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Lise Davidsen, Bergen Philharmonic Orchestra & Edward Gardner – Sibelius: Lunnotar, Op. 70 & Other Orchestral Works (2021)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 01:12:51 minutes | 1,19 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Chandos
Following their acclaimed recordings of Schoenberg with Sara Jakubiak and Britten’s Peter Grimes with Stuart Skelton, Edward Gardner and the Bergen Philharmonic turn their attention to the music of Sibelius. Written in 1913 for the diva Aino Ackté, the tone poem Luonnotar draws on text from the Finnish national epic poem, the Kalevala. Its virtuosic demands are ably met here by award-wining soprano Lise Davidsen, who also feature in the Suite from Pelléas and Mélisande, music re-worked by Sibelius from his incidental music written for the first performances of Maeterlinck’s play in Helsinki, in 1905, in Swedish. The tone poem Tapiola, from 1926, is Sibelius’ last great masterpiece and evokes the forests of his native Finland. The programme is completed by a pair of much earlier works, Rakastava and Vårsång (Spring Song).
Details of original recording : Recording producers Brian Pidgeon (May 2018) and Vegard Landaas, LAWO Classics (February 2021)
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Ragnhild Hemsing, Bergen Philharmonic Orchestra, Eivind Aadland – Bruch & Tveitt (2023)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 01:00:51 minutes | 1,10 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Berlin Classics
Experience the rich and vibrant sounds of Europe’s Romantic tradition with our latest CD featuring music by four talented composers. Discover the little-known talent of Sigurd Lie, a highly skilled violinist and composer from Norway who studied with leading teachers in Leipzig and Berlin. Immerse yourself in the enchanting folk tale inspiration of Lie’s “Huldra aa’n Elland” for violin and orchestra and be captivated by the playful and seductive solo violin performed by the renowned violinist Ragnhild Hemsing. Follow in the footsteps of Lie’s compatriot, Johan Svendsen, a famous violinist and composer who studied in Leipzig and Paris and is best remembered for his Romance for Violin and Orchestra, Op. 26. Svendsen’s work was admired by Belgian violinist and composer Eugène Ysaÿe and was reprinted 65 times. This CD is a must-have for any lover of the Romantic era, the diverse sounds of Norway and Europe, and the virtuosic performances of Hemsing.
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James Ehnes, Bergen Philharmonic Orchestra, Edward Gardner – Janacek: Orchestral Works, Volume 2 (2015)
SACD Rip | SACD ISO | DSD64 2.0 & 5.1 > 1-bit/2.8224 MHz | 01:16:52 minutes | Front/Rear Covers | 3,81 GB
or FLAC(converted with foobar2000 to tracks) 24bit/88,2 kHz | Front/Rear Covers | 1,32 GB
This is the second volume in our series devoted to the orchestral works of Janáček, with the Bergen Philharmonic Orchestra and Edward Gardner.
The repertoire on this disc includes some of the greatest programmatic pieces by the composer. Unsurprisingly, the first piece featured here is Jealousy – his first declared piece of programme music, originally written to preface the opera Jenůfa but never included in any production of it during his lifetime. Both The Ballad of Blaník and The Fiddler’s Child (also known as a ‘ballad for orchestra’) are characterised by the use of musicals symbols, reflecting the Czech poems on which the pieces are based and also some of the composer’s personal reflections and responses.
The one-movement Violin Concerto The Wandering of a Little Soul is a more mysterious piece, with uncertainties surrounding the title, the date of creation, and the goals of its composition. Like the unfinished Danube symphony, the version recorded here has been reconstructed by Miloš Štědroň and Leoš Faltus from Janáček’s sketches.
An interpretation of the famous tale by Gogol, Taras Bulba was completed in 1915 and was Janáček’s most substantial orchestral work to date. It is inflected with folk dances, battle and horse-riding music, suffering and love, and brought to a grandiloquent apotheosis, in orchestration of almost cinematic vividness.
