Studio Masters

Ralph Vaughan Williams – Pastoral Symphony – Halle Orchestra, Sir Mark Elder (2014)
FLAC (tracks) 24-bit/96 kHz | Time – 01:10:47 minutes | 1,22 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Master, Official Digital Download – Source: Q0buz | Front Cover | © Hallé Concerts Society

Two of Vaughan Williams’ most popular works, Wasps Overture and Tallis Fantasia, are coupled with arguably his greatest and most original Symphony and a delightful multiple setting of a folk-song that enchanted the composer throughout his life.

The Wasps Overture, from the Suite which Vaughan Williams extracted from the 1908-09 score of his incidental music to an ancient Greek play by Aristophanes, has become one of the composer’s most popular works. From the opening orchestral buzzing of a swarm of wasps, culminating in a fortissimo sting, through a jolly folk-like tune, a brisk march and a broad stately melody which sweeps in on the strings and emerges as one of English music’s great tunes, this work is a showcase for the vivid orchestral colours of Vaughan Williams’ writing.
Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis has become one of Vaughan Williams’s most frequently played works and is acknowledged as one of the greatest examples of writing for strings. Although the treatment of Tallis’s theme is mainly contemplative, there are dramatic and passionate moments in the Fantasia, which is scored for two string orchestras (the second orchestra comprising only nine players) with solo quartet.

The ‘Pastoral’ Symphony is characterised with a mood that is gently elegiac and dark and that reflects the work’s true genesis. Although the title mistakenly led audiences and critics to associate the work entirely with rural landscapes and English folk-song, it is in fact directly related to the First World War. Vaughan Williams, although forty one when war was declared, enlisted as a private in the Royal Army Medical Corps and served as a wagon orderly in France. Like many others, he never spoke afterwards of the horrors he had witnessed there, but they left their mark. Echoes are heard throughout the work, including the second movement’s use of natural notes (inspired by the wartime memory of a bugler) and the cadenza for E flat trumpet which creates the effect of an ethereal Last Post, provoking an anguished heart cry before it returns on the horn. The addition of a wordless solo voice above a quiet drum roll at the start of the fourth movement is further evidence of the dark and solemn inspiration of this most evocative of symphonies.

Five Variants of ‘Dives and Lazarus’, for strings and harps, was written for the New York World Fair in 1939, when Sir Adrian Boult conducted the first performance in Carnegie Hall. Vaughan Williams first encountered the folk-song Dives and Lazarus in 1893, when he was 21, later collecting several versions, and in this mature work he displays his affection for the melody in variants which are reminiscences of various versions in several folk-song collections, including his own.

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Schubert, Schumann, Brahms, Wagner – Rheinmadchen – Ensemble Pygmalion, Raphael Pichon (2016)
FLAC (tracks) 24-bit/96 kHz | Time – 01:14:18 minutes | 1,18 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Master, Official Digital Download – Source: eClassical | Digital Booklet | © Harmonia Mundi
Recorded: juillet 2015, Temple du Saint-Esprit, Paris

The Rhine hymned by women’s voices :: A major source of inspiration for writers and painters (Hugo, Nerval, Heine, Eichendorff, Turner) and above all composers throughout Romantic Europe, the legends of the Rhine still enthral our imaginations even today. The Ensemble Pygmalion and Raphaël Pichon invite us on a fantastic voyage through famous works (including Wagner) and others, much more rarely recorded, that are absolute gems of the repertory for female voices.

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Gustav Mahler – Symphony No. 1 in D major ‘Titan’ – Symphonieorchester des Bayerischen Rundfunks, Yannick Nezet-Seguin (2016)
FLAC (tracks) 24-bit/48 kHz | Time – 00:53:55 minutes | 503 MB | Genre: Classical
Studio Master, Official Digital Download – Source: HDTracks | Digital Booklet | © BR Klassik

The music of Gustav Mahler, the Late Romantic composer on the threshold of modernity, has been a firm part of the repertoire of the Symphonieorchester des Bayerischen Rundfunks ever since the early 1960s, when the orchestra’s Mahler tradition was established by its former chief conductor Rafael Kubelik. BR-KLASSIK has already released Mahler’s First (as part of an audiobook CD) and Seventh Symphonies with Mariss Jansons, as well as the Ninth with Bernard Haitink. The young Canadian conductor Yannick Nézet-Séguin is making his debut here on the BR-KLASSIK label with Mahler’s First Symphony. He is one of the most important representatives of a younger generation of conductors and, since his European debut in 2004, has already conducted such renowned orchestras as the Berlin and Vienna Philharmonic. Yannick Nézet-Séguin is currently chief conductor of the Rotterdam Philharmonic Orchestra and the Philadelphia Orchestra.

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Playing with Fire – Music by Frank Ticheli – Jerry Junkin, Dallas Wind Symphony, Jim Cullum Jazz Band (2012)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/176,4 kHz | Time – 01:10:53 minutes | 1,71 GB | Genre: Classical, Jazz
Studio Master, Official Digital Download – Source: PonoMusic | Artwork: Digital Booklet | © Reference Recordings

The Dallas Wind Symphony and the Jim Cullum Jazz Band team up on a new world premiere sonic spectacular! Composer Frank Ticheli’s works have become standards in concert band repertoire, and Playing With Fire weaves in enthusiastic playing by the famed Jim Cullum Jazz Band. All wind music and traditional jazz enthusiasts should have these knockout performances, conducted by Jerry Junkin. Recorded in the Meyerson Symphony Center, the great music is perfectly captured by Reference Recordings’ world-renowned team of engineer Keith Johnson and producer Tam Henderson.

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