Paavo Jarvi Stravinsky Soldier's Story

The Rite of Spring is a ballet and orchestral concert work by the Russian composer Igor Stravinsky. It was written for the 1913 Paris season of Sergei Diaghilev's Ballets Russes company; the original choreography was by Vaslav Nijinsky with stage designs and costumes by Nicholas Roerich. When first performed at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées on 29 May 1913, the avant-garde nature of the music and choreography caused a sensation. Many have called the first-night reaction a "riot" or "near-riot", though this wording did not come about until reviews of later performances in 1924, over a decade later. Although designed as a work for the stage, with specific passages accompanying characters and action, the music achieved equal if not greater recognition as a concert piece and is widely considered to be one of the most influential musical works of the 20th century.

Paavo Järvi’s remarkably fresh-sounding Tchaikovsky Pathétique emphasizes the music’s lyricism and singing line, with flowing tempos and unforced, natural phrasing throughout. Accordingly the strings predominate in this performance, and the Cincinnati players make beautiful sounds, especially in the outer movements. Järvi treats the first movement’s “big tune” as a love song that grows more impassioned with each appearance. On the other hand he leads a quite angry development section, with biting brass ratcheting up the tension. The second movement goes at a lively, dancing pace, while Järvi’s quick-stepping third-movement march generates real excitement in its second-half, with brilliant playing by the Cincinnati brass.

Like his father, Neeme Järvi, Paavo Järvi is an internationally renowned classical music conductor of Estonian heritage with a deep catalog of recordings. Born on December 30, 1962, in Tallinn, Estonia, he and his family moved to the United States in 1980. His education includes studies at the Tallinn School of Music, the Curtis Institute of Music, and the Los Angeles Philharmonic Institute. For a decade he served as music director of the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra prior to being named music director of the Orchestre de Paris.

After two recordings released on Alpha Classics (including a monograph devoted to Erkki-Sven Tüür – ALPHA595 – that won a Diapason d’Or in 2020), the Estonian Festival Orchestra and Paavo Järvi present six works by five internationally renowned Estonian composers: Tõnu Kõrvits, Ülo Krigul, Helena Tulve, Tauno Aints and Lepo Sumera. Four of these pieces were commissioned by the Pärnu Music Festival, founded and directed by Paavo Järvi. This traversal of six original sound-worlds highlights the richness of Estonian musical creation and its multiple facets.

Celebrating 80 years of vigorous artistic life with Brahms’ expansive and consoling mass for the dead, Ein deutsches Requiem, the hr-Sinfonieorchester (Frankfurt Radio Symphony Orchestra) under its Chief Conductor Paavo Järvi, is joined by soprano Natalie Dessay, baritone Ludovic Tézier and the Swedish Radio Choir in an interpretation described as “exemplary” by the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung.

At a time when many of his contemporaries were exploring more fluid structures, Franz Schmidt while perhaps stretching tonal harmony to its limits, continued to embrace 19th-century form and achieved a highly personal synthesis of the diverse traditions of the Austro-German symphony. His language, rather than being wedded to a narrative of dissolution and tragedy is radiant and belligerently optimistic and reveals this scion of largely Hungarian forebears as the last great exponent of the style hongrois after Schubert, Liszt and Brahms.

Bratsche! It’s not often that the German word for ‘viola’ comes with an exclamation mark attached, but the cover of Antoine Tamestit’s new release heralds something worth celebrating. Among the latest of the new star violists to record Hindemith, Tamestit brings his wonderful musical intelligence to bear on some of the greatest music written for the instrument. Tamestit has selected four contrasting works that reflect that composer’s expressive range: one of the solo sonatas, one of the sonatas with piano, and two very different works for viola and orchestra.

This CD features German star violinist Christian Tetzlaff with virtuoso Romantic concertos by Felix Mendelssohn and Robert Schumann. The Mendelssohn Concerto is one of the most frequently performed violin concertos of all time, with an unfailing popularity among audiences. Also included is Schumann’s more seldom recorded Fantasy for Violin and orchestra, which he completed shortly before writing the Concerto. One of Schumann’s last significant compositions, the long-lost Violin Concerto saw its première performance only in 1937, and was hailed by Yehudi Menuhin as the “historically missing link of the violin literature.”

For this 2016 Hyperion release, cellist Steven Isserlis and the Philharmonia Orchestra under Paavo Järvi present a moving album of cello concertos by Edward Elgar and William Walton, along with Gustav Holst's Invocation and Imogen Holst's The Fall of the Leaf, a five-movement suite for solo cello. The program creates a profoundly pensive and even autumnal feeling, and Isserlis' tone is by turns reflective, lyrical, and poignantly elegiac, appropriate to the selections. The melancholy nostalgia of Elgar's Cello Concerto in E minor colors the album's mood from the outset, and notwithstanding passages of intense virtuosity, the rich but subdued sonorities of his burnished orchestration contribute to its brooding quality.

Following their recordings of Bruckner's Symphonies Nos. 7 (ALPHA932, Diapason d'Or) and 8 (ALPHA987, awarded 'best symphonic recording of the year' at the International Classical Music Awards), Paavo Jarvi and the Tonhalle-Orchester Zurich here conclude their tribute to the Austrian composer in this bicentenary year with a recording of his 9th symphony. The orchestra's history has been closely linked to Bruckner since it gave the first Swiss performance of one of his symphonies under Richard Strauss in 1903. "The great classical and romantic tradition of the Tonhalle-Orchester Zurich make it ideally suited to Bruckner, the central composer for modern symphony orchestras," says Paavo Jarvi. Bruckner composed this musical farewell (he wrote the words "a farewell to life" in the score) in his final years; legend has it that he was still working on the symphony on the day he died.