The Orchestra

If you've seen the Leonard Bernstein biopic "Maestro", you've seen and heard The Orchestra Now, the exceptional ensemble that appears in the movie's Tanglewood Music Festival scene. The Orchestra Now (TON), a New York-based graduate-level training orchestra comprised of the most vibrant young musicians from around the globe, was founded by conductor, educator and music historian Leon Botstein, whose insatiable curiosity has resulted in rescuing countless musical works from oblivion. Their first recording for AVIE, "The Lost Generation", brings together three German-speaking composers who were contemporaries of Arnold Schoenberg and Alban Berg, but whose music became supressed by historical events of the 20th century.

Inspired by a desire to offer my own kids a fresh guide to the orchestra, Philharmonia Fantastique was created to showcase both the artistic and technical wonders of the medium. Like its predecessors Peter & the Wolf and Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra, it colorfully presents the instruments of the orchestra in the medium of a film soundtrack. Philharmonia Fantastique uses both musical genre and electronic sounds for characterization: noir-ish jazz for the woodwinds; bending lyricism in the strings; dark techno for the brass; drum-corps in the percussion; and, for our Sprite protagonist, a simple yet harmonically wandering piano melody.

For this 2010 production, the first new staging of the opera in 10 years, Glyndebourne welcome back the winning team of director Jonathan Kent and designer Paul Brown with Festival Music Director, Vladimir Jurowski conducting the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment. Set at a time of seismic social and cultural change - in a Fellini-esque vision of post-war life - Jonathan Kent's urgently propulsive production offers a 'white-knuckle rollercoaster ride' through the events of the Don's last day as they unfold in and around Paul Brown's magical 'box of tricks' set.

Many composers have written music for children, or about childhood. Very few however have been as successful in understanding the world of children and music as Benjamin Britten. His ‘Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra’ quickly became one of his most popular works internationally. It is a brilliant showpiece for orchestra based on a theme from ‘The Moor’s Revenge’ or ‘Abdelazar’ by Purcell. Variations for each section of the orchestra are followed by a brilliant fugue for the full orchestra. The RLPO has a long history with this piece and gave the first performance under Sir Malcolm Sargent in 1946, and the recording that followed that year won the ‘Orchestral Record of the Year’ award at the 1948 annual conference on Gramophone Critics in New York.