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Łukasz Borowicz – Grażyna Bacewicz: Complete Orchestral Works Vol. 2 (2023)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/48 kHz | Time – 53:03 minutes | 512 MB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © CPO
In her own words, Grazyna Bacewicz (1909-1969) had been gifted by nature with a “small, invisible engine” that allowed her to do in ten minutes what others needed an hour for. This inner drive can be demonstrated in all areas of this Polish artist’s life. She was an excellent violinist from an early age, had success as a writer and already wrote her first compositions as a teenager – all at a dizzying pace. Even so, the quality of her works are not superficial in the least. This new release by cpo is the second in a series of her complete symphonic works. After presenting her Symphonies Nos. 3 and 4, works from the early 1950s, Lukasz Borowicz and the WDR Symphony Orchestra perform more examples of Bacewicz’s wealth of expression. These include the neoclassical outbursts of the Overture (1943) and the Second Symphony (1951), the sophisticated, already strongly timbre-oriented Variations for Orchestra (1957) and Tre movimenti, by which time Grazyna Bacewicz had achieved her “late” style – the so-called “sonorism”, in which the colour of sound plays an essential structural role. After these “three movements”, the “small engine” ran for almost another four years – this phenomenal musician had completed everything faster than the others. Her invisible drive can still be heard here today.
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Lily Laskine – Mozart: Concerto for Flute and Harp by Lily Laskine (2023)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 01:00:28 minutes | 1012 MB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Alexandre Bak – Classical Music Reference Recording
Lily Laskine was one of the most prominent harpists of the twentieth century. Born Lily Aimée Laskine to Jewish parents in Paris, she studied at the Conservatoire de Paris with Alphonse Hasselmans and became a frequent performing partner of several distinguished French flautists, including Marcel Moyse and Jean-Pierre Rampal. Laskine also served as professor of harp at the Conservatoire de Paris from 1948 to 1958. She was awarded the Legion of Honour in 1958. She died in Paris.
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Lahti Symphony Orchestra & Dalia Stasevska – Helvi Leiviskä: Orchestral Works Vol. 1 (2023)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 01:02:37 minutes | 1,07 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © BIS
Conductor Dalia Stasevka who received the BBC Music Magazine’s ‘Personality of the Year’ Award in 2023 and the Lahti Symphony Orchestra present three works by the Finnish composer Helvi Leiviska, who was Finland’s first major female composer. Initially inspired by the language of late Romanticism – she mentioned Brahms as her favourite composer – Leiviska developed an original, modern style that eschewed all schools, convinced that it was more important to tread one’s own path than to follow fashionable styles. While her output may seem small in terms of quantity, it more than makes up for it in the quality of the works, especially her symphonies, a genre she considered ‘the highest manifestation of music’. This disc presents three works: the Sinfonia Brevis, a confidently crafted work reminiscent of Sibelius; the austere, restrained, melancholy and at times very dissonant Symphony No. 2, which could be called ‘tragic’; and the Suite for orchestra No. 2, which uses material from a powerfully descriptive score originally composed for a film. This recording bears witness to the ‘Leiviska renaissance’ that has taken place in recent years, which has contributed to the rediscovery of a neglected but important voice in Finnish music.
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Klaus Florian Vogt – Franz Schubert: Die schöne Müllerin (2023)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 01:01:47 minutes | 1,10 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © CPO
Franz Schubert’s song cycle from Die Schöne Müllerin as a premiere recording? Anyone who wanted to claim this in view of the international discographic landscape would undoubtedly have to reckon with a storm of indignation. Unless, that is, the release announced as a world premiere had something unprecedented to offer – and the present production certainly does: instead of the original and endlessly performed version for voice and piano, cpo offers an all-round successful hypothesis here: The accompaniment, if the instrumental part can even be called that, is provided by Ensemble acht, which has celebrated success for many years in the line-up of Schubert’s octet, and the star tenor Klaus Florian Vogt sings the twenty stages of the enamored miller, who in the end goes into the water out of disappointment . . . The extended sound palette is the work of the equally accomplished and sensitive arranger and composer Andreas N. Tarkmann, who has illuminated the romantic nuances of the colorful piano part with an almost poignant feel for the poetic drama. A world premiere!
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Kjell Bækkelund – Kjell Bækkelund plays Brahms, Mozart & Schumann (2023)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/192 kHz | Time – 53:22 minutes | 1,41 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © LAWO Reissue
Kjell Bækkelund (6 May 1930 – 13 May 2004) was a Norwegian classical pianist.
