In this installment in 'an ongoing Shostakovich survey that has rightly won him three Grammy Awards' (New York Times), Andris Nelsons and the Boston Symphony Orchestra bookend the composer's brilliant, often turbulent symphonic career. Nearly half a century lies between Shostakovich's triumphant debut with the 'First', premiered before his 20th birthday, and the 'Fifteenth', an inventory of influences written under the shadow of his own mortality. Penned just two years earlier, the 'Fourteenth' is a symphonic song cycle, and the Chamber Symphony is a skillful adaptation of that tragic masterpiece, the Eighth String Quartet.
Music Director Manfred Honeck and the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra, with Reference Recordings, are pleased to announce the release of a new recording in superb audiophile, pairing Tchaikovsky’s iconic Symphony No. 4 with the world premiere of leading American composer Jonathan Leshnoff’s Double Concerto for Clarinet and Bassoon, featuring the orchestra’s own Michael Rusinek, Principal Clarinet, and Nancy Goeres, Principal Bassoon. This HIGHRESAUDIO release was recorded in Heinz Hall for the Performing Arts, the acoustically outstanding and historic home of the orchestra.
The London Symphony Orchestra's cycle of Brahms symphonies was Bernard Haitink's first set of recordings on the LSO Live label, originally released individually throughout 2004-05, and then as a boxed set in 2005. This collection of remastered recordings is now available on SACD, and digitally in spatial audio. Bernard Haitink's revelatory Brahms recordings with the LSO have demonstrated why fresh new interpretations of his major works are so important, and why the composer's music is still so relevant today. After struggling for years to come to terms with his fear of comparison to Beethoven, Brahms finally completed his First Symphony at the age of 43. It was hailed as a triumph and the remaining three symphonies followed relatively easily. His Symphony No.2 overflows with a relaxed, pastoral beauty, while the Third Symphony contains some of the most dramatic music Brahms was to compose. Finally, loaded with German Romanticism and including variations on a Bach cantata, Brahms' final symphony is a remarkable example of his mastery of symphonic composition. A rich, warm work that builds on a sense of movement and intensity right up to the final bars. Along with the symphonies, this release also includes Brahms' Double Concerto, Tragic Overture and Serenade No.2.
Thomas Dausgaard and the Seattle Symphony bring you electric and superbly played performances of Nielsen’s early symphonies. Dausgaard has championed the music of his countryman throughout his career, and this album features the Danish composer’s ecstatic First Symphony and the strong-willed Second Symphony. The live concert recordings capture the vitality and energy shared by the orchestra and their new Music Director, all in the spectacular acoustics of Benaroya Hall.
The "Under Stalin's Shadow" subtitle of this release may be confusing inasmuch as the opening Passacaglia from the opera Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District dates from before the period when Stalin made Shostakovich's life a living hell, and the main attraction, the Symphony No. 10 in E minor, Op. 93, was finished ten months after Stalin's death. Actually the album is the first in a set of three; the others will cover the symphonies No. 5 through No. 9, all written during the period of Stalinist cultural control. But even here the theme is relevant: the pieces are linked by a dark mood that carries overtones (of a feminist sort in the case of the opera) of repression. And the Symphony No. 10 is decidedly some kind of turning point, with repeated (and finally triumphant) assertions of the D-S-C-H motif (D, E flat, C, B natural in the German system) that would appear frequently in the composer's later work.