Margaux Vranken – Purpose (2020)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/44,1 kHz | Time – 51:56 minutes | 543 MB | Genre: Jazz
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Igloo
The debut of Margaux Vranken, a new Belgian female pianist. Produced by Diederick Wiselus, her 10 unique original songs are included. Half of the album is a string quartet (Ansonia Quartet). It is a stylish album with fresh sensibility and creativity.
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Margarita Höhenrieder – Clara & Robert Schumann: Works for Piano (2019)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 01:04:27 minutes | 976 MB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Solo Musica
Margarita Höhenrieder writes of her new release: “After just a few notes on this exceptionally fine Pleyel grand piano in Kellinghusen, north of Hamburg, in a collection of Eric Feller’s, I found myself plunged into a different century. This pianoforte was built in Paris in about 1855 and professionally restored using historical materials and methods. It is absolutely uniform with the instrument that Chopin possessed, and is of typically French elegance – in sound as well as in appearance. It reflects the soul of the Romantic era. Apart from that, it offers an authentic testimony to the sound of the instruments that Fryderyk Chopin and Robert and Clara Schumann played. Clara’s father, Friedrich Wieck, gave his daughter a Streicher grand, built in Vienna. Personally, I saw this Pleyel as the ideal instrument on which to play the works of Robert and Clara Schumann as authentically as possible while also matching as precisely as possible the exacting demands they place on piano technique. The constant aspiration in today’s music world towards ever larger and more versatile instruments and architecturally and acoustically challenging auditoria meant that I was in search of a convincingly authentic sound for compositions written in and around the 1830s, while also looking out for a suitable performance location – comparable to a mid-19th-century salon and differing from today’s concert halls.”
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Margarita Hohenrieder – Beethoven: Complete Works for Piano & Cello (2020)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 02:18:01 minutes | 2,28 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Solo Musica
“Who would I need to be to be able to talk about a man who is still growing…” Adam Zagajewski: “The late Beethoven”
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Margarita Balanas – Saint-Saëns: Cello Concerto No. 1 & Other Works (The Royal Academy of Music Bicentenary Series) (2021)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 37:00 minutes | 616 MB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Linn Records
As the Royal Academy of Music approaches its Bicentenary in 2022, Linn’s “Bicentenary Series” continues with debut albums from two exceptional recipients of the Academy’s 2019/20 Bicentenary Scholarships scheme: Margarita Balanas and Roberts Balanas. Known for her distinguished artistry and mesmerizing stage presence, cellist Margarita made her solo debut at Wigmore Hall at age seventeen. Since then, she has performed to audiences world-wide at venues including Royal Festival Hall and Southbank Centre, London, Berliner Philharmonie and Walt Disney Concert Hall, Los Angeles.
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Margaret Batjer – Jalbert, Bach, Pärt & Vasks: Music for Violin & Orchestra (2019)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/48 kHz | Time – 01:03:41 minutes | 617 MB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © BIS
Making their first appearance on BIS, Margaret Batjer and the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra (LACO) cross great distances in both time and space in this programme of concertante violin works. The disc opens with a Violin Concerto by the American composer Pierre Jalbert (b. 1967), whose music has been described as ‘rich in instrumental color and harmonically engaging’. Composed in 2017, the 26-minute concerto was a commission from the orchestra and here makes its first recorded appearance. The next work takes us to 18th-century Germany, where Johann Sebastian Bach had been busy studying the concertos of his Italian colleagues, and especially Vivaldi. His Concerto in A minor is thought to have been composed around 1730, at a time when Bach had freed himself from his models, producing works richer in both texture and sentiment.
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Maren Morris – HERO (Deluxe Edition) (2016/2017)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/44,1 kHz | Time – 47:44 minutes | 552 MB | Genre: Country
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Columbia Nashville
A contemporary pop spin on feel-good, windows-down country, Hero is the debut studio album from Maren Morris. The Texas native cut her teeth writing songs for Tim McGraw and Kelly Clarkson, but her fresh perspectives and knack for radio-ready pop hooks caught the attention of executives in Nashville, and earned her comparisons to crossover stars such as Sheryl Crow and Kacey Musgraves. The songs that are new for HERO Deluxe, “Bummin’ Cigarettes”, “Space” and “Company You Keep”, all co-written by Morris, will be familiar to fans who have attended Morris’ sold out headlining HERO Tour 2017 as Morris has performed all three songs each night from the stage.
