Korngold Stadt

Hot on the heels of their acclaimed recording of Britten’s Peter Grimes, Stuart Skelton and Edward Gardner join forces with Christine Rice and the BBC Symphony Orchestra for this fascinating programme of early twentieth-century works. Schoenberg’s Verklärte Nacht needs no introduction, but far rarer is Oscar Fried’s contemporaneous setting of the same poem.

Closing the distance between classical music and Broadway, between the old world and the new, this album is born out of a stunning encounter between two performers. Kate Lindsey is an opera star whose career is skyrocketing. She has stunned audiences with her performances of Mozart and Purcell, but grew up steeped in the music of Broadway, from Gershwin to Cole Porter. Baptiste Trotignon is a multie award-winning jazz pianist who plays with big names like Brad Mehldau or Tom Harrell, but who has a long-held interest in classical music, even composing a piano concerto for Nicholas Angelich.

Tine Thing Helseth - Storyteller
Tine Thing Helseth, trumpet / Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra / Eivind Aadland
EAC+LOG+CUE | FLAC: 240 MB | Full Artwork: 57 MB | 5% Recovery Info
Label/Cat#: EMI # 50999 0 88328 2 5 | Country/Year: Europe 2011
Genre: Classical | Style: Romantic, Early 20th Century,Trumpet

Norwegian trumpet player Tine Thing Helseth emerged toward the end of the first decade of the 20th century as of the leading international soloists on her instrument, and in 2011 signed an exclusive recording contract with EMI Classics. For her debut solo album for the label she decided to forego the traditional concertos and virtuosic showpieces and play transcriptions of vocal music, primarily art songs. The result is an appealing collection of music that puts Helseth's lyrical sensibility on display. The pieces don't make the technical demands of, say, a Baroque concerto, but they require the ability to communicate expressively with the simplest means, and that is no less an achievement. Helseth plays with exceptionally well-supported legato phrasing and her tone is sweet, burnished, and mellow…

Pilar Lorengar never achieved the fame and recognition of some of her Spanish peers, such as Victoria de los Angeles and Teresa Berganza; because of this, her singing is relatively unknown to contemporary listeners. Fortunately, anyone with interest can get to know this terrific soprano through The Art of Pilar Lorengar, Decca's two-disc retrospective featuring operatic excerpts and songs of Spanish composers. It is well worth the time; Lorengar had a gorgeous voice, and at its best her singing competes with anything on record. This is especially true of the purely lyrical excerpts on the album, such as "Je dis que rien ne m'épouvante" from Carmen and "Glück, das mir verbleib" from Korngold's Die tode Stadt, both of which would be tough to beat for sheer beauty of singing.

Kate Royal - Midsummer Night
Kate Royal, Soprano / English National Opera Orchestra / Edward Gardner
EAC+LOG+CUE | FLAC: 246 MB | Full Artwork: 196 MB | 5% Recovery Info
Label/Cat#: EMI # 50999 2 68192 2 8 | Country/Year: Europe 2009
Genre: Classical | Style: Opera, Vocal

"…Royal's voice is pure and strong, with a silvery sheen, and she brings a wide expressive range to these selections. The quality of the repertoire and the warmth and depth of Royal's interpretations make this an album that should be of interest to any fan of modern opera. Edward Gardner leads the Orchestra of English National Opera and Crouch End Festival Chorus in intensely passionate performances that emphasize the Romantic lyricism of the music. The sound is warm and clean, with an excellent sense of presence." ~AMG

At the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the lied increasingly took on orchestral garb. The boundary with opera became almost impalpable. That is what Samuel Hasselhorn and Łukasz Borowicz demonstrate here, in a splendid programme mingling smiles and disillusionment, where some of the most characteristic orchestral lieder and operatic arias of this Austro-German ‘fin de siècle’ era blend perfectly together.