Fancy 30 Years of Fancy & His Music Productions (2015)

Brilliant Classics is proud to bring to the market this unique 6-CD Set dedicated to the original music for solo guitar of the Paraguayan composer Agustin Barrios Mangore (1885 - 1944). Barrios is still revered in Paraguay, where he is seen as one of the greatest musicians of all time by many. John Williams has said of Barrios: "As a guitarist/composer, Barrios is the best of the lot, regardless of era. His music is better formed, it's more poetic, it's more everything! And it's more of all those things in a timeless way”.

A highly versatile musician, Ulf Wallin has recorded a succession of discs for BIS, including music by Schoenberg, Schnittke, Janacek and Hindemith. Lately he has focussed on Romantic composers, resulting in an acclaimed recording of Schumann's complete works for violin and orchestra (Daily Telegraph: 'It's hard to imagine more sympathetic and insightful performances of these wonderful pieces'). Supported by the eminent Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester Berlin conducted by Okko Kamu, Wallin now offers a programme spanning some 30 years of the long career of Max Bruch.

It has been six (very) long years, since Blackie Lawless and his mean muthafuckin’ metal-making machine by the name of W.A.S.P have warmed our collective ears with a new album…

The Russian-born American composer Leo Ornstein (1893–2002) lived long enough – an astonishing 109 years – to see his music both fall into and re-emerge from obscurity. His earliest surviving work dates from around 1905; his last was composed in 1990. Not surprisingly, his music embraces a range of styles, ranging on this first CD – in the first extended series devoted to his piano works – from the atmospheric impressionism of the Four Impromptus via the fiery virtuosity of the Fourth Piano Sonata to the Rachmaninov-like Romanticism of the Cossack Impressions and In the Country.

Music Box Films - Antarctica: A Year on Ice (2015)
HDRip | 1280x720 | .MP4/AVC @ 3022 Kbps | 1h 32mn | Audio: English AAC 160 kbps, 2 channels | Subs: English | 2.05 GiB
Genre: Documentary | Adventure | Biography

Antarctica: A Year on Ice is a visually stunning film that lets you experience what it is like to live in Antarctica for a full year, including winters isolated from the rest of the world, while enduring months of darkness in the harshest place on Earth. Anthony Powell has been working in Antarctica with his wife Christine for many years. After over 10 years of filming, his documentary is now complete. It has had a theatrical release in the US and New Zealand, and has screened at numerous festivals around the world and winning many awards.

Violinist Joshua Bell and cellist Steven Isserlis are joined by two acclaimed musical forces - pianist Jeremy Denk and the Academy of St Martin in the Fields, of which Bell is Music Director – in a landmark joint recording, For the Love of Brahms (Sony Classical). Available September 30, 2016, the new album is a unique project that features works of Brahms and Schumann that Bell calls “music about love and friendship.” Bell, Isserlis and Denk unite here in Brahms’s first published chamber work, the Piano Trio in B Major, Op. 8 in its rarely performed original 1854 version. Isserlis also joins Bell – as violin soloist and director – and the Academy of St Martin in the Fields in Brahms’s last orchestral work, the celebrated Double Concerto (for Violin and Cello) in A Minor, Op. 102. Bell, Isserlis and members of the Academy also offer the first recording of an unusual coupling: the slow movement of Schumann’s rarely heard Violin Concerto, in a version for string orchestra made by Benjamin Britten, who also added a short coda.

Although all of the quartet's original members with the exception of violist Josef Kluson have moved on since its 1972 founding, the Prazák Quartet has maintained many of its original traditions. For starters, the Prazák Quartet has long distinguished itself as an ensemble almost obsessed with technical precision. From its earliest recordings to the present, intonation, articulation, balance, phrasing, and even the matching of vibrato have been among its trademarks. All of these technical proficiencies have never come at the expense of musical integrity. Quite the contrary, in fact; the performances are typically quite passionate and musically sating.