Bavarian Chor

Bavarian Chor, Radio Symphony Orchestra, Howard Arman – Der Wilde Sound Der 20er (2023)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/48 kHz | Time – 01:09:01 minutes | 647 MB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Digital Booklet, Front Cover | © BR-Klassik

The BR-KLASSIK album features recent studio recordings from April 2021 (Toch, Weill) and March 2022 (Krenek) as well as a live recording from the Munich Philharmonie in the Gasteig from March 2017 (Bartók). The album is released as part of the programme focus on “100 Years of Radio”, which shows how formative the sound of this century was: in 1923, amidst social upheaval, the age of radio began. The music composed for the new medium reflects the time between modernity and tradition, revolution and republic, jazz and dance music.

29 October 1923 – a date steeped in history. In the midst of a year of political and economic crisis, the age of public radio in Germany was heralded with the first broadcast of the “Berliner Funkstunde” in the attic of an office building on Potsdamer Platz. – Radio offered completely new possibilities for the production and reception of music.
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Bavarian Chor, Radio Symphony Orchestra, Howard Arman – André Caplet: Le miroir de Jesus (2023)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/48 kHz | Time – 01:00:32 minutes | 596 MB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Digital Booklet, Front Cover | © BR-Klassik

Le miroir de Jésus (The Mirror of Jesus) for mezzo-soprano, women’s choir, strings and harp – the last major work composed by the French composer André Caplet in the spring and summer of 1923, based on fifteen poems by the French writer Henri Ghéon – was subtitled “Mystères du rosaire” (Mysteries of the Rosary). The mystical work, whose form and genre defy the usual categorisations, revolves around the most important stations in the life of Jesus, told from the perspective of the Virgin Mary and mirrored, as it were, in her gaze. Each of the three parts consists of an extended instrumental prelude and five episodes: The first begins with the Annunciation, recounts the Visitation of Mary, the birth of Christ and his time in the Temple of Jerusalem. The second part turns to the mysteries of pain: the scourging of Jesus, the crown of thorns, the way of the cross and the agony and finally his death. The last reflects on the “Glorious Mysteries”: Jesus’ Resurrection, Ascension, Pentecost and finally Assumption and Coronation. A mezzo-soprano takes the perspective of Mary. Occasionally the voice changes to recitation or even recitative, but the singing always serves the text, guarantees its comprehensibility and at the same time interprets the words through musical means. Later, the choir introduces the respective title of the poem and also emerges at a few, but all the more significant points: at the end of the first rosary, it reinforces the message of Ghéon’s text with a Latin biblical quotation and later with praises such as “Sanctus” and “Alleluia”. In “Le miroir de Jésus”, Caplet found a musical form for the mysteries of the ancient Passion story that brings past and present into a peaceful synthesis.
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