Dona Nobis The Lark

Groundbreaking new music from Mason Bates and the Richmond Symphony! Reference Recordings is proud to present a World Première recording of MASON BATES: Children of Adam, songs of creation Commissioned by the Richmond Symphony; coupled with RALPH VAUGHAN WILLIAMS: Dona nobis pacem. These pieces both draw inspiration from Walt Whitman s poetry and this release celebrates his bicentennial (born 1819). Children of Adam is a collection of exuberant celebrations of creation, from American poets to sacred and Native American texts.

Written in the final year of his life, Schubert’s Mass No. 6 in E-flat major is often regarded as the composer’s own requiem. In this recording, The Cleveland Orchestra is joined by soprano Joélle Harvey, mezzo-soprano Daryl Freedman, tenors Julian Prégardien and Martin Mitterrutzner, bass-baritone Dashon Burton, and The Cleveland Orchestra Chorus.

Discover this collection of sacred music by the American composer Dan Locklair, much of it based on ancient and treasured texts, poems and hymn words. The recording includes Locklair’s Brief Mass, a simple yet deeply symbolic setting of the words of the liturgy.

The Lark Quartet brings its stellar 34 year career to a close with this celebratory album. On it, the Lark Quartet offers premiere recordings of works by John Harbison, Kenji Bunch, Anna Weesner and Andrew Waggoner, all composed for this occasion. Assisting Lark Quartet are Yousif Sheronick, percussion (Bunch), Romie de Guise-Langlois, clarinet (Weesner) and the Lark's four founding members (Waggoner).

To mark the 150th anniversary of the birth of Ralph Vaughan Williams, pianist Mark Bebbington, members of the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra and conductor Hilary Davan Wetton, present a recording of the composer’s almost totally neglected orchestral work, Fantasia on the Old 104th, for solo piano, choir and orchestra premiered at the Three Choirs Festival in 1950.

This is an oddly cool performance of one of the most overtly sentimental–indeed, gushing–pieces in the violin repertoire. In an effort simply to present, rather than interpret, the music, Hahn seems to have gone overboard–she plays with little portamento and vibrato, she keeps away from the music's soul. All that having been said, the playing itself is faultless, her tone lovely, and by the last movement her virtuosity is truly impressive. The classic performance remains Menuhin's, but Hahn and Davis and his LSO have much to offer here. Vaughan Williams' gorgeous-if-sappy "The Lark Ascending" is played ravishingly, with more overt feeling than the Elgar, and again the LSO add greatly to the pleasure with the woodwind section–and clarinet in particular–shining brightly.

With a series of portraits fleshed out in melodic lines THE LARK unites personal experience and collective modern jazz exploration. The second release from pianist and composer, Søren Gemmer, presents an elaboration on the trademark melodicism displayed on the internationally acclaimed debut album. The album is the follow-up release to the highly successful AT FIRST, the debut that received widespread critical acclaim for its sense of direction and compositional signature that merged modern jazz with a fascination of late-romantic classical piano music.

The Swedish Chamber Choir makes its debut on Chandos with this fascinating programme of works for choir, choir and solo voice, and for choir and violin. The founder and conductor, Simon Phipps, leads the choir in unaccompanied works by Swedish and British composers. Maria Forsström joins them in one of Mahler’s Rückert Lieder, ‘Ich bin der Welt abhanden gekommen’, in a sixteen-part arrangement by Clytus Gottwald, and in Judith Bingham’s The Drowned Lovers, a stark companion piece to Stanford’s The Blue Bird. The violinist Jennifer Pike joins the Choir in Ola Gjeilo’s stunning Serenity (a setting of O magnum mysterium) and Paul Drayton’s outstanding 2018 arrangement of Vaughan Williams’s The Lark Ascending, for violin and chamber choir. Recorded in Surround Sound.

Following their hugely successful cycle of Vaughan Williams’ nine symphonies, the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra is led by Andrew Manze in this album of the composer’s most popular shorter orchestral works.

Kurz nach ihrer Gründung beim legendären Marlboro Festival erhielt 1973 das Cleveland Quartet einen Vertrag mit RCA – die junge Streichquartettformation konnte dann bis 1979 viele zentrale Werke aufnehmen.