Bournemouth

'Carmina Burana' stands tall as one of the great 20th-century masterpieces of choral music. Well-known for it's opening theme "O Fortuna," the work has garnered critical acclaim since it's inception in the 1930's. Carl Orff composed the material from a collection of 13th-century Latin and German poems written by Benedictine monks in Beuren and the melodies are at times tender, full of beauty, yet scandalous in nature.

Warner Classics brings you the for the first time for streaming, a remastered recording of Paavo Berglund with the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra and composer & pianist John Ogden. Ogden was a fierce promoter of the works of Richard Yardumian (1917-1985) who was an Armenian-American composer, and whose post-Romantic music was popularized by his close partnership with Eugene Ormandy and the Philadelphia Orchestra. Ogden had a particularly close connection with the Passacaglia, Recitative and Fugue featured in this album, this piece is still very rarely put on record, it's rich yet easily accessible. This recording also features Glazunov's Piano Concerto No. 1.

While he left an extensive and significant output of stage-works, the contribution of Kurt Weill to orchestral and instrumental genres was largely restricted to his formative years. The angular Symphony No. 1, completed in 1921, reflects something of the turmoil of post-World War I. In 1933, with Hitler in power, Weill escaped to Paris where he wrote Symphony No. 2, “one of the 20th century’s forgotten masterpieces”. The Symphonic Nocturne, adapted from the Broadway musical, Lady in the Dark, a 1940 collaboration between Weill, Moss Hart and Ira Gershwin, exhibits all the hallmarks of bitter-sweet lyricism of Weill’s theatrical works from his American years.

George Hurst with the Bournemouth orchestra inspires richly expressive playing, full of subtle rubato which consistently sounds natural and idiomatic, never self-conscious. Like Elgar himself, he tends to press ahead rather than linger, as in the great climactic variation in Enigma", Nimrod, as well as in the finale and in the overture, In the South". The Coronation March also inspires an opulent, red-blooded performance, and the recording throughout is rich and sumptuous.

Philip Glass has enjoyed a degree of popularity unusual among contemporary composers. A pupil of Nadia Boulanger, he was also influenced by the Indian sitar player Ravi Shankar and has won a reputation as an exponent of minimalism, based on the systematic repetition of a motif, modified or extended. In both the epically-proportioned Second Symphony and the smaller scale Third Symphony (for chamber orchestra), Glass returns, in his own way, to his roots at the Juilliard School, writing polyharmonies, rousing finales, and fully formed symphonic paragraphs. They are true symphonies in scope, structure and seriousness of purpose.