Ultra Vomit et le Pouvoir de la Puissance

Of the large crop of tenors reaching their prime years in the late 2010s, Malta's Joseph Calleja has shown strong signs of breaking out from the pack, and this Verdi recital can only help him. Calleja combines a rich, smooth middle range with a bright, edgy top in which he can convincingly explode in emotion. Album buyers have been primed for a new recital release from Calleja and would probably have been perfectly satisfied with an album covering Verdi's greatest hits.

This is a delightfull performance of some of Vivaldi's best known concertos, but don't be put off if you already have most of them, baroque music is all about interpretation, much pleasure can be had from listening to different ones.

In 1996, the complete recording of the oratorio La morte del cor penitente (The Death of the Penitent Heart), composed around 1671, by the Northern Italian Early-Music ensemble Sonatori de la Gioiosa Marca was a special event: for the first time, the Italian composer Giovanni Legrenzi (1626-1690) an important creator of sacred and chamber music – was introduced with a voluminous work. At the same time, the recording, which went on to win several awards, also marked the beginning of the career of the Sonatori around Andrea Marcon, now long famous. Legrenzi was a master of baroque musical rhetoric: expressive harmonies and melodic elegance transformed the libretto by an unknown author, which illustrates its theme with numerous metaphors, into a sensuous pleasure.

To this day, Anton Bruckner’s Symphony No. 2 in C minor continues to be the least frequently performed of all his symphonies. Not as revolutionary as the first, or as brutally reckless as the third, Bruckner’s core ambition with his Second is a constant testing, exploration, and expansion of the possibilities of the symphony. Conductor Marek Janowski and the Orchestre de la Suisse Romande succeed in doing justice to the work, and the recording is clear proof of Janowski’s brilliance when it comes to conducting Bruckner. In reviewing the recording, Gramophone declared: “There’s more than a touch of the great Eugen Jochum in Janowski’s approach.”

Guy Braunstein, who was concertmaster of the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra for nearly fifteen years, pursues an international career as soloist, conductor and composer. Inspired by a period of Beatlemania at home with his family, Braunstein wove a dozen songs from the Beatles’ celebrated Abbey Road album into a concerto for violin and orchestra entitled Abbey Road Concerto.

The pianists Mari Kodama, Momo Kodama, Karin Kei Nagano and conductor Kent Nagano present Double and Triple Piano Concertos by Mozart and Poulenc, together with the Orchestre de la Suisse Romande on a new CD recording (Pentatone). Similar to Mozart’s own practice of making music with his family, the Nagano-Kodama family recorded Mozart’s piano concerto No. 7 for 3 pianos and No.10 for 2 pianos as well as Poulenc’s concerto for 2 pianos and orchestra.

Pierre de la Rue wurde möglicherweise um 1452 in Doornik/Tournai im heutigen Belgien geboren. Dort arbeitete sein Vater Jehan als Illuminator (Buchmaler), seine Mutter, Gertrude de la Haye, stammte ebenfalls aus Tournai. Im 15. Jahrhundert waren dort beide Familiennamen geläufig. Wir nehmen an, dass Pierres Ausbildung, besonders als Musiker, mit einer Verbindung als Chorsänger an der berühmten Kathedrale der Stadt anfing. Als solcher bekam er dann, wie dort alle Chorsänger, die Tonsur. Wenn so, dann war das die erste entscheidende Situation seines Lebenslaufs, den er letztlich als Diaconus beschließen sollte. Zum Priester wurde de la Rue anscheinend nie geweiht.