Tom Nyman, Anu Komsi Shostakovich Suite On Finnish Themes

GRAMOPHONE Magazine Editor's Choice - December 2015. Ondine’s fourth release together with star baritone Dmitri Hvorostovsky features a program of sonnets by Dmitri Shostakovich (1906–1975) and Franz Liszt (1811–1886). Hvorostovsky is accompanied by his longstanding duo partner, the Estonian pianist Ivari Ilja.

This new live recording pairs profound works by two of the twentieth century's greatest composers: Arnold Schoenberg and Dmitri Shostakovich. Writer Phillip Huscher describes Schoenberg's Kol Nidre a "stark, strong modernist statement," set to the prayer said on the eve of Yom Kippur the Day of Atonement. Schoenberg, who had fled Europe in 1934, premiered the work in Los Angeles in 1938, one month before the devastating the anti Jewish pogroms of Kristallnacht took place throughout Nazi-Germany. Shostakovich's suite explores similarly weighty concerns, including themes of love, morality, death, and the human spirit through the poetry of the Renaissance master Michelangelo. Although originally conceived to honor the fifth centenary of the artist's birth, Shostakovich's settings became a highly personal testament to concerns the two men shared across the centuries.

Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers was an American rock band from Gainesville, Florida. Formed in 1976, the band originally comprised Tom Petty (lead singer, guitar), Mike Campbell (lead guitarist), Ron Blair (bass guitar), Stan Lynch (drums), and Benmont Tench (keyboards). In 1981, Blair, weary of the touring lifestyle, departed the band. His replacement, Howie Epstein, stayed with the band for the next two decades. In 1991, Scott Thurston joined the band as a multi-instrumentalist—mostly on rhythm guitar and second keyboards. In 1994, Steve Ferrone replaced Lynch on drums. Blair returned to the Heartbreakers in 2002, the year before Epstein's death.

This book, combining integratively-revised previously-published papers with entirely new chapters, challenges and treats some major problems in Kant’s philosophy not by means of new interpretations but by suggesting some variations on Kantian themes. Such variations are, in fact, reconstructions made according to Kantian ideas and principles and yet cannot be extracted as such directly from his writings. The book also analyses Kant's philosophy from a new metaphysical angle, based on the original metaphysics of the author, called panenmentalism.

Coloratura soprano Anu Komsi began her musical education in Kokkola, Finland, where she played both flute and violin in the Ostrobothnian Chamber Orchestra. Equally at home on both opera and concert stages, she appears regularly throughout Europe and the United States.

This new album by the Finnish Radio Symphony Orchestra and conductor Hannu Lintu includes two of Magnus Lindberg’s (b. 1958) recent compositions featuring soprano Anu Komsi as soloist in Accused. Magnus Lindberg is among the leading figures in today’s contemporary music and the Finnish Radio Symphony Orchestra enjoys a particularly close relationship with the composer.

This new album by the Finnish Radio Symphony Orchestra and conductor Hannu Lintu includes two of Magnus Lindberg’s (b. 1958) recent compositions featuring soprano Anu Komsi as soloist in Accused. Magnus Lindberg is among the leading figures in today’s contemporary music and the Finnish Radio Symphony Orchestra enjoys a particularly close relationship with the composer.

Andris Nelsons is the Music Director of the Boston Symphony Orchestra and in fall 2015 he was announced as Gewandhauskapellmeister of the Gewandhausorchester Leipzig, commencing in the 2017/18 season. With both appointments, and in leading a pioneering alliance between these two esteemed institutions, Andris Nelsons is firmly underlined as one of the most renowned and innovative conductors on the international scene today. The goal is a complete Shostakovich cycle on Deutsche Grammophon with the Boston Symphony Orchestra. This recording provides a kaleidoscope of Shostakovichs struggle with historical events and political pressures. The pre-war eclectic but accessible and popular 5th, in which he would seem to bow to political pressure, ensured his temporary rehabilitation. The beautiful but dark and gloomy mid-war 8th provoked yet again his fall from favor and instead of providing the political authorities with a triumphant post-war 9th Symphony, Shostakovich wrote a light Haydnesque work which would not be performed until after Stalins death. Selections from the Hamlet Suite, possibly Shostakovichs best film score, rounds out this 2 CD set.

Lydia Mordkovitch and the then Scottish National Orchestra conducted by Neeme Järvi were a celebrated team in the 1980s, recording many notable Russian works, including the concertos by Khachaturian, Prokofiev and Shostakovich for Chandos, and winning a Gramophone Award. This ‘team’ has recently re-assembled to record little-known concertante works by Taneyev and Rimsky Korsakov. The unusual coupling of works by Taneyev and Rimsky-Korsakov, two great composer friends, neatly symbolises the era of the last decades of nineteenth-century Russia, with its great conservatories in Moscow and St Petersburg exerting enormous influence on the music of the country at the time.