Samuel Barber

Cellist Christian Poltéra turns to the music of Samuel Barber. He is joined by the Bergen Philharmonic Orchestra under Andrew Litton and pianist Kathryn Stott. Poltéra opens his programme with the Cello Concerto – one of only three concertos by Barber – which balances the natural lyric expressiveness of his earlier music with a more urgent, rhythmic and intense style.

This unusual coupling of the violin concertos by Aram Khachaturian and Samuel Barber, entitled Two Souls, is tailor-made for Mikhail Simonyan’s exciting DG debut. Born in Novosibirsk, Simonyan has mixed Russian and Armenian parentage, but spent his formative years in the US. Simonyan's close rapport with Kristjan Järvi and his first collaboration with one of the world’s best orchestras, the London Symphony Orchestra, produce an extraordinarily fresh reading of the two concertos.

The threads that connect the string quartets on this "American album" by San Francisco's Cypress String Quartet are a little tenuous. The booklet speaks of the mixture of ethnic influences that has been characteristic of concert music in the U.S., but two of the works, Kevin Puts' Lento assai and Samuel Barber's String Quartet in B minor, Op. 11, do not use ethnic materials at all.

The threads that connect the string quartets on this "American album" by San Francisco's Cypress String Quartet are a little tenuous. The booklet speaks of the mixture of ethnic influences that has been characteristic of concert music in the U.S., but two of the works, Kevin Puts' Lento assai and Samuel Barber's String Quartet in B minor, Op. 11, do not use ethnic materials at all.

Vibrant young pianist, Isata Kanneh-Mason, presents her sparkling second album, Summertime, as she takes us on a journey through the musical landscape of 20th century America. Isata brings her signature flair to this virtuosic and spiritual music for solo piano, including a world premiere recording of a Samuel Coleridge-Taylor piece, the fiercely challenging Barber sonata, and dazzling arrangements of Gershwin's songs.

This beautifully conceived program brings together the complete works for piano duet by three major American composers: Edward MacDowell (1860-1908), Amy Beach (1867-1944) and Samuel Barber (1910-1981).

Previous releases from the New York-based Escher Quartet include an acclaimed set of Mendelsohn’s six string quartets as well as an album with works by Dvořák, Tchaikovsky and Borodin. For their latest offering the members have looked closer to home, however, choosing to combine the quartets by Samuel Barber and Charles Ives. The disc opens with Barber’s String Quartet in B minor, containing the music for which the composer remains best-known: the second movement which he two years later expanded into Adagio for Strings. Recognizing its potential already while composing it, Barber described the piece as ‘a knock-out’ – which made it all the more difficult to come up with a third movement worthy to follow it.