Bach Blu Ray

Sir Simon Rattle was in no doubt: the performance of the St. Matthew Passion which he realized together with the Berlin Philharmonic and the Rundfunkchor Berlin in 2010 was for him “the single most important thing we ever did here.” Critics around the world agreed. They praised the semi-staged “ritualization” by American star-director Peter Sellars, as well as the outstanding musical performances by the soloists, including Magdalena Kozená, Christian Gerhaher, Thomas Quasthoff, and Mark Padmore as the Evangelist.

As before with the St. Matthew Passion, star director Peter Sellars succeeded in creating a staging which made the spiritual and dramatic content of the Passion story even more intensive. The New York Times also praised the “brilliant and energetic” playing of the orchestra, the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung the “haunting, almost unsurpassable singing of all those involved.”

The Daily Telegraph describes Nikolaj Znaider as "the most stimulating young musician playing today, drawing on musical intelligence, perception and dynamism to give performances of rare intensity." This release presents one of the world's foremost violinists playing two landmark concertos, accompanied by the Leipzig Gewandhausorchester "one of Europe's finest orchestras" (The Guardian) under the baton of its music director Riccardo Chailly.

The founding of the Berliner Philharmoniker on the first of May in 1882, is annually celebrated in an European city of cultural significance. In 2015 the EUROPAKONZERT takes place for the second time after 2004 in Athens, with Leonidas Kavakos joining the Berliner Philharmoniker for the Sibelius Violin Concerto and Bach’s “Largo” from Sonato No. 3. The concert was a smash hit, stunning the audience on site in Athens.The soloist on this recording, Leonidas Kavakos won the ECHO Klassik Award in 2013 as ‘Instrumentalist of the Year’.

To celebrate their traditional New Year's Eve Concert, Daniel Barenboim and the Berliner Philharmoniker encouraged the audience to dance. The result was a lively whirl of catchy and melodious numbers selected from over 300 years of music history - a heady cocktail of old and new that put a spring in the steps of both connoisseurs of brilliant orchestral miniatures and lovers of Latin American rhythms.

The Mariinsky Theatre in St. Petersburg is one of the most prestigious opera and ballet venues in the world. Built in 1860 and named in honour of Maria Alexandrovna of Hesse-Darmstadt, wife of Czar Alexander II, it is home to the famous Mariinsky Ballet as well as numerous international stars and ensembles. After the turn of the millennium it was painstakingly restored; and since 2013, St. Petersburg's Theatre Square has been crowned with the "Mariinsky II" an imposing new arts and performance venue. At its inauguration on May 2, 2013, the highly gifted conductor Valery Gergiev led a veritable who's who of the classical music world.

The Verbier Festival is one of classical musics greatest events. In celebration of the festivals 25th anniversary, this unique concert brings together 36 classical stars in an unprecedented evening of ingenious programming and captivating performances. The line-up includes the worlds greatest violinists, violists, cellists and pianists as well as other leading performers conducted by Valery Gergiev and Gabor Takacs-Nagy. Founder and director Martin T:son Engstroem writes: We started this incredible adventure in 1994, and 25 years on, our Festival has become one of the worlds most important cultural events. But it is not just another festival; our vision right from the beginning was to build something which combined important musicians with a very visible youth and learning element. This is what we set out to do and this is what we achieved.

The complete Beethoven Piano sonatas Edition available either in a box of 3 Blu-ray discs or in a box of 5 DVDs. In this recording, GRAMMY Award-winning pianist and conductor Daniel Barenboim tackles the so-called ‘New Testament’ of music, Ludwig van Beethoven’s thirty-two piano sonatas. Composed over twenty-five years and embodying the shift of musical taste from the Classic to the Romantic, their performance requires a musician of extraordinary versatility. Barenboim is one such pianist – his recordings run the gamut from Bach and Mozart to Bruckner and Bartók. In following in the footsteps of such masters as Artur Schnabel, Barenboim truly shows himself to be among the greatest living musicians.

A "triumph of remembrance," wrote Die Welt following this stirring concert given by the Berliner Philharmoniker under Seiji Ozawa and with Anne-Sophie Mutter as soloist. It left its audience hovering between hushed reverence and deafening exultation. The Golden Hall of Vienna's Musikverein was the dazzling venue for the live recoding of this concert celebrating the 100th anniversary of Herbert Von Karajan's birth. And Karajan's "Berliners" never sounded better, according to the Frankfuter Allgemeine Zeitung, evoking "a time which self-confidently sought the private and subjective in music, and believed it could find them in the mirror of the works."