Baukonstruktionen Bd.01 Bauphysik Erweiterung 1

L’Europa è un campo di battaglia. Il fragore della Guerra di Successione d’Austria risuona fino in capo al mondo. Nel momento di seppellire il suo padre naturale, Jolanne de Valcourt, giovane donna ardente…

The Harmony Codex - the seventh album by Steven Wilson - takes you on a trip. A genre-spanning collection that opens up like a musical puzzle box, it presents a series of endlessly beautiful vistas that roll out and shift in front of you. Arguably the best album Wilson has made during a career that’s spanned more than three decades both as a band leader and as a solo artist, it represents the apotheosis of a life spent fully absorbed in music.

Blu-Ray content only from the box-set (discs 17, 18): Phaedra (5.1 Surround Sound Steven Wilson Mixes); Phaedra (Stereo Mixes 96/24 LPCM); Oedipus Tyrannus (5.1 Surround Sound & 96 Khz / 24-bit Stereo Steven Wilson Mixes); Ricochet (5.1 Surround Sound & 96 Khz / 24-bit Stereo Steven Wilson Mixes); Ricochet (Original Stereo Mix 96/24 LPCM).

It was Thursday November 30th 2022. We took to the stage at the Komedia in Bath, our first UK tour since Dingwalls in 2017. We had our ever-patient compadre Rob Reed and his troupe of cheerful professionals in tow and not only did they have a load of top-of-the-range cameras with them, they had the talent and expertise to make us look presentable. We were determined to succeed and well…we only went and bloody did it, didn’t we? What we have here is that very film, on a glorious Blu-ray, and I hope you enjoy it as much as we did making it.

There are probably no more drastic examples of stylistic differences within one composer's symphonic output than those inherent in Charles Ives's 1st and 4th. The 1st is a piece of pure late Romanticism; it reminds the listener of both Dvorak and Tchaikovsky, but with some odd harmonic surprises. The 4th Symphony is very difficult (it symbolizes the Pilgrim's quest for the spirit). It requires a second conductor to lead a bevy of strings and harp, presumably placed offstage or in a balcony. A bonus on the disc is the composer's "Central Park in the Dark", which is evocative of the strange whooshing of trees and the eeriness of a vast piece of nature in the midst of a metropolis. Ives is for the curious, and these great performances convince and fascinate.

Chief conductor Mariss Jansons leads his Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra on this live performance of Mahler's Symphony No. 1, recorded in Amsterdam in 2006. This album has earned Jansons and the RCO great praise for a skillful, energetic and evocative interpretation, called "as good as live performance can get" by BBC Music Magazine.

After the volumes dedicated to Vivaldi's great instrumental cycles, La Stravaganza (2004), La Cetra (2012) and L’Estro armonico (2015), English violinist Rachel Podger continues her work with her Brecon Baroque ensemble to bring out this version of the Four Seasons, which is rounded off with three violin concertos. A passionate fan of the music of Vivaldi and Biber, Rachel Podger, who studied in Germany, demonstrates through her performances just how much the Red Priest's music (and her herself, following Biber) can cloak itself in the mysterious and bizarre, to the point that Vivaldi appears here as a distant descendant of the mannerists from the late Renaissance and early Baroque period. This is a particularly interesting and successful take.