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Jean-Efflam Bavouzet, Bergen Philharmonic Orchestra, Edward Gardner – Janacek: Orchestral Works, Volume 1 (2014)
SACD Rip | SACD ISO | DSD64 2.0 & 5.1 > 1-bit/2.8224 MHz | 01:03:23 minutes | Front/Rear Covers | 3,12 GB
or FLAC(converted with foobar2000 to tracks) 24bit/88,2 kHz | Front/Rear Covers | 1,06 GB
Edward Gardner conducts the Bergen Philharmonic Orchestra in the opening volume in their series devoted to orchestral works by Leoš Janáček. It features three pieces that originate in Janáček’s late period, when his passionate feelings for Kamila Stösslová, thirty-seven years his junior, inspired an extraordinary flowering of his creative genius.
The Sinfonietta is one of Janáček’s most successful and popular works, famed for its opening movement, a brazen fanfare scored for a phalanx of brass with timpani. The remaining four movements, full of character, celebrate Janáček’s adopted town of Brno, blending occasional reflection with high-voltage exuberance.
Scored unusually for left-hand piano and an ensemble of brass and flute, the Capriccio is remarkable even among Janáček’s distinctive late works. Its overall effect is mercurial and capricious, in the composer’s words: ‘whimsical, all wilfulness and witticisms’. Jean-Efflam Bavouzet employs his formidable technique and interpretative flair in the solo part.
The Cunning Little Vixen, Janáček’s opera from 1923, was not universally well received at first. A number of its orchestral interludes, however, were immediately popular and after Janáček’s death in 1928 Václav Talich, a leading Czech conductor, extracted an orchestral suite, re-orchestrated by two young colleagues. Recently Sir Charles Mackerras restored Janáček’s striking original orchestration, the version recorded here.
Read more![Beate Mordal, Jeremy Carpenter, Bergen Philharmonic Orchestra, Edward Gardner - Arne Nordheim: The Tempest (2023) [Official Digital Download 24bit/192kHz] Download](https://i0.wp.com/imghd.xyz/images/2023/03/29/ybgr3omq5ajca_600.jpg?resize=500%2C500&ssl=1)
Beate Mordal, Jeremy Carpenter, Bergen Philharmonic Orchestra, Edward Gardner – Arne Nordheim: The Tempest (2023)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/192 kHz | Time – 49:39 minutes | 1,76 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Lawo Classics
Arne Nordheim was Norway’s most significant and respected composer until his death in 2010, and one of the few figures in contemporary western music who proved himself able to move beyond traditional harmonic relationships while maintaining a distinct ability to communicate widely through his striking, physical music.
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![John Relyea, Michelle DeYoung, Bergen Philharmonic Orchestra, Edward Gardner - Bartók: Bluebeard's Castle, Op. 11, Sz. 48 (2019) [Official Digital Download 24bit/96kHz] Download](https://i0.wp.com/imghd.xyz/images/2023/03/27/yirr7b2zssyca_600.jpg?resize=500%2C500&ssl=1)
John Relyea, Michelle DeYoung, Bergen Philharmonic Orchestra, Edward Gardner – Bartók: Bluebeard’s Castle, Op. 11, Sz. 48 (2019)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 58:55 minutes | 901 MB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Digital Booklet, Front Cover | © Chandos
Following outstanding reviews for his interpretation of Duke Bluebeard around the world, notably at the Paris Opéra and then in Philadelphia and New York with Michelle DeYoung, John Relyea stars in this recording of Bartók’s psychological thriller. The two protagonists are joined by Edward Gardner and his Bergen Philharmonic Orchestra, and the Hungarian actor Pál Mácsai who delivers the Prologue, the work being sung in the original Hungarian. Bartók’s only opera, Bluebeard’s Castle was composed in 1911 and is based on a libretto by Béla Balázs (a room-mate of Kodály), which met Bartók’s desire for a subject that was modern, but drawn from traditional culture.
