Beethoven 2023

This powerful New Series album represents “a résumé and a departure” for Thomas Zehetmair, a summing up of his work with the Royal Northern Sinfonia. In his years as Music Director of the British chamber orchestra, Zehetmair was noted both for bringing compelling new music into the repertoire and for insightful performances of classical and modern composition, qualities very much in evidence on this concert recording from The Sage, Gateshead. The album opens with John Casken’s double concerto That Subtle Knot, written in 2012-3 for Zehetmair, Ruth Killius and the Northern Sinfonia. Inspired by the poetry of John Donne, the composition establishes a broad arc between the English Renaissance and music of today. Ruth Killius shines in a revelatory performance of Bartók’s Viola Concerto, and Zehetmair as conductor fully brings out what liner note writer Giselher Schubert describes as “the juggernaut propulsive thrust” of Beethoven’s Symphony No. 5.

After 2021’s critically acclaimed Echoes of Life, pianist Alice Sara Ott has now recorded a selection of works by Beethoven for her latest album. At the heart of Beethoven is Piano Concerto No. 1, Op. 15, in which she is joined by the Netherlands Radio Philharmonic Orchestra and its Chief Conductor Karina Canellakis. Ott and Canellakis were in fact approached by Apple Music to record this particular concerto, with the result that they and the orchestra became the stars of the Apple Music Classical app launch video earlier this year. The pianist then selected a series of solo works to complement the concerto performance, including “Für Elise” and the “Moonlight” Sonata. Beethoven is released digitally on 28 July – together with a “Für Elise” video – and physically on 29 September.

This powerful New Series album represents “a résumé and a departure” for Thomas Zehetmair, a summing up of his work with the Royal Northern Sinfonia. In his years as Music Director of the British chamber orchestra, Zehetmair was noted both for bringing compelling new music into the repertoire and for insightful performances of classical and modern composition, qualities very much in evidence on this concert recording from The Sage, Gateshead. The album opens with John Casken’s double concerto That Subtle Knot, written in 2012-3 for Zehetmair, Ruth Killius and the Northern Sinfonia. Inspired by the poetry of John Donne, the composition establishes a broad arc between the English Renaissance and music of today. Ruth Killius shines in a revelatory performance of Bartók’s Viola Concerto, and Zehetmair as conductor fully brings out what liner note writer Giselher Schubert describes as “the juggernaut propulsive thrust” of Beethoven’s Symphony No. 5.

The Academy of St Martin in the Fields (ASMF) is an English chamber orchestra, based in London. John Churchill, then Master of Music at the London church of St Martin-in-the-Fields, and Neville Marriner founded the orchestra as "The Academy of St. Martin-in-the-Fields", a small, conductorless string group. The ASMF gave its first concert on 13 November 1959, in the church after which it was named. In 1988, the orchestra dropped the hyphens from its full name.

Protean Quartet, winner of the prestigious first prize at the 2022 York Early Music International Young Artists Competition, explores the String Quartet repertoire of the second half of the XVIII Century, from the last of the so-called “Russian Quartets”, by Franz Joseph Haydn, to Beethoven’s Op. 18 No.1, the first of his String Quartets to be published, but already a masterpiece of the repertoire. The album also includes the first recording of Juan Pedro Almeida’s Quartet op. 7 no. 1. Protean Quartet, performing on period instruments and historically informed criteria, delivers refined, vital, and highly expressive performances.

The name of Sviatoslav Richter (1915-1997) appears at the head of virtually everyone’s shortlist of the world’s great pianists. In the West, the legend began, then gathered force, during the 1950s, when it was rumoured that there was a pianist in Russia who caused even such formidable colleagues as Emil Gilels to exclaim in awe and amazement. Expectations were raised still higher when Julius Katchen and later Lazar Berman claimed that Richter was, quite simply, a nonpareil, a pianist whose titanic powers forbade even whispered comparisons.