Ilan Volkov

As late as 1982 Soviet musicologists claiming any significance for Nikolay Roslavets were vigorously suppressed. Only in 1990 was his unmarked grave identified. How many scores were lost when his flat was ransacked just after his death in 1944? The ruthless vengeance of a reactionary proletariat—branding Roslavets, himself born of peasant stock and a fervent 1917 revolutionary, a mere pedlar of bourgeois ‘art for art’s sake’—has fortunately now given way to a gradual recognition of the very real significance ……..

A dazzling orchestral disc of music from the Jewish tradition of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. Bruch’s Kol Nidrei is one of the most well-loved works in the cello repertoire. The descending opening phrase of the cello line is instantly recognizable: a universal, extraordinarily expressive utterance.

Jonathan Harvey - Body Mandala / Timepieces / Tranquil Abiding / White as Jasmine / … towards a Pure Land
Anu Komsi / BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra - Ilan Volkov & Stefan Solyom
EAC+LOG+CUE | FLAC: 319 MB | Artwork | 5% Recovery Info
Label/Cat#: NMC # NMC D141 | Country/Year: UK 2007
Genre: Classical | Style: Contemporary

British composer Jonathan Harvey has all the credentials of a classic modernist, and while his music would never be described as making the slightest concession to the New Accessibility of the late 20th century, the attractive, colorful surfaces of his work coupled with unerringly visceral intuitive development makes him a composer who can appeal to more than just hardcore new music aficionados. (…) The BBC Scottish Symphony, led by Ilan Volkov, plays with a confident mastery of the demanding scores and a sensitivity to their mercurial shifts and transformations. NMC's sound is clean, detailed, and present. (The composer recommends that listeners take a pause between the pieces, to surround each with a cleansing silence.)

Ever since he was a child, Norwegian composer Henrik Hellstenius has sought to explore music more freely than by simply mastering the classics. His language, which draws its inspiration from the modes of expression of his time, takes shape in the course of his work through sound, movement, rhythm and silence, as well as in his encounters with musicians and their instruments. Here, much of what is expressed is part of an intense inner monologue: a litany of doubt, affirmation and frustration being whispered, said, sung and shouted. Everything about these two works, from their titles to their modes of expression, suggests that they are directed outwards towards society in general and towards individuals in particular. Public Behaviour is about how we act together in an age of extreme individualism.

With the season 2005/06 Deutsche Grammophon launched its visionary initiative for recording and releasing orchestral concert performances - the DG Concerts series collaborates with some of the best orchestras around the globe, making their most acclaimed concert performances available to music lovers worldwide via digital download.

Leslie Howard’s recordings of Liszt’s complete piano music, on 99 CDs, is one of the monumental achievements in the history of recorded music. Remarkable as much for its musicological research and scholarly rigour as for Howard’s Herculean piano playing, this survey remains invaluable to serious lovers of Liszt.

The concept of The Romantic Piano Concerto series was born at a lunch meeting between Hyperion and the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra sometime in 1990. A few months later tentative plans had been made for three recordings, and the first volume, of concertos by Moszkowski and Paderewski, was recorded in June 1991. In our wildest dreams, none of us involved then could ever have imagined that the series would still be going strong twenty years later, and with fifty volumes to its credit.