Igor Stravinsky – Rite of Spring, Firebird Suite, Scherzo, Tango – Budapest Festival Orchestra, Ivan Fischer (2012)
DSF Stereo DSD64/2.82MHz | Time – 01:03:12 minutes | 2,5 + 2.63 GB | Genre: Classical
Official Digital Download – Source: nativeDSDmusic |  © Channel Classics Records B.V.
Recorded: Palace of Arts, Budapest, December 2010

The recipe seems simple: take a simple melody of six notes and repeat it in the same order, accentuating a different note each time. For example:
1 2 3 4 2 5
1 2 3 4 2 5
1 2 3 4 2 5
Here we have the beginning of the Sacre du Printemps (with a short transition between lines 2 and 3)! Next step: add a rhythmic pattern and repeat it many times. Prepare a few of these and combine them thoroughly until you get a polyrhythmic and polytonal mix! Finished. With his simple recipe, Stravinsky changed the world. Many plants grew from this seed: beat, rock, rap, minimal music… A pagan, sacrifice ritual with shocking music and shocking choreography: three exceptional talents – Roerich, Nijinsky and Stravinsky – brought about an artistic revolution with a masterstroke. 100 years later it still sounds fresh, pagan, scary, new and beautiful. –Iván Fischer

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Franz Schubert – Symphony no. 9, Five German Dances – Budapest Festival Orchestra, Ivan Fischer (2011)
DSF Stereo DSD64/2.82MHz | Time – 01:08:01 minutes | 2,75 + 2.94 GB | Genre: Classical
Official Digital Download – Source: nativeDSDmusic |  © Channel Classics Records B.V.
Recorded: Palace of Arts, Budapest, June 2010

A new dimension is added to the marvellous transition from the simple horn melody to a symphony when it is played on natural horns. Why did Schubert choose horns? Three notes sound open, the next stopped, the next stopped in a different way, like a melody roughly hewn from marble. Only when the oboe takes over is the unevenness polished away, removing limitations and barriers and transporting us into a magical realm of eternity. I must say that I find this transition most touching if the natural horn players do their best to equalize, to overcome their natural unevenness – like handicapped athletes do. Small C-clarinets and narrow trombones give this symphony a special colour. The woodwinds have a leading role, playing all the Viennese songs, serenades, popular tunes and dances. Even if it is an orchestral work, here and there it feels like the seventh volume of Schubert’s Lieder. –Ivan Fischer

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Mozart, Clementi – Piano Sonatas & Fantasy – Aldo Ciccolini (2012)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96kHz  | Time – 01:10:57 minutes | 1,1 GB | Genre: Classical
Official Digital Download – Source: Qobuz | © La Dolce Volta
Recorded: Paris from 7 to 9 December 2011 (Église Réformée de l’Annonciation)

Clementi is now known mainly for his pedagogical works, but he is a major figure in the history of music for the piano, and was greatly admired by Beethoven for example.

Though Ciccolini has always held his Sonata Op.34 No. 2 close to his heart, he had never recorded it before. He has now – and how sumptuously! – grouping it with works by Mozart.

After a first and highly-praised recording devoted to Mozart (La Dolce Volta LDV 03), he has now tackled his Sonata KV 332 and the celebrated diptych comprising Fantasy in C Minor KV 475 and Sonata in C Minor KV 457. Through their expressive depths and their pre-romantic accents, these Mozart works fit nicely with Clementi’s amazing Sonata Op.34 No.2.

“One shouldn’t be impatient in life, certain things demand a gestation period. I’m not impatient to play something, I need the time to find myself”, says Aldo Ciccolini.

