Anton Dolgov

Anton Fils, dessen kurzes Leben mit nur 27 Jahren im Jahr 1760 als Cellist der Hofkapelle in Mannheim endete. Schon Zeitgenossen wie Schubarth haben den frühen Tod dieses hochbegabten und einfallsreichen Komponisten bedauert. Zum Glück für die Nachwelt hinterließ Fils eine stattliche Anzahl sinfonischer Kompositionen: So ist zu hoffen, daß das L’Orfeo Barockorchester und das Label cpo dieser ersten CD noch einige folgen lassen, um den überlieferten Schatz von etwa dreißig Sinfonien dieses Meisters den Musikfreunden zugänglich zu machen.

Though a pupil of the great orchestrator Rimsky-Korsakov, and in turn a teacher to the likes of Rachmaninov, Glière, and Scriabin, Anton Arensky himself is a composer often forgotten when contemplating the Russian greats. Productive in many genres, it is perhaps in his chamber music that this unduly neglected composer truly shines. His writing has much of the same textural sophistication and melodic beauty as his close friend, Tchaikovsky. In fact, the theme on which the Second Quartet's Variations are based is drawn from a Tchaikovsky quartet. Performing Arensky's First and Second string quartets, along with the Piano Quintet, is the Ying Quartet. This ensemble's playing is characterized by a surprisingly precise, consistent uniformity of sound and exactness of articulation, making it seem as if a single instrument were playing as opposed to four independent parts. All aspects of their technical execution are polished and refined, which only enhances their equally enjoyable musical effusiveness, rich, deep tone, and understanding of Arensky's scores that casts them in the best possible light.

Anthony Paul Beke (born 20 July 1966), known professionally as Anton Du Beke, is a British ballroom and Latin dancer and television presenter, best known as a professional dancer and judge on the BBC One celebrity dancing show, Strictly Come Dancing, since the show began in 2004. His professional dance partner since 1997 has been Erin Boag. In 2009, he presented the UK version of Hole in the Wall, for the BBC, replacing Dale Winton after being a team captain in 2008. In November 2017, Du Beke released his debut studio album, From the Top, on Polydor Records. It reached number 21 on the UK Albums Chart.

Karajan reportedly felt so strongly about his recordings of the Second Viennese School that he agreed to finance them himself when DG balked at picking up the tab. These are great performances, to be sure. Indeed, there may be some others that are comparable, but none are superior. The Berg pieces never have sounded so decadently beautiful, nor the Webern so passionately intense, or the Schoenberg so, well, just plain listenable. The Berlin Philharmonic strings make their usual luscious sounds, but here the winds, brass, and even percussion rise to the occasion as well. And sonically these were always some of Karajan's best efforts. Essential, then, and a perfect way to get to know these three composers on a single disc.

Known for his scientific explorations of timbre and his innovative syntheses of acoustic and electronic techniques, Tristan Murail is regarded as a composer of the "spectral school." He accepts untempered sound as the basis for his expansive musical language, far removed from tonality, serialism, and aleatoric procedures. Gondwana was developed from electronic music concepts, and its expanding and contracting bands of complex sounds are analogous to those generated through a synthesizer. Shimmering clusters, washes of color, and massed, low sonorities evoke the slow shifting of continents. The Orchestre National de France, directed by Yves Prin, delivers this work with primordial grandeur and astonishing depth. Because of its smaller forces, Désintégrations is more focused and intense than Gondwana, though no less cosmic in its implications. The Ensemble de l'Itinéraire blends effectively with the electronic tape, so it is difficult to distinguish acoustic from synthetic sounds. Time and Again is a departure from the familiar practice of slowly unfolding processes, for its chopped-up material is jumbled, as if sequential events were reordered in a time machine.

Full of high-energy drumming, complexity and unpredictability with ‘Æ’ Anton has pulled out all the stops, drawing on an eclectic genre-defying mix of electronica, hardcore contemporary beats and retro musical guilty pleasures.

For his project of recording the complete symphonies of Anton Bruckner on CPO, Mario Venzago has chosen to record each symphony with a different orchestra to re-create the sounds that Bruckner would have heard. Considering that Bruckner's experiences with orchestras spanned three decades, he would have witnessed growth of the orchestra's size and the introduction of new instruments, which clearly influenced his decisions when he composed and revised each work. Venzago performs the Symphony No. 8 in C minor with the Konzerthausorchester Berlin, following the 1890 version and employing the same instrumentation and ensemble scale, as well as traditional practices that are documented in performances from that period. The result is an Eighth that sounds strikingly different from the other symphonies, quite far removed from the early Romantic orchestra he used in the First, and considerably expanded from the ensembles he would have expected for the Fourth or even the Seventh symphonies.

I was about to begin this text with something like this: "True minimalists lived in the 16 th – 17 th centuries." And then I thought you might say: "Hmm, there he goes again talking about that minimalism." And it’s true: the word is so unfit. Human language is very limited, and every time we attempt to express something important we discover that our language simply doesn't work.