Rite Spring

Every year, the Berliner Philharmoniker hold a kind of classical-music fête with a bright, cheerful concert to end the season. In 2009 about 22,000 people had come together at the Berlin Waldbühne to enjoy the traditional summer picnic concert. The theme of the evening was “Russian rhythms”, and star conductor Sir Simon Rattle, the Berliner Philharmoniker and Yefim Bronfman, one of the most famous pianists in the world today, presented a superb selection of Russian music.

Containing 4 unreleased epics from 1993 right up to the present day, this record will send you out into the Cosmos and leave you on a park bench possibly not of your own choosing.

Even in these days of super-efficient Rites and Petrushkas, Boulez can still find in these scores many subtle and beautiful details that are lost in the rush or the brilliance of some showier readings, and his precision of ear is audible on page after page.

Visions of a November Spring, James MacMillan's First String Quartet, was completed in 1988 and already bears many a stylistic trait of the composer who was to create such a stir two years later with The Confession of Isobel Gowdie, not least a mastery of the singing line and the distinctive, 'keening' quality of the string writing itself. The work is cast in two movements, the much lengthier second of which perhaps doesn't quite add up to the sum of its impressive parts.