Claus+ogerman

French piano star Jean Yves Thibaudet is joined by young Chinese violinist Yue Deng for this album of intimate classical music for piano and violin by the celebrated jazz composer/ arranger Claus Ogermann. Grammy Award Winner Claus Ogermann is a musician of rare breadth and versatility who has worked with all the great song stylists including Frank Sinatra, Stan Getz, George Benson, Nelson Riddle, Astrid Gilberto, Michael Brecker and Antonio Carlos Jobim. Well known for recent collaborations with Diana Krall (including the album The Look Of Love), Claus Ogermann has also written works performed by legendary pianists Bill Evans and Glenn Gould, and is the arranger of the classic recording of The Girl From Ipenema. Classical style has always been important to Ogermann, and his compositions include concertos-both classical and jazz- a song cycle (premiered by Brigitte Fasbaender and an orchestral suite commissioned for the American Ballet Theatre. Praised as "one of the most exciting talents before the public today," pianist Jean-Yves Thibaudet is renowned for his eloquent phrasing, lustrous colors and brilliant technique. His poetic interpretations have won him a following throughout the United States and around the globe, having performed with virtually every major orchestra in the world. Yue Deng is one of today's outstanding Chinese violinists, having trained in China and at New York's Juilliard School.

With her pre-bop piano style, cool but sensual singing, and fortuitously photogenic looks, Diana Krall took the jazz world by storm in the late '90s. By the turn of the century she was firmly established as one of the biggest sellers in jazz. Her 1996 album All for You was a Nat King Cole tribute that showed the singer/pianist's roots, and since then she has stayed fairly close to that tradition-minded mode, with wildly successful results…

"Classical Barbra" is a studio album by Barbra Streisand, released in February 1976 but recorded in 1973. The album consists of songs by classical European composers and includes tracks sung in English, French, Occitan, German, Italian and Latin. The music is performed by the Columbia Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Claus Ogerman. Leonard Bernstein wrote of the album, "Barbra Streisand's natural ability to make music takes her over to the classical field with extraordinary ease. It's clear that she loves these songs. In her sensitive, straightforward, and enormously appealing performance, she has given us a very special musical experience." The album has been certified Gold in the United States for sales of 500,000 on May 5, 1999.

Though this is one of the more obscure Jobim albums, it did introduce what some believe is Jobim's masterpiece, the hypnotically revolving song "Aguas de Marco" (heard here in Portuguese and English versions). Mostly, however, the record lets listeners in on another side of Jobim, the Debussy/Villa-Lobos-inspired creator of moody instrumental tone poems for films and whatnot, with the instrumental colors filled in by Jobim's old cohort, Claus Ogerman. This was supposed to be a breakthrough for Jobim, bursting out of the bossa nova idiom into uncharted territory, yet a lot of this often undeniably beautiful music merely treads over ground that Villa-Lobos explored long before ("Train to Cordisburgo" especially). In any case, Jobim would explore his serious muse with greater success later on.