Two Brazilian artists pay tribute to Villa-Lobos and the Amazon rainforest… Sebastião Salgado is a world-renowned photographer who has been working since the 1990s to protect and restore the Atlantic forest and water resources of the Rio Doce valley in Brazil. The Italian-Brazilian conductor Simone Menezes is passionate about the Brazilian composer Heitor Villa-Lobos and his symphonic poem Floresta do Amazonas, for which she created a suite for large orchestra and soprano. Together they travel the world to present an exhibition of Salgado's photographs, combined with concerts conducted by Simone in which the photographs are projected, the photographer having associated each musical phrase with one of his images… The music of this monumental project has been recorded with the Philharmonia Zürich and soprano Camila Provenzale. Ten photos by Salgado, each more striking than the last, are included in the booklet that accompanies this recording, which is completed by another tribute to Amazonian nature, by Philip Glass, with an extract from his Aguas da Amazonia.
"I don't think Mendelssohn gets the attention he deserves," said Paavo Järvi at the start of the 2020-2021 season. Faced with this observation, he undertook to record a complete cycle of Mendelssohn's orchestral works with the Zurich Tonhalle Orchestra for his second season as Music Director. On the programme are the composer's five symphonies, including the second, known as 'Lobgesang', half-symphony, half-cantata, with the participation of the Zürcher Sing-Akademie, tenor Patrick Grahl and sopranos Chen Reiss and Marie Henriette Reinhold. Finally, A Midsummer Night's Dream , based on Shakespeare's play, the overture to which Mendelssohn composed when he was just 17, concludes this very fine cycle.
Since January 2007 the Stockhausen-Verlag is releasing Text-CDs of a new series: lectures which Stockhausen has given since 1952. The edition is limited to 300 copies per release. He wrote and spoke these lectures in German. Most of them are supplemented with musical examples.
"Spektakel müssen sein" soll Kaiserin Maria Theresia 1759 zu ihrem Hoftheaterdirektor gesagt haben, ohne Spektakel "kann man nicht hier in einer solch großen Residenz bleiben". Dieser Devise trug man im 18. Jahrhundertnicht bloß am Kaiserhof sondern auch an den kleineren Residenzen Rechnung. Der Fürstenhof in Salzburg bot z. B. seinem Konzertmeiste. Michael Haydn vielfältigste Gelegenheiten, sein Können unter Beweis zu stellen: Hofbälle, Faschingsveranstaltungen, Universitätsfeiern, Theaterauführrungen.