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Maren Morris – HERO (2016)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/44,1 kHz | Time – 37:53 minutes | 441 MB | Genre: Country
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Columbia Nashville
A contemporary pop spin on feel-good, windows-down country, Hero is the debut studio album from Maren Morris. The Texas native cut her teeth writing songs for Tim McGraw and Kelly Clarkson, but her fresh perspectives and knack for radio-ready pop hooks caught the attention of executives in Nashville, and earned her comparisons to crossover stars such as Sheryl Crow and Kacey Musgraves. Fittingly, Hero includes Top 40 contenders, such as the carefree anthem “80’s Mercedes”, alongside soulful country tributes like “My Church”, a ballad about Hank Williams, Johnny Cash, and the healing power of FM radio. The album reached #1 on the US Country Billboard.
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Maren Morris – GIRL (2019)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/44,1 kHz | Time – 47:05 minutes | 561 MB | Genre: Country
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Columbia Nashville
After 2016’s Hero won her big awards from the Academy of Country Music and the Country Music Association, Maren Morris took a left turn with the Top 40 pop smash “The Middle,” a collaboration with electro producer Zedd. So it’s no surprise that her follow-up blurs genre lines. “I’m cooking up my own flavor…making a mess straight outta scratch,” she sings on the sassy “Flavor,” which uses bro-country guitars and moody pop atmospherics to hammer home the point. There are some moments of purity: the terrific “All My Favorite People” ropes in country duo Brothers Osborne and lifts its melody from Dolly Parton’s “9 to 5”. With its slide guitars and shuffling drums, “To Hell and Back” would be right at home on a Miranda Lambert record. But mostly, Morris channels the queen of the middle, Sheryl Crow, as on the bouncy “Feels” and the folksy “A Song for Everything.” She also adopts the social themes du jour, calling for unity on “Common” (which features a guest turn from Brandi Carlile) and sisterhood support on “Girl.” Morris tries hard at being the popular girl, and it works.
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Marek Toporowski – Köhler: Organ Works (2021)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 01:10:28 minutes | 1,34 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © DUX
Ernst K”ohler numbers among the representatives of the so-called Wroclaw organ school from the first half of the 19th century; this group of composers, whose oeuvre combines respect for the contrapuntal refinement of Johann Sebastian Bach’s music with the emotional aspects of the new Romantic trends and also heralds an apogee of synthesis; the most perfect embodiment of which was the organ and cantata-oratorio oeuvre of Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy. A certain stylistic conservatism and established opinion concerning the crisis in organ music during the first half of the 19th century is perhaps responsible for the relatively rare performance of works by such composers as Adolph Hesse, Moritz Brosig and Ernst K”ohler, the latter of whom is without doubt the least-known figure among the three names mentioned.
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Marek Szlezer – Krzysztof Meyer: Piano Works, Vol. 3 (2020)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 01:14:06 minutes | 1,10 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © DUX
Krzysztof Meyer’s interest in the piano stemmed from a fairly obvious source: he has been playing the instrument since his childhood, and then well enough to perform in public as a pianist. No wonder that the first performer of the Preludes was the composer. First, he recorded them in the studio of the West Berlin RIAS radio (it was released on a longplay soon after), and on 17 May 1979 he performed the whole at the festival in Stalowa Wola – the one where the next generation of composers was in the process of parting ways with the “Polish school” and declared their return to tradition, often Romantic. However, Meyer’s preludes are not neo-post-Romantic music. Quite the contrary. Their harmony is rather austere, closer to the tradition of young Prokofiev and Bartók.
