Paavo Jarvi

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Paavo Järvi inaugurates his new contract as conductor of the Tonhalle Orchestra in Zurich with a programme devoted to Messiaen. Alpha Classics will accompany this extremely promising combination: ‘I’ve always admired French music very much. (…) I think Messiaen is the most original voice, someone absolutely unique. You need only listen for three seconds to a work by Messiaen to be sure that it is by him. His style is so clear, so unmistakable. In his two early works Les Offrandes oubliées and Le Tombeau resplendissant, religion and mysticism play an important role. If you listen carefully, you will notice how a harmony is continually transformed, so that you can never predict what sound will come next. But Messiaen’s harmonic language is not experimental: it produces an inevitable meaning, and you get the feeling that the chord sequence can be that way and no other.Music is a language of its own; music begins where words leave off.’

It’s simple: [Järvi] takes the lunacy [in the Ibert] to an inspired new level, from the very first ear-splitting trombone raspberry. The Tapiola Sinfonietta…plays with guts, virtuosity, and madcap inspiration.

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.

This album by violinist Christian Tetzlaff and cellist Tanja Tetzlaff together with the Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester Berlin conducted by Paavo Järvi, is dedicated in the memory of their longtime artistic partner, pianist Lars Vogt (1970–2022). At the heart of this album is Brahms, one of Lars Vogt’s favourite composers, and his late orchestral masterpiece, the Double Concerto. Brahms himself had admired one of Viotti’s violin concertos so much that he included material from the Violin Concerto no.22 into his work. With Christian Tetzlaff’s recording of the Violin Concerto, this album finally brings these two works together. Also included is Dvořák’s beautiful Silent Woods for cello and orchestra, a work by another composer that was very close to Lars Vogt’s heart.