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Brown took a fresh approach for this 1982 date, retaining the trio format but substituting flute for drums and using Monty Alexander instead of regular pianist Gene Harris. The results were intriguing; Most provided colors and sounds that haven't been on a Brown date since, while Alexander added some Caribbean flavor and a bit more adventurous sound.

This recording of Alban Berg’s Three Pieces from Lyric Suite and a Suite in Three Parts from Richard Strauss’s opera Der Rosenkavalier, compiled by Franz Welser-Möst, pairs two early-20th-century masterpieces grappling with an all-consuming love and lust through vastly expressive but different means.

The fifth audio release on The Cleveland Orchestra’s own label once again showcases the ensemble’s unparalleled artistry and polished music-making, alongside as its longstanding commitment to perform and present new repertory under the direction of Music Director Franz Welser-Möst. This album features four works spanning half a century by pioneering American composer George Walker (1922-2018). Together, they demonstrate his wide-ranging musical vision and meticulously-crafted sound-worlds.

The Cleveland Orchestra will release a new audio recording of Anton Bruckner’s Symphony No. 4 led by Music Director Franz Welser-Möst on August 16 as it prepares to perform the work on tour in Europe later this summer.

Here is a natural and effective coupling of spiritual-minimalist pieces from the Baltic and the Balkans; and how good it is to see this music at last on a major label with a top-flight international orchestra.
The benefits are clear in Kancheli’s Third Symphony, with its extreme contrasts of solo vocal keening and tutti Stravinskian outbursts. Here the spaciousness of EMI’s recording, made in Watford Town Hall, and the refinement of the LPO’s playing are clear gains over the rival Georgian performance (which comes with the added drawback of having been transferred a whole tone too high by the original Melodiya team). The mesmeric folk-derived lament which punctuates the structure was sung on the earlier recording by Rustavi choir-member Gamlet Gonashvili, for whose unearthly tenor Kancheli conceived it.

Franz Schmidt is currently on his way to be recognized as one of the most important representatives of the post-Mahlerian, post-romantic symphonic tradition. Indeed, there is something about Schmidt's symphonies - the fourth in particular - that suggests a certain post-apocalyptic feeling, not in terms of any feeling of tragedy in particular but because it feels as if Schmidt are writing the somewhat sobering afterwords to the works of Bruckner and Mahler at the very end of the romantic era (the symphony dates from 1933).

It was hard to muster much enthusiasm for Welser-Möst’s soft-grained, untheatrical approach to Mozart’s score and his careful avoidance of appoggiaturas, though it has to be admitted that the clarinet and basset-horn obbligatos — their players not credited in the program — sounded ravishing. Welser-Möst’s beat could certainly have been fueled by some extra zest, his syncopations by stronger incisiveness. Little was made of the explosive clashes of contrasting keys, Welser-Möst’s opera gentile dallyings replacing Mozart’s needed opera seria gravitas.