Klemperer Mendelson Symphony no 5

Conductor Nicholas Collon’s second Sibelius album together with the Finnish Radio Symphony Orchestra focuses on works written by Sibelius during or just before World War I, and culminating in the 5th Symphony, one of the composer’s symphonic key works.

Sakari Oramo is among the best known and most heavily recorded Finnish conductors on the international scene. In 2003, he was elevated to principal conductor of the Finnish Radio Symphony Orchestra (FRSO), where he remained until 2012. This release for Japanese Exton label includes Johannes Brahms' second & Ludwig van Beethoven's fifth symphonies.

As the last completed symphony that Mahler wrote, the Ninth has often been heard by audiences as the composer’s swan song: a nostalgic, moving farewell from a composer conscious of his own mortality. This interpretation is of course easily justifiable, as etched into the musical fabric of the symphony are references to the tragedies that befell the composer in the years before his death. Furthermore, it is wholly plausible that for a man as melodramatic as Mahler, the idea of a symphony that centres around themes of loss and finality would surely have been an appealing prospect.

Performed by the Christchurch Symphony Orchestra in the newly restored Christchurch Town Hall and conducted by Kenneth Young, Symphony No. 5 “Childhood” is an optimistic work that uses childhood as a metaphor for renewed hope and optimism for the future.

Written in 1944, Prokofiev’s Fifth Symphony is one of his greatest and most complete symphonic statements. At its première he himself called it “a symphony of the grandeur of the human spirit”. The first movement couples considerable strength with unexpected yet highly characteristic twists of melody. After a violent scherzo followed by a slow movement of sustained lyricism, with a fiercely dramatic middle section, the finale blazes with barely suppressed passion. The Year 1941 is another wartime work, a symphonic suite written in response to the German invasion of the Soviet Union.

Recursive Classics has announced the upcoming release of Mahler's Symphony No. 5, featuring David Bernard leading the Park Avenue Chamber Symphony.

The Fifth Symphony was finished in 1808, although its composition had occupied Beethoven's attention for many years before. At its first performance, at Vienna, it was numbered on the program as the Sixth ; and the Pastoral appeared as the Fifth. Both were finished in the same year, but the priority of the C minor is clearly established by Beethoven's own numbering in the autograph. The C minor Symphony is probably the best known and most admired of the nine, perhaps because it is the most human in its qualities.

The Symphony No. 5 in E minor, Op. 64 by Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky was composed between May and August 1888 and was first performed in Saint Petersburg at the Mariinsky Theatre on November 17 of that year with Tchaikovsky conducting.

Prokofiev sends an urgent musical bulletin from Stalin’s Russia with his Symphony No. 5—music of iron and steel, forged in a time of war and tyranny.