Schoenberg Michael Gielen Bwv 552

Alexander Zemlinsky composed his Lyric Symphony, Op. 18 for soprano, baritone and orchestra during his time as musical director of the New German Theatre in Prague, where he had moved in 1911 from Vienna. It was generally regarded as his corresponding equivalent to Mahler’s Lied von der Erde and is based on Nobel Prize laureate and most important representative of modern Indian literature Rabindranath Tagore. The work is combined with the befriended and three years older "phantasmogorist" Franz Schreker’s Prelude to a Drama, which is a version of the overture of his Die Gezeichneten. It might be considered symptomatic for the most notable characteristic of Schreker’s music: the dominance of chordal sounds over the melodic element.

A new enlightening box of mostly live and radio recordings by the intellectual among the pianists: Pietro Scarpini. ""A sterling achievement. For me, the whole series has been a voyage of discovery […] In terms of production quality and presentation. The Pietro Scarpini Edition gets my wholehearted recommendation for resuscitating the memory of a long-forgotten artist. (MusicWeb) Pietro Scarpini was called ""a pianist of prodigious capacities"" by New York Times critic Olin Downes after the performance of the Prokofiev 2nd concerto. Though he studied conducting at the Accademia di Santa Cecilia in Rome, as well as composition with Casella, to whom the Busoni Op 54 is dedicated, and with Respighi, it is as a pianist that realized his ultimate talent. Scarpini was a rare combination: a highly intellectual pianist with a virtuoso technique. He was a dignified and solitary person with a serious approach to music, single-mindedly following the course of his artistic convictions without compromise.