Simon 3.6.4

This 1997 album presents material from the Simon-composed Broadway musical The Capeman, chronicling the life of convicted Puerto Rican street hoodlum Salvador Agrón. The production starred Marc Anthony and Ruben Blades, whose performances are featured here.

Known for her vivid portrayals and full, distinctive voice, Elizabeth Llewellyn has established herself internationally as a dramatic and vocal artist of distinction. She has chosen to offer listeners something new by devoting her debut disc to the music of Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, much of it never recorded before. Elizabeth Llewellyn is joined by pianist Simon Lepper, with whom she has collaborated closely in the development of this unique project. To poetry by Christina Rossetti, Coleridge-Taylor’s Six Sorrow Songs and A Lament are almost all world-premiere recordings. The Southern Love Songs evoke styles including Latin music and flamenco, and the African Romances, never recorded until now, are to words by African-American writer Paul Laurence Dunbar.

Magdalena Kožená presents a recital of Czech songs, together with the Czech Philharmonic under the baton of Sir Simon Rattle. The first impression of Czech songs may be atmospheric nature scenes, or stories about pretty peasant girls and village pranks, but the selection on this album demonstrates that the imagination of Czech song composers stretched far wider. For example, Bohuslav Martinů’s Nipponari were inspired by Japanese culture, whereas his folksy Songs on One Page obtain a deeper meaning knowing that he wrote them in the US, having fled the Nazi threat. His colleagues and contemporaries Hans Krása and Gideon Klein did not manage to get away, and both died in concentration camps.