New York Philharmonic Orchestra

A new enlightening box of mostly live and radio recordings by the intellectual among the pianists: Pietro Scarpini. ""A sterling achievement. For me, the whole series has been a voyage of discovery […] In terms of production quality and presentation. The Pietro Scarpini Edition gets my wholehearted recommendation for resuscitating the memory of a long-forgotten artist. (MusicWeb) Pietro Scarpini was called ""a pianist of prodigious capacities"" by New York Times critic Olin Downes after the performance of the Prokofiev 2nd concerto. Though he studied conducting at the Accademia di Santa Cecilia in Rome, as well as composition with Casella, to whom the Busoni Op 54 is dedicated, and with Respighi, it is as a pianist that realized his ultimate talent. Scarpini was a rare combination: a highly intellectual pianist with a virtuoso technique. He was a dignified and solitary person with a serious approach to music, single-mindedly following the course of his artistic convictions without compromise.

Wanda Landowska came from a cultured background. Her father was an amateur musician and lawyer in Warsaw and her mother, who spoke six languages, was the first to translate the works of Mark Twain into Polish and founded the first Berlitz School in Warsaw. Landowska began to play the piano at the age of four. Her first teacher was Jan Kleczyński and she continued her tuition at the Warsaw Conservatory with Aleksander Michałowski. At seventeen Landowska went to Berlin to complete her studies, in piano with Moritz Moszkowski and in composition with Heinrich Urban.

Chandos’ Rimsky-Korsakov symphony cycle effectively steals the thunder from Neeme Järvi’s set on Deutsche Grammophon. Dmitri Kitajenko’s grittier and bolder readings better present the music. While Järvi luxuriates in Gothenberg’s smooth sonorities, Kitajenko draws more stark sounds from his Bergen Philharmonic players. This is especially telling in the Antar Symhony (which Rimsky-Korsaskov later published as a “symphonic suite”) where Kitajenko’s gruff approach makes the second movement’s growling argument more forbidding.

New from the London Philharmonic’s own label is a previously unreleased recording by their former Principal Conductor Kurt Masur. And artist who NPR described as the “conductor who rebuilt the New York Philharmonic”. Prokofiev’s Alexander Nevsky cantata features music originally composed for the 1938 film by pioneering Russian director Sergei Eisenstein. It’s a rare example of film music that has found a regular place in the standard classical repertoire.

Here are sets of Pictures to suit almost every personal art gallery. The newest issue (though not the most recently recorded—it has a 1979 analogue source) is the least memorable.

Record of American conductor, pianist and composer Leonard Bernstein (1918-1990) leading the New York Philharmonic Orchestra in a work dedicated to the great French composer J. Maurice Ravel. Bernstein was one of the largest and most popular directors, one of the most powerful composers and a talented pianist of the last century. Gained fame over a long career of nearly five decades, marked with an endless list of awards, medals and other honors. He led the New York Philharmonic (one of the five major American symphony orchestras) between 1958 and 1969.