In this production from Teatro alla Scala the ballet Don Quixote is shown in the legendary choreography of Rudolf Nureyev. Nureyev´s intention by fusing together the worlds of Commedia dell´Arte and classical ballet to create a visual feast for its audience, has made Don Quixote one of the most loved ballets world-wide. With its sparkling energy and the bright colours of the staging by Raffaele Del Savio and Anna Anni, Rudolf Nureyev’s Don Quixote, transports audiences with freshness, joy and choreographic splendour to an enchanting Spain, with gypsy dances, fandangos, matadors, windmills and the airy candour of the Garden of the Dryads. The ballet of Teatro alla Scala and the classical ballet stars Natalia Osipova (principal dancer of the Royal Ballet in London and the Mikhaylovsky Theatre Ballet in St Petersburg) and Leonid Sarafanov (principal dancer of the Mikhaylovsky Theatre Ballet in St Petersburg) make this a breathtaking, and distinctive performance.
During his long and exceptionally fruitful creative life, Richard Strauss (18641949) composed only a few works for the cello. Only three have survived and small as that number may seem, those cello works are critical to the composers development. Daniel Müller-Schott sees the early Sonata for cello and piano op. 6 and the late tone poem Don Quixote op. 35 as marking the path that was to lead Strauss within the space of a few years from Romanticism to the Modern era in music. The cellist highlights this watershed in Strausss artistic development with his own transcriptions, expressly made for this CD, of the Lieder Zueignung op. 10/1 and Ich trage meine Minne op. 32/1.
The G major Anton Rubinstein violin concerto is a fine and powerful work, quite as good as many a lesser-known Russian example in the same genre, and easily as deserving of wider currency as, say, the Taneyev Suite de Concert, which is just as rarely heard these days. Nishizaki gives a committed and polished reading, though you often feel that this is music written by a pianist who had marginally less facility when writing for the violin. Still, here’s a well-schooled performance, full of agreeable touches of imagination (the Andante shows Nishizaki’s fine-spun tone to particularly good effect) delivered with crisply economical urgency that makes good musical sense even of the work’s plainer and less idiomatic passages.
The Melbourne Symphony Orchestra and their Chief Conductor Sir Andrew Davis continue their acclaimed survey of the orchestral music of Richard Strauss, with this latest volume featuring three world-class soloists – James Ehnes, Daniel Müller-Schott and Christopher Moore – performing two of his finest early works: the Violin Concerto, and the tone poem Don Quixote.
Celebrating one of the most revered conductors of the 20th century, this series was originally released to commemorate Herbert von Karajan’s 100th birthday in 2008. Using innovate technology to recreate the original concert acoustics, the audio for these DVDs has been re-recorded at the Philharmonic Hall in Berlin and the Musikverein in Vienna, Karajan’s two favourite concert venues, to create re-mastered surround-sound versions of these classic performances. With each DVD featuring von Karajan conducting either the Berlin Philharmonic or Vienna Philharmonic orchestras, two of the highest regarded orchestras in the world, this series really does marry the greatest music, the highest calibre performers, and the best possible audio-visual presentation.