Bækkelund was born in Oslo, Norway. He was the son of Martin Bækkelund (1903–66) and Rallik Antonette Hansen (1904–94). He was a student at the Oslo Conservatory of Music from 1935 until 1944.
Bækkelund debuted as a prodigy in 1938 with the Oslo Philharmonic Orchestra at the age of eight. After the Second World War, he trained with Gottfrid Boon (1886-1981) in Stockholm. In 1953 Bækkelund won first prize in the Scandinavian Musicians’ Festival held at Trondheim. That same year, he was granted the Harriet Cohen Memorial Music Award for young professional musicians of outstanding promise. Subsequently, he studied for three years with Ilona Kabos in London. He followed with study under the direction of German classical pianists, Hans Richter-Haaser and Wilhelm Kempff. From the beginning of the 1960s, he performed several worldwide concert tours with the main emphasis of his repertoire consisting of baroque and the classic-romantic music.
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Joseph Tawadros – Live at the Sydney Opera House (2020)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/48 kHz | Time – 01:16:14 minutes | 816 MB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © ABC Classic
Recorded live at his 2019 Sydney Opera House showcase, this album takes you on a rollicking ride through Joseph’s milestone Concerto for Oud & Orchestra. Listeners are also treated to another nine of his most popular pieces that straddle the worlds of classical, jazz and world music. Upon release in June 2020, Live at the Sydney Opera House ran to the #1 position on the ARIA Classical charts, becoming the first release by an Australian artist to reach the top spot since 2019. Alongside his brother James Tawadros on Egyptian percussion, with the Sydney Symphony Orchestra conducted by maestro Benjamin Northey, Joseph creates sounds and moods like you have never heard before.
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Joseph Szigeti – Szigeti Recital at USC (2023)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/44,1 kHz | Time – 01:12:21 minutes | 426 MB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Biddulph Recordings
This CD presents a complete recital given by the master violinist Joseph Szigeti in the Hancock Auditorium at the University of Southern California on 13 January 1957. This concert originally formed the last of a series of three concerts featuring works by 20th-century composers entitled ‘Eleven Masterpieces of the Twentieth Century’, which Szigeti performed at numerous college campuses throughout the United States in the late 1950s. He described this three-part series was ‘an incentive to break with the “one-programme-each-season” type of concertizing that the organized audience movement demands.’ Acclaimed for his playing of the great classical masterworks, Szigeti was also an ardent champion of contemporary music. He made the first recordings of major violin pieces by Bartok, Stravinsky, Busoni, Hindemith, Cowell, Ives, Warlock, Webern and Bloch, and presents works by Honegger, Prokofiev, Ives and Ravel on this recital. Furthermore, this CD includes Szigeti’s spoken introductions to each of the four works. Recorded after the violinist had retired, they provide an invaluable insight from one of the most eloquent and patrician musicians of the 20th century.
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Jess Godwin – Dreamer. (Live) (2023)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/48 kHz | Time – 34:43 minutes | 377 MB | Genre: Pop, Christmas
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Jess Godwin
Jess has always been a dreamer. Her friends are used to awkward, lengthy 8am text messages from her saying, “I just had this dream about you”. She sees them as little hellos, little reminders. Little warnings.
But recently, her dreams have had a consistent message: “Something’s wrong”.
After a year of songwriting celibacy, she was compelled to drop everything and spend seven days banging on a piano in the woods. This particular songwriting process felt dream-like. Like she was downloading from something outside of herself.
Jess initially set out to just document dreams and songs as they came to her, freely puzzling them together with non-linear dream logic. But when she began to see that the 10 songs and 7 dreams she gathered spoke together in concert, she found that “dreamer.” ended up discovering a turning point in her life.
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Orchestre National des Pays de la Loire, Pascal Rophé, Ilya Gringolts, Florent Jodelet – Michael Jarrell: Orchestral Works (2023)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 54:01 minutes | 885 MB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © BIS
The music of Michael Jarrell has been said to ‘examine states of dream and unreality, searching for a moment of truth’ – a truth which is often found in the lowest sonorities and slowest tempi, a place where time stands still. His works are often interrelated, not only by a certain sensitivity or a distinctive tone, but also by the recurrence of particular features that he reworks in different contexts. The present disc combines three orchestral works composed over a period of almost a quarter of a century. In Paysages avec figures absentes, played here by solo violinist Ilya Gringolts, the composer wished to find a new approach to writing for violin within an ensemble. Premièred a few months before this recording by the Orchestre des Pays de la Loire and Pascal Rophé, the Sechs Augeblicke for orchestra suggest a concentration or implosion of sound matter within musical fragments, as a sort of reference to Schubert. Finally, the guiding idea of Un long fracas somptueux de rapide céleste with solo percussionist Florent Jodelet is a short, powerful ‘initial explosion’ that recurs, like a punctuation mark, throughout the piece, more or less regularly, in different forms.