Approach to the piano – in the spirit of Stravinsky, who saw it as a percussion instrument rather than one predestined to sing cantilenas. We invite you to listen to the album of an excellent interpreter of Krzysztof Meyer’s music – Marek Szlezer. It will be a great opportunity to confront the original specifics of Meyer’s style with much more widespread cycles of piano preludes.
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Marek Polański – Duranowski & Kaczkowski: First Polish Caprices For Violin (2021)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 34:05 minutes | 696 MB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © DUX
Marek Polanski’s album is the world phonographic premiere of the first Polish violin Caprices by August Fryderyk Duranowski and Joachim Kaczkowski. The recording was made on the 185th death anniversary of August Fryderyk Duranowski as well as on the 230th birthday and 190th death anniversary of Joachim Kaczkowski. Its premiere falls on the 250th birthday anniversary of August Fryderyk Duranowski in 2020. All these anniversaries are a great opportunity to familiarize music lovers around the world with the works of these two composers, now almost completely forgotten.
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Marek Napiórkowski – Up! (2013/2014)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 56:52 minutes | 1,11 GB | Genre: Jazz
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Universal Music
UP! is an unprecedented piece of work in the history of Polish jazz – Marek Napiórkowski’s dreams came true, realized on a huge scale, an effect of his search for artistic and life’s truths, declaration of a grown up man who doesn’t wish to look back. The album has been well acclaimed by critics, audience, as well as the music industry, the effect of which was a nomination for the prestigious FRYDERYK Prize in Jazz Album Of The Year category.
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Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra, Marek Janowski – R. Strauss: An Alpine Symphony, Op. 64, TrV 233 (2009)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 01:09:11 minutes | 1,19 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © PentaTone
Technically speaking, Eine Alpensinfonie (= An Alpine Symphony) is not a symphony. For after 1911, Richard Strauss rejected his original plan to write a four-movement symphony based on the theme of a Tragedy of an Artist, and instead sat down to write a one-movement symphonic poem. He concentrated on the part he had first designated as the opening movement of the symphony and in which he provided a programmatic description of “the Alps”. The first sketches were made in 1911; in 1913 the work existed in the form of a partichelo (= reduced score); and two years later, the full score was completed. Some scholars have interpreted the prolonged period of time spent by Strauss in the composition of the Alpine Symphony, with very little progress at times, as “an indication that he had exhausted his capacity to portray instrumental programme music” (Wagner). The work was lacking a “truly significant musical core thought”, which was apparent for instance from the enormously expanded length of the Alpensinfonie (not only is this Strauss’ last, but also his longest tone poem, with an average duration of about 60 minutes), as well as from its relinquishment of certain categories employed in other symphonic poems, such as humour, irony and persiflage.
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Marek Janowski – Weber: Der Freischütz, Op. 77, J. 277 (2019)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 01:55:35 minutes | 1,97 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © PentaTone
We have Marek Janowski to thank for this studio version of Weber’s masterpiece, recorded in 1994 in Berlin, and painstakingly remastered by RCA in 2017. Here the German conductor returns to a work which he knows in minute detail. Marking a bridge from the tradition of the “singspiel” in the style of the Magic Flute and the young Wagner of the Flying Dutchman, Freischütz represents the starting point for German romantic opera.
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Mareille Merck LARUS – Fadenschlag (2021)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 40:35 minutes | 688 MB | Genre: Jazz
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Mons Records
Mareille Merck wurde 1996 in Stralsund (D) geboren und lebt in Zürich (CH). Sie studierte Jazzgitarre in Weimar (D), Luzern (CH) und Zürich (CH) bei Prof. Frank Möbus, Kalle Kalima, Lionel Loueke, Wolfgang Muthspiel, Roberto Bossard und anderen. Mareille ist ein aktives Mitglied der Schweizer Jazzszene – sie ist Leiterin und Komponistin der Band „Mareille Merck LARUS“ und spielt auch live auf der Bühne mit verschiedenen bekannten Musikern. Sie teilte die Bühne mit berühmten Musikern wie John McLaughlin, Anne Paceo und Michael League, Bill Lawrence und Justin Stanton von Snarky Puppy.
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