Rite Spring

Three 20th-century orchestral scores, Bartók’s Two Pictures, Debussy’s Jeux and Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring, all dating from 1910-13 and all linked (as the detailed CD booklet explains), are brought to life in the hands of two exceptional French pianists. The central interest is the ballet Jeux. One of the world’s outstanding Debussy interpreters, Jean-Efflam Bavouzet has added to his complete Chandos recordings with his own transcription for two pianos. Written late in Debussy’s life for Nijinsky, Jeux involves an emotionally erotic and harmonically daring game of tennis. Bavouzet and his well-matched partner, François-Fréderic Guy, play with nimble grace, capturing the works wit and mystery. This gripping album is dedicated to Pierre Boulez, guru and enabler, for his 90th birthday.

The pianist, composer, producer and renaissance musician Jeroen van Veen has played many concerts with both his wife Sandra and his brother Maarten, and has recorded with both of them for Brilliant Classics. The present compilation brings together a unique sequence of masterpieces for the genre in live and studio performances, made between 1992 and 2008, and given by the brothers as Piano Duo Van Veen.

“Le Sacre du Printemps” (The Rite of Spring) by Igor Stravinsky is regarded as a key work of classical music of the 20th century. Due to its rhythmic and tonal structures, interspersed with numerous dissonances, it created turmoil in the audience at its world premiere in Paris in 1913, but was then able to quickly establish itself as a central work in the repertoire of concert halls.

Vladimir Jurowski was the London Philharmonic Orchestra’s Principal Conductor for 14 years from 2007–21, during which his creative energy and artistic rigour were central to the Orchestra’s success. This release captures three of his most memorable concerts with the Orchestra, tracing Stravinsky’s early creative journey from his youth amid the glittering fairytales of Imperial Russia through to those incredible moments in Paris when The Firebird and The Rite of Spring exploded in a blaze of rhythm and colour.

Within the first 30 seconds of "Spiritual Eternal," the opening track on Alice Coltrane's final studio album, Eternity, the listener encounters the complete palette of Alice Coltrane's musical thought. As her Wurlitzer organ careens through a series of arpeggiated modal drones, they appear seemingly rootless, hanging out in the cosmic eternal. They remain there only briefly before an orchestra chimes in behind her in a straight blues waltz that places her wondrously jagged soloing within the context of a universal musical everything as she moves through jazz, Indian music, blues, 12-tone music, and the R&B stridency of Ray Charles. This is the historical and spiritual context Alice Coltrane made her own, the ability to open up her own sonic vocabulary and seamlessly create an ensemble context for to deliver an unpredictable expression of her vision of harmonic convergence…

A magic moment in the history of classical music: Martha Argerich and Daniel Barenboim – both from Buenos Aires – team up for a duo recital at Berlin's Philharmonie. A reunion of the two classical superstars after more than 15 years. THE concert highlight from Berlin's fully packed Philharmonie on the occasion of the "Festtage der Berliner Staatsoper 2014".

Ashkenazy and Gavrilov give a full-blooded performance, rhythmically incisive and with every minute gear change and every nuance finely judged. Without doubt, this has to be one of the most satisfying, nay galvanizing, two-piano recitals I have had the pleasure of sampling for a long time. Ashkenazy and Gavrilov commence proceedings with a rhythmically taut, crisply articulated account of the rarely heard two-piano arrangement of the Scherzo a la russe. Originally intended as music for an abortive project for a war film, the Scherzo is more frequently heard in either its orchestral or jazz ensemble versions, but as Ashkenazy and Gavrilov so persuasively prove there is much to be said for more than an occasional airing in Stravinsky's own arrangement for two pianos.