Stefan Weber

Weber's great heroic-romantic opera Euryanthe premiered in Vienna in 1823. It concerns the wronged Euryanthe, victim of a plot to establish her unfaithfulness, but her love imbues her with colossal strength which Weber characterises with acute psychological insight. Through-composed and dispensing with spoken dialogue, its chivalric plot provides opportunities for a series of arias, ariosos, duets, cavatinas and choruses that contain some of his greatest operatic music. This production employs the operas original version with a few, very minor cuts.

Louise Farrenc - Les 3 Symphonies - Orchestre de Bretagne, Stefan Sanderling (2001) {2CD Set Pierre Verany PV700030}
XLD rip (secure mode) | FLAC (tracks)+CUE+LOG -> 404 Mb | MP3 @320 -> 234 Mb
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© 2001 Disques Pierre Verany / Arion | PV700030
Classical / Romantic / Symphony / Orchestral

If you want to check a symphonist's freshness and originality, go to a trio section. It always marks out the jobsworths. By that test Louise Farrenc well deserved her prominence as pianist, composer and teacher. All her symphonies date from the mid-1840s, when hardly anybody else in Paris wrote in the form, and though acclaimed they were never published. Yet they evolve purposefully from a Hummel-Mendelssohn style to something uncannily like Schubert, both in harmonic quirks and in the prominence of the woodwind.

The focus of Kalevi Aho’s output lies on large-scale orchestral works, and his work-list includes fifteen symphonies to date, composed between 1969 and 2010. Although the Finnish composer is famously lavish as an orchestrator, and often invites rare guests such as the heckelphone into his orchestra, the scores of Aho’s three chamber symphonies are much more economic in scale. But although composed for some twenty strings in all, and of more modest durations than for instance the 50-minute Eighth Symphony for organ and orchestra, they bear eloquent proof of the composer’s aim of exploiting to the full the expressive capabilities of a string orchestra.

Nearly every music lover is acquainted with Der Freischutz, but the fewest are aware of Euryanthe. In the light of the musical quality of the opera, the disdain for it does not seem fitting. Euryanthe was Carl Maria von Webers most ambitious project, one that anything but backfired. The composition may certainly be termed ground-breaking and truly deserves more attention. A chain of glittering jewels from the beginning to the end. All witty and ingenious, (Robert Schumann in his critic about Euryanthe.) The presnt release features a live recording of the work, which was taken in December of 2018 and features the Arnold Schoenberg Chor and the Orf Vienna Radio Symphony Orchestra, as well as a group of brilliant soloists.