Jurowski Stravinsky v3

Nicola Benedetti joins that small group of violinists who have given us really special recordings of Elgar’s concerto. Accompanied by an orchestra with this music flowing in its veins—it played for Nigel Kennedy’s now-classic version— and a conductor whose attention to the score’s myriad details never stands in the way of the work’s vast panoramas, Benedetti rises magnificently to the challenge. She achieves moments of great inwardness when needed, but sings out like a lark when the music demands it. It’s a very considerable achievement, and shows what a superb, mature musician she has blossomed into. Delightful encores too!

Swedish composer Ture Rangström (1884–1947), a contemporary of Sibelius and Nielsen, was largely self-taught and defiantly independent in his approach to symphonic composition. Though well versed in counterpoint and sonata principles, Rangström largely rejected these techniques in favor of his own, which emphasized content over form, and drama over development. While there’s no doubting the dramatic and narrative power of the music, the lack of true counterpoint (his themes are not harmonically interrelated or contrasted, but rather blatantly juxtaposed) makes them ultimately unsatisfying as symphonies but perfectly suitable, as, for example, film scores, or as multi-movement symphonic poems (poets were his main inspiration).

These recordings of live LPO concerts at Southbank Centre's Royal Festival Hall between 2008 and 2011. The CD release of Symphonies Nos. 1 & 2 (February 2010), received great critical acclaim including BBC Music Magazine's Disc of the Month' and the recommended version of Symphony No. 2 by BBC Radio 3's Building a Library'. The CD release of Symphonies Nos. 3 & 4 was also praised in the press, with Gramophone describing the LPO as London's finest Brahms orchestra' and The Financial Times writing that Jurowski marries the best of tradition with the best of modern practice'.

A very nice box set from Capriccio of Prokofiev’s complete incidental music, featuring some of his most well known musical scores. The Radio Symphony Orchestra Berlin play with fire and panache under the baton of conductor, Michail Jurowski.

Anton Bruckner had to wait an age before bagging his first and greatest success. The Austrian composer’s Seventh Symphony, first performed in Leipzig in 1884 shortly after his sixtieth birthday, proved an immediate hit. Vladimir Jurowski’s visionary interpretation of the work with the Berlin Radio Symphony Orchestra, recorded live at the Berlin Philharmonie, stands as the utterly compelling outcome of the conductor’s profound study and long experience of performing Bruckner’s music. He’s backed to the hilt by superlative playing, remarkable for its intense focus, lyrical warmth, and jaw-dropping beauty.

This is an operetta more in the vein of Offenbach's than in the later waltz-wallowing ones of Lehár. It has a wide variety of rhythms, all well paraded by Michail Jurowski. The Overture and the ensemble which Suppé called 'Orgy' have liveliness, verve and zest, and if that is tautological, they deserve the nouns…All is well recorded and very enjoyable.