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Freddy Kempf, Bergen Philharmonic Orchestra, Andrew Litton – Prokofiev: Piano Concertos (2010)
PS3 Rip | SACD ISO | DST64 2.0 & 5.1 > 1-bit/2.8224 MHz | 80:49 minutes | Scans included | 3,58 GB
or FLAC 2.0 Stereo (converted with foobar2000 to tracks) 24bit/88,2 kHz | Scans included | 1,3 GB
Features Stereo and Multichannel surround sound | BIS Records # BIS-SACD-1646
Whatever one might call it – virtuosity, charisma, panache, or just plain guts – pianist Freddy Kempf certainly has it. Kempf has successfully deployed his gifts in some of the most difficult works in the piano repertoire in a consistently impressive series of discs for BIS. He’s taken on Bach partitas, Beethoven sonatas, Chopin etudes, and Rachmaninov preludes, and he’s brought them to dizzying heights where the air is thin and only the greatest pianists can breathe. But while there’s no doubt Kempf is bringing his best qualities to bear on this disc of Prokofiev’s Second and Third piano concertos and his Second Piano Sonata, it is nowhere nearly as successful as his earlier recordings. Perhaps this is because, for all his blazing virtuosity, Kempf tends to lean toward the light and lyrical in Prokofiev, and this approach doesn’t always fit with the music. It works brilliantly in the body of the Third Concerto’s opening Allegro and in much of the same work’s closing Allegro ma non troppo, where Kempf’s fleet fingers and racing tempos carry all before them. But in the Third’s central theme and variations, and in most of the Second’s opening Allegretto and closing Allegro tempestoso, Kempf sounds oddly underpowered, as if he lacked the strength to convey the steel and iron of the music. That surely cannot be the case for a pianist who has turned in a performance of “The Great Gate of Kiev” from Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition that could, if aimed in the right direction, reduce Gibraltar to pebbles. Whatever the cause, this disc is somewhat disappointing, coming from such a gifted player. Andrew Litton and the Bergen Philharmonic are more than adequate, but not much more, as accompanists. BIS’ super audio sound seems to surround and even envelop the listener.
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Andrew Litton, Bergen Philharmonic Orchestra – Prokofiev: Romeo And Juliet Suites (2007)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/44,1 kHz | Time – 01:14:15 minutes | 607 MB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © BIS
Combined, Prokofiev’s three suites from Romeo include about half of the score. Still, most conductors who want to give us a full CD (or even a full LP) of Romeo pick their own extracts from the complete ballet instead of stringing together the suites. That’s probably at least partly because they don’t share Prokofiev’s preferences when it comes to favorite moments—but it’s also because, as written, the suites are organized for musical rather than narrative coherence, and thus provide little sense of the play’s dramatic trajectory. One way around the second of these issues, of course, is to reorder the suites: that’s, for instance, what Mitropoulos does with selections from the more popular First and Second. Here Andrew Litton pushes that idea to its limit, giving us all 20 movements of the three suites “in the order the music appears in the ballet score.”
Composer: Sergei Prokofiev
Conductor: Andrew Litton
Orchestra/Ensemble: Bergen Philharmonic Orchestra
Bergen Philharmonic Orchestra, Sir Andrew Davis – Vaughan Williams: Job / Symphony No.9 (2017)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 01:17:26 minutes | 1,22 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Chandos
The projected complete cycle of Vaughan Williams’s symphonies started by the late Richard Hickox has left a precious heritage in the discography of the composer. Now, conducting the Bergen Philharmonic Orchestra, that other expert in British repertoire, Sir Andrew Davis, takes on the challenge of completing the series with idiomatic interpretations of two masterpieces: the final Symphony (No. 9) and the ballet Job.
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Bergen Philharmonic Orchestra, Edward Gardner – Berlioz : Grande messe des morts, “Requiem” (Live) (2018)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 01:20:53 minutes | 1,19 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Digital Booklet, Front Cover | © Chandos
With this surround-sound recording of Berlioz’s Requiem, Edward Gardner and the Bergen Philharmonic Orchestra tackle the infinite and the immeasurable.All the grandiose, striking beauty of the Requiem’s large-scale ceremonial is encapsulated by first-class vocal and orchestral forces, fully utilising the spatial possibilities of Grieghallen in Bergen. The matching of space and sonority was one of Berlioz’s lasting obsessions, one experience in St Paul’s Cathedral in London throwing Berlioz into a delirium of emotion from which he took days to recover. His Grande Messe des morts, notorious for its requirement of four brass bands in addition to a large orchestra and chorus, taken here from live concerts, has often been seen as one of the most emotionally powerful works of its kind. Setting a solemn and austere, even ascetic text, the music is not that of an orthodox believer but of a visionary, inspired by the dramatic implications of death and judgement.
