Noseda

The National Symphony Orchestra (NSO) will release an album of George Walker’s five sinfonias, conducted by Music Director Gianandrea Noseda, on September 8, 2023. The recording project celebrates NSO’s connection to Walker—the first African American composer to receive a Pulitzer Prize and a D.C. native—and honors his centennial, which was in 2022.

The National Symphony Orchestra (NSO) and Music Director Gianandrea Noseda will release the first installment of their complete Beethoven symphony cycle, a recording of Symphonies Nos. 1 & 3.

Gianadnrea Noseda and the BBC Philharmonic have the work’s measure and their performance has a full-blooded intensity and fire. Tempos are well judged and orchestral textures well blended. Noseda balances a strong sense of the piece’s architecture with its expressive eloquence and rich nostalgia it is a reading that can rank alongside the classic Ormandy and Pletnev accounts, both of whom bring a special authority to the Symphony.

"Certain moments in history gave composers the possibility of saying something deeply personal", says LSO Principal Guest Conductor Gianandrea Noseda. "And Shostakovich speaks equally to us today." As Noseda and the LSO continue their journey through Shostakovich's symphonies, which span the composer's lifetime, they take on one of his biggest creations, the Seventh. Written during the siege of Leningrad in World War II, it is shattering in scale and impact. For Noseda, "you can hear the march of the soldiers, the obsessive repetition, a loop you cannot escape," in the relentless, pounding rhythms, the struggle towards a fragile victory.

The abundant concert works of Italian composer Nino Rota continue to surface in recordings, many on major labels. Doubtless this is partly because Rota carries marquee value from his association with the Godfather films, but his music, although surely a mixed bag, is often just plain fun. You can break it down into three general categories, which don't necessarily correspond to individual works but are heard in combination. First is the group of marvelously cinematic tunes that make this release of interest to the still-numerous fans of Rota's film music; the Concerto Soirée for piano and orchestra offers a generous selection.

Seong-Jin Cho garnered international attention and critical accolades through his first prize victory in the 2015 Warsaw Chopin Competition, followed by a studio recording pairing Chopin's Piano Concerto No. 1 and the 4 Ballades. Five years later, Seong-Jin returns to Chopin with a complementary program consisting of the romantic Piano Concerto No. 2 and the 4 Scherzi.

No one could ever accuse Liszt of a lack or largesse. And listening to Vol 3 in Chandos’s recordings of the symphonic poems you are made more aware that ever of his role as an over-reacher, a towering figure who sought to loosen all formal constraints and allow the river of Romanticism to rush by in full spate… it says much for the BBC Philharmonic under Gianandrea Noseda that they once more temper drama with discretion. They achieve a special sense of exultance rather than bombast in Festklänge… and they are no less successful in the vast spans of the Héroïde funèbre… Fluent and eloquent as ever, Noseda and his orchestra have once more been superbly recorded.

This is the fourth volume of the BBC Phiharmonic’s five-disc cycle of Liszt’s Symphonic Poems, conducted by Gianandrea Noseda. This monumental survey continues to go from strength to strength through Noseda’s passionate conducting and innate Italian romanticism and has made possible a reappraisal of these unjustly neglected works. The Telegraph wrote, “…it is hard to imagine them ever sounding better than here. This is music-making full of rich colouring, refined shaping of melodic line and emotional power.”

This first ever digital recording of Prokofiev's music for the ballet 'The Stone Flower' is released to coincide with the 50th anniversary of the composer's death. the story is an amalgamation of several of the folk-style tales in a book by the ural writer Paval Bazhov, cast in a Prologue, four acts and eight scenes which range from village and fairground to mountain caverns. 'The Tale of the Stone Flower' is Prokofiev's last ballet, and he never lived to see it performed. This is Chandos' first recording with Gianandrea Noseda, the new Principal Conductor of the BBC Philharmonic. His work with the orchestra has been greeted with tremendous enthusiasm.

Bizet’s Les Pêcheurs de perles, set in Sri Lanka, is known above all for its unforgettable duet for tenor and baritone, but it its score is full of delightful and dramatic music. When recently staged at the Metropolitan Opera in New York it proved a major success, both for the production by Penny Woolcock and the musical performance, conducted by Paolo Noseda, with (once again) Diana Damrau as the priestess Leïla and, as the two men competing for love, the tenor Matthew Polenzani (Nadir) and the baritone Mariusz Kwiecien (Zurga). Woolcock’s concept brought the production up to date, with photographic and video references to the 2004 tsunami, and offered a superb ‘aquatic’ spectacle during the overture: the whole stage appeared to be beneath the Indian Ocean and acrobatic divers ‘swam’ down from the surface (located in the flies of the theatre).