it to an ever wider public. After three recordings of the complete Sibelius symphonies on CD, Berglund returned to these titanic works in 1998, aged nearly 70, with a level of insight—shaped over the course of decades—that perhaps no other conductor has ever achieved.

Douglas Boyd and the Chamber Orchestra of Europe play Bach's concerto masterpieces with wonderful sense of rhythms, refinement and articulation.

Great chorus, weak soloists: thank heaven Handel's oratorio Israel in Egypt, like his oratorio Messiah, is more a work for chorus with orchestra and vocal soloists than, like most of his other oratorios, a work for vocal soloists with orchestra and chorus. From a choral point of view, this 2006 recording by the Chamber Orchestra of Europe is indeed superlative. The international chorus sings with surprising unanimity, amazing cohesion, and impressive diction.