The album includes Brahms’ Clarinet Quintet, one of the most seminal works for the instrument – combined with Hungarian dances and waltzes by Brahms, all newly arranged to include additional material from Brahms' original musical sources, with an authentic folk twist.
Ravi Shankar: In Celebration is a compilation box set by Indian classical musician and composer Ravi Shankar, released in 1996 on Angel Records in conjunction with Dark Horse Records. The four discs cover Shankar's international career, from the 1950s to the mid 1990s, and include recordings originally released on the World Pacific, HMV, Angel, Apple, Dark Horse and Private Music record labels. Shankar's friend George Harrison compiled and co-produced the set, which was issued as part of year-long celebrations for Shankar's 75th birthday.
Here at last is the definitive Ravi Shankar Collection - ten discs covering 40 years of the master's recordings for EMI. This set includes collaborations with such luminaries as Ali Akbar Khan, Yehudi Menuhin, Jean-Pierre Rampal, and a host of other musicians both east and west. Besides the ten discs, there is a 27 page booklet (English, German, French) and exclusive access to a website with additional audio and video content. If you are familiar with Ravi Shankar, there is little I can say beyond the fact that the discs are exquisitely mastered, generously full, and contain a tremendous wealth of performances from an incomparable career. And If you have not yet heard the music of Ravi Shankar - one of the greatest improvisational musicians of this, or any other age - this is your opportunity to enter into a musical experience that goes beyond hearing, beyond words, resonating deep into the depths of the infinite soul.
Autumn 2013 marks Legrand's great return to the music scene: two concerts with Natalie Dessay at The Olympia in Paris (October 28th and 29th) followed by a tour through France and Europe, and also his first memoirs, Rien n'est grave dans les aigus, to be published by the Cherche-Midi Editeur. To tie in with these events, Universal Classics & Jazz France has undertaken the most ambitious, abundantly prolific and extravagant record-project ever devoted to Michel Legrand: a 15CD boxed-set which brings together every face and aspect of every domain on the Legrand continent; in other words, songs, jazz, original film-soundtracks, symphonic works, musicals…
Michala Petri’s version of Vivaldi’s Six Flute Concertos op. 10 with the Academy of Saint-Martin-In-The-Fields under its first fiddler Iona Brown was recorded in July 1980 – almost the prehistory of Vivaldi interpretation, seen 35 years later. And after all, yes, 1980 is almost exactly the middle point between the beginning of the great 20th century Vivaldi revival, heralded by Louis Kaufman’s ground-breaking recording of the Four Seasons on Concert Hall in 1948 (Vivaldi: Twelve Concertos, Op. 8), and today.