Jurowski Stravinsky v3

This recording is the second of a highly rated three volume Stravinsky series recorded by the London Philharmonic Orchestra with then Principal Conductor (now Conductor Emeritus) Vladimir Jurowski. The first volume of the series was featured in Gramophone Editor’s Choice: The Best New Classical Recordings in September 2022. This series documents Jurowski’s year-long Stravinsky festival with the LPO in 2018, ‘Changing Faces’. The festival surveyed Stravinsky’s works, programmed chronologically alongside his influences and those he influenced.

Vladimir Jurowski was the London Philharmonic Orchestra’s Principal Conductor for 14 years from 2007–21, during which his creative energy and artistic rigour were central to the Orchestra’s success. This release captures three of his most memorable concerts with the Orchestra, tracing Stravinsky’s early creative journey from his youth amid the glittering fairytales of Imperial Russia through to those incredible moments in Paris when The Firebird and The Rite of Spring exploded in a blaze of rhythm and colour.

During Vladimir Jurowski’s tenure as Principal Conductor of the London Philharmonic Orchestra, Stravinsky’s music was often a focus of his concert programming. This culminated in a year-long festival, ‘Changing Faces’, in 2018, which traced Stravinsky’s metamorphosis as a composer progressively evolving his musical language, making him a key figure in 20th-century music. Pulcinella marked the beginning of the composer’s middle ‘neoclassical’ period and, like the Symphony in C, demonstrated his playful updating of Classical forms. Jurowski takes listeners on Stravinsky’s exploration of serialism, to his last substantial work, the Requiem Canticles: sometimes spare in texture and austere in expression, yet a movingly sincere restatement of Stravinsky’s Christian faith.

Alessandro Corbelli takes the title role in Annabel Arden’s whirlwind production of Puccini’s compact opera, in which the scheming Gianni Schicchi retrieves for himself the spoils of a disinherited family to pave the way for his daughter to marry her love. As performed at Glyndebourne, Gianni Schicci is here combined in a double bill with Rachmaninov's dark setting of Alexander Pushkin's 'little tragedy'. The Miserly Knight, also directed by Annabel Arden and featuring an outstanding performance from Sergei Leiferkus in the role written for the great Russian bass Fyodor Chaliapin.

Georgian composer Giya Kancheli wrote seven symphonies between 1967 and 1986, all sharing an organic one-movement form. If his work has been in danger of losing its identity amid the tide of spiritually motivated music to come out of the ex-Soviet Union in recent years, these persuasive performances will set the record straight. Both are distinctly Russian in character: grave, ritualistic, shot through with religious symbols – pealing of bells and fragments of Georgian ‘church songs’ – long paragraphs punctuated by crude blasts, in the manner of Schnittke or Ustvolskaya, and brief flashes of caustic vulgarity – sudden jazz ‘wowing’ in the brass or a sinister quoting of a Bach invention. The Second rises gradually from an ascending four-note scale, richly suspended across the brass. Kancheli’s control of its sustained, circular development is extraordinary, moving from a gargantuan anticipation of the melody with its wistful, downturned coda to bright, dancing Stravinskian ostinatos in the wind and back again. The longer Seventh Symphony is conceived on a more conventional and grandiose scale. Suffused with Georgian folksong, its powerful rhetoric and hefty orchestration hark back to the world of Shostakovich, though veiled in a prayerful introspection peculiar to Kancheli.

This 7 CD box set features the first complete cycle of Tchaikovsky’s symphonies recorded by Vladimir Jurowski and the London Philharmonic Orchestra, including symphonies previously released on the LPO’s label and new recordings of Tchaikovsky’s Symphonies Nos. 2 and 3, Francesca da Rimini and Serenade for Strings.