Ultra Vomit et le Pouvoir de la Puissance

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.”

This milestone of the Arcana catalogue returns with new artwork, new catalogue number (previously A330) and a new cover featuring ‘Boy with Flute’ by the Venetian painter Domenico Maggiotto. All the recorder concertos on this CD were written expressly for flauto or flautino and show the imagination, delicacy, freshness, virtuosity and sometimes even melancholy, which Vivaldi put into his writing for this instrument. Oberlinger has intentionally chosen tuning at 440 Hz since, in Venice, in Vivaldi’s time, tuning was higher than in neighbouring musical centres such as Rome.

Pierre de la Rue is another of those composers who contributed so prolifically to the richness of musical life in the Low Countries during the late fifteenth century. If today he is less well known than some of his contemporaries, the distinguished advocacy of Stephen Rice and The Brabant Ensemble should do much to redress the balance.

Like many of the performances in previous installments, these–three bassoon concertos, two for oboe, and one double concerto for oboe and bassoon–also are characterized by widely contrasting tempos, sharply delineated dynamics, and especially here, a stylish in-your-face approach. From bassoonist Sergio Azzolini’s quite audible intake of breath before beginning the Concerto in D minor and continuing throughout this captivating program, rarely have Vivaldi’s wind concertos been rendered with such a consistent sense of urgency, vitality, and well, attitude.

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 Brahms vocal compositions (for their quality and abundance – over 400 of them) made Brahms a “worthy heir to Beethoven” in Germany, throughout Europe, and finally in France, where Ravel was the first and one of the few to admire “the beauty in his melodic ideas, their quality of expression and above all the brilliance of his orchestral language”. Schoenberg also later praised the innovation of his musical language in his Style and Idea.

Thunderous applause and loud cries of “bravo” greeted the première of Beethoven’s Fidelio at the inaugural performance of the first opera season in Valencia’s new Palau de les Arts. With this spectacular production directed by Pierluigi Pier’Alli, Valencia has put itself back on the map of the international opera world. Dominating the activity on stage are two of today’s most distinguished German singers, Waltraud Meier (Leonore) and Peter Seiffert (Florestan), who have left their mark above all on the Wagner interpretation of our time. And the great Finnish bass Matti Salminen stamped his forceful character on his role as the jailer Rocco.

Best known for his huge output of concertos for the violin, Antonio Vivaldi produced a sizeable number of concertos for other instruments including the cello, an instrument that was little used as a soloist during Vivaldi's time. In all, there are 27 extant cello concertos that, like the violin concertos, push the instrument's technical and expressive abilities.