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Igor Stravinsky – Stravinsky conducts Stravinsky: The Rite of Spring & The Firebird (2023)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 01:15:41 minutes | 1,24 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Alexandre Bak – Classical Music Reference Recording
The Rite of Spring is a ballet and orchestral concert work by the Russian composer Igor Stravinsky. It was written for the 1913 Paris season of Sergei Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes company; the original choreography was by Vaslav Nijinsky with stage designs and costumes by Nicholas Roerich. When first performed at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées on 29 May 1913, the avant-garde nature of the music and choreography caused a sensation. Many have called the first-night reaction a “riot” or “near-riot”, though this wording did not come about until reviews of later performances in 1924, over a decade later. Although designed as a work for the stage, with specific passages accompanying characters and action, the music achieved equal if not greater recognition as a concert piece and is widely considered to be one of the most influential musical works of the 20th century.
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Health – RAT WARS (2023)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/48 kHz | Time – 41:36 minutes | 525 MB | Genre: Electronic, Alternative Rock
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Loma Vista Recordings
Health are not only making the heaviest, most genre-obliterating music of their career, they’re documenting just how insane it feels to be alive right now. It’s ‘The Downward Spiral’ for people with at least two monitors and a vitamin D deficiency. RAT WARS is a definitive statement on the insanity and the insipidness of contemporary life.
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François Thuillier – Doullens (2023)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/48 kHz | Time – 33:32 minutes | 302 MB | Genre: Jazz
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Klarthe Records Jazz
François Thuillier was born in 1967 and belongs to the new generation of tuba players, renowned for their knowledge, inquiring minds and inventive style and known for playing a wide range of jazz and improvisational music with symphony orchestras.
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Empire City Men’s Chorus & Vince Peterson – All is Mere Breath (2023)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/44,1 kHz | Time – 45:06 minutes | 433 MB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Navona
In the throes of lockdown, Nicholas Weininger found himself reflecting on this Hebrew verse; what is the nature of our collective life sustained on if not breath and breath alone? It was a breath robbed and convoluted during the COVID-19 pandemic: the ravaged breath of the afflicted, the fear of coming too close to the breath of another. Our world seemed to pause and take a breath, busy city streets gone barren amid our collective anxieties.
Debuted and recorded by the Empire City Men’s Chorus, ALL IS MERE BREATH asks us to question the nature of our changed society in the thought of mere breath alone, and offers us refuge in the breath of song, perhaps, now and then, the purest form of it.
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Elton Dean Quartet – They All Be on This Old Road (Expanded Edition) (1977/2021)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 01:19:44 minutes | 1,57 GB | Genre: Free Jazz, Avant-Garde Jazz
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Ogun Records
Ogun Records are excited to announce the reissue of They All Be On This Old Road, on CD for the very first time, by the Elton Dean Quartet, featuring Elton Dean, Keith Tippett, Chris Laurence and Louis Moholo-Moholo. This expanded edition of the original LP (OG400) includes 40 minutes of newly discovered extra material from the 1976 live recording and is released as a loving tribute to those stalwarts of the Ogun family, Keith and Elton.
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Eloy Orzaiz – La Contemplazione (2023)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 01:03:19 minutes | 934 MB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © IBS Classical
Endowed with an inquisitive and versatile character, Eloy is a pianist, piano player and harpsichordist.
Having received a solid piano education in his hometown (Pamplona) and in Muziken (San Sebastian), Eloy receives a scholarship from the Government of Navarre, the Humboldt Foundation (Hezekiah Wardwell Award) and the Nuffic Foundation (Advanced Training Program), continuing his studies at the Hague and Groningen Conservatories, the Higher School of Music. for music in Trossingen (Germany) and at the Schola Cantorum in Basel (Switzerland). Under the guidance of teachers such as Johan Hofmann, Paul Komen, J. Boetticher, Jesper Christensen and Edoardo Torbianelli, Eloy Orzaiz are graduates with the highest grades in various areas of the master’s degree. These studies not only provide him with a remarkable technical and artistic base, but also contribute to deepening his knowledge of various styles, aesthetics and repertoire, from the Renaissance to our days.
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