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Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart – Die Entfuhrung aus dem Serail, K384 – Chamber Orchestra of Europe, Yannick Nezet-Seguin (2015)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96kHz  | Time – 02:18:40 minutes | 2,73 GB | Genre: Classical
Official Digital Download – Source: Qobuz | © Deutsche Grammophon
Recorded: Festspielhaus Baden-Baden, 7/2014

The third of DG’s series of seven Mozart operas conducted by Yannick Nézet-Séguin, and initiated by Rolando Villazón, in collaboration with Festspielhaus Baden Baden, U-Live, and sponsored by ROLEX.
The release follows up a “completely enthralling” (Opernglas) Così fan tutte and “the most exciting and consistently well-sung Don Giovanni for some years” (Opera) with another Baden-Baden Festival Mozart production,Yannick Nézet-Séguin conducts this similarly acclaimed 2014 Entführung aus dem Serail: “Well-deserved cheers for all participants” (Online Musik Magazin).
It was recorded live in the stunning venue of Festspielhaus Baden Baden and features a star cast full of critically-acclaimed artists – including Diana Damrau, the reigning Konstanze of our time – with an extraordinary strong showing of Deutsche Grammophon artists.

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Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart – Complete Sonatas for Keyboard and Violin, Vol.2 – Gary Cooper, Rachel Podger (2005)
DSF Stereo DSD64/2.82MHz | Time – 01:11:06 minutes | 2,89 + 2.43 GB | Genre: Classical
Official Digital Download – Source: nativeDSDmusic |  © Channel Classics Records B.V.
Recorded: The Church of Our Lady, St Mary, South Creake, UK, October 2004

Rachel & I feel that, by using a fortepiano throughout, we present a sort of musical ‘level playing field’ with regard to our choice of Mozart’s sonatas included on this disc – spanning as it does such a huge portion of the composer’s life & musical development. While K.6 may at first appear to the listener as amiable juvenilia, sitting as it does alongside a sonata of such undoubted breadth & maturity as K.481, we firmly believe that allowing Mozart’s early – and outstanding – ventures into this genre to speak for themselves by using using the same instruments throughout, we hope to draw attention to his early work in the best way – in a way that is not only so suggestive of what would in time follow, but also seeks to demonstrate the eight year old’s already fecund imagination and uncanny sense of musical line. –Gary Cooper

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Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart – Alla Turca – Aldo Ciccolini (2011)
FLAC (tracks) 24-bit/96 kHz | Time – 00:53:51 minutes | 821 MB | Genre: Classical
Official Digital Download – Source: Qobuz | @ La Dolce Volta
Recorded: mai 2011, Paris (Église Réformée de l’Annonciation)

Over the course of his 60-year career Aldo Ciccolini has established an intimate relationship with the great composers. Now aged 85, he takes a fresh look at one of the greatest and says “I understand Mozart now”. For this recording Aldo Ciccolini plunged into the past, to his earliest years: he says that with the Bechstein he rediscovers “the sound of my childhood” and that this new energy does justice to the impetuous spirit of an untamed genius. Although he has played and replayed these three sonatas for so many years, they suddenly rise to new heights, borne of a deep relationship between the two masters. It took Mozart 17 years to write these sonatas; it took Ciccolini 85 to transcend them: “I have these three sonatas in me from my soul to my fingertips,” he says.

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Felix Mendelssohn – The Complete Solo Piano Music, Vol. 2 – Howard Shelley (2014)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96kHz | Time – 01:13:40 minutes | 1,18 GB | Genre: Classical
Official Digital Download – Source: hyperion-records |  @ Hyperion Records
Recorded: June 2013 at St Silas the Martyr, Kentish Town, London, United Kingdom

Howard Shelley is acclaimed as the living master of early Romantic piano music. So much of this music was ignored throughout the twentieth century that there is still a sense of discovery at each new recording. Shelley here presents the second instalment of a six-volume set of Mendelssohn’s complete solo piano music—perhaps the least well-known part of the composer’s repertoire. The first volume was praised for Shelley’s ‘immaculate, lightly-pedalled brilliance, unfailing stylistic assurance, warmth and flexibility’
This second volume includes the Rondo capriccioso, a favourite virtuoso concert piece of the nineteenth century; the three-movement Fantasia in F sharp minor, which was originally described as a ‘Sonate écossaise’, with its characteristic Scottish folk-song elements in the first movement, and two books of the Songs without Words.

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