Jurowski

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.

This recording was taken from a live performance during the London Philharmonic Orchestra’s 2019/20 season at London’s Royal Festival Hall. The recording captures the thrill and electricity of the live performance.

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).

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.

Most often performed in an arrangement for string quartet, this recording of Haydn’s The Seven Last Words of our Saviour on the Cross is a unique proposition – offering Haydn’s original instrumental meditations alongside their choral counterparts.