In three CD Volumes Galaxy presents some of world bests artists, some of the finest New Instrumental Music. Each volume has been lovingly and carefully compiled, digitally remastered with painstaking attention to detail to obtain maximum audiophile sound quality.
Ryuichi Sakamoto, Megabyte, Double Fantasy, Quiet Force, Richard Wahnfried (Klaus Schulze), Software and more.
Gustav Leonhardt began recording Bach's secular cantatas on Philips in 1990 after completing the sacred cantatas cycle with Harnoncourt. Those Philips discs were well received but are now hard to find, either on CD or as downloads, so I was thrilled to discover that Leonhardt, now 80, just recorded another pair of Bach's secular cantatas.
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.
Of the two oratorios Haydn wrote in his old age The Creation is the more dramatic and immediate while The Seasons is more idyllic. It’s also a good deal longer, which to some extent explains why The Creation is regularly performed while its country cousin is a comparatively rare visitor to the concert hall. There is no denying that the later work contains a lot of good music and has a more folksy character; Austrian folk music is never far away. It is also has a more leisurely pace with long stretches of admittedly beautiful but slow and restrained music. There are moments of drama also, for example the end of part II, Summer (CD1 tracks 16 – 18), where in the recitative the soloists build up the tension.
Wieder einmal vergrub sich Gardiner in alle möglichen Quellen, um auch Haydns lebens- und sinnenfrohes Oratorium in neuen, trotz schlanker Besetzung nicht minder prallen Farben malen zu können. In den teilweise hymnischen Chorszenen treibt er seinen erstklassigen Monteverdi-Chor behende durch die Fugen und enorme Steigerungen hinauf. Sein Orchester stürzt sich geradezu auf die vielen Lautmalereien, und die Solisten können nahezu als Idealbesetzung gelten. Auch wegen der exzellenten Aufnahmequalität die zweite Platte des Monats.
When Nature took on new meaning. The transition from Winckelmann to Rousseau marked one of the biggest upheavals of thought in the Enlightenment - and it is perfectly illustrated in these four Seasons with their decidedly Romantic 'descriptivism'! In this music, even though lambs frisk, fish teem and thunder booms, it is the question of Man within Nature that is the central issue. By going back to the very first version of The Seasons (with the orchestral introductions played in their entirety), René Jacobs enables us to relive that day in April 1801 that saw the triumph of old 'Papa' Haydn.
Margarete Schweikert (1887-1957) war in Karlsruhe, wo sie ihr ganzes Leben verbrachte, eine hochgeehrte Geigerin und Pädagogin. Ihre zahlreichen Kompositionen (Vokal- und Kammermusik), von denen sie selbst kein großes Aufhebens machte, fanden Anklang, aber – obwohl großenteils im Druck erschienen - keine große Verbreitung. Dass sie in der Musikgeschichte keine Spuren hinterlassen hat und bis vor wenigen Jahren gänzlich in Vergessenheit geraten war, hängt wohl weniger damit zusammen, dass sie eine Frau war.