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![Edward Gardner, Bergen Philharmonic Orchestra - Brahms: Symphonies Nos. 1 & 3 (2019) [Official Digital Download 24bit/96kHz] Download](https://i0.wp.com/imghd.xyz/images/2022/09/01/ekyslo9r5d2da_600.jpg?resize=500%2C500&ssl=1)
Edward Gardner, Bergen Philharmonic Orchestra – Brahms: Symphonies Nos. 1 & 3 (2019)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 01:21:25 minutes | 1,31 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Digital Booklet, Front Cover | © Chandos
The Bergen Philharmonic Orchestra under its Chief Conductor, Edward Gardner, embarks on a new Brahms cycle with this first instalment, containing the First and Third Symphonies. Recorded in Bergen’s Grieghallen – the orchestra’s home – in October 2018, these two symphonies show the orchestra at the very top of its game, offering rich, strong, and supple string playing matched by outstanding ensemble work across the orchestra. Gardner approaches Brahms from his knowledge and experience of the chamber music, and aware of Brahms’s ties to Schumann. Inspired by the joy and excitement live performances of the symphonies with the Bergen Philharmonic, he states that ‘the combination of the personality of the orchestra, the Chandos sound, and [Brahms’s] great music produces something special’.
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![Bergen Philharmonic Orchestra, Thomas Dausgaard - Bruckner: Symphony No. 6 in A Major, WAB 106 (1881 Version) (2020) [Official Digital Download 24bit/96kHz] Download](https://i0.wp.com/imghd.xyz/images/2022/09/01/yxltttli4wvfb_600.jpg?resize=500%2C500&ssl=1)
Bergen Philharmonic Orchestra, Thomas Dausgaard – Bruckner: Symphony No. 6 in A Major, WAB 106 (1881 Version) (2020)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 53:21 minutes | 843 MB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Digital Booklet, Front Cover | © BIS
Anton Bruckner wrote his Symphony No. 6 over a period of two years, completing it in September 1881. And for once with this composer, the word ‘completing’ can be used without qualification: known for his habit of reworking and revising his works, Bruckner for once seems to have been satisfied with the result of his efforts. That doesn’t mean that the Sixth has enjoyed a smoother passage to the concert stage than other Bruckner symphonies, however. The only performance in Bruckner’s lifetime was a partial one, of the two middle movements, and when Gustav Mahler conducted the first ‘full’ performance in 1899, he made a number of substantial cuts and other amendments. In fact, the true premiere of the Sixth as Bruckner wrote it had to wait until 1935, almost 40 years after the composer’s death. And the work is still something of a Cinderella in the Bruckner catalogue, with far fewer outings in concert halls or on disc than for instance the Fourth or the Seventh. Bruckner called the Sixth his ‘boldest’ symphony – with a duration of ‘only’ some 55 minutes it is at any rate one of the shorter, but possibly the composer was thinking of the remarkably expansive Adagio or the ambiguous Scherzo, or of the way the so-called ‘Bruckner rhythm’ (different combinations of a duplet and a triplet) pervades the work. The present release is the first in a Bruckner ‘mini-series’ from Thomas Dausgaard and the Bergen Philharmonic Orchestra, appearing together on disc for the first time.
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![Bergen Philharmonic Orchestra, Andrew Litton - Holst: The Planets, Op. 32 - Elgar: Enigma Variations, Op. 36 (2019) [Official Digital Download 24bit/96kHz] Download](https://i0.wp.com/imghd.xyz/images/2022/09/01/srzra3mokvauc_600.jpg?resize=500%2C500&ssl=1)
Bergen Philharmonic Orchestra, Andrew Litton – Holst: The Planets, Op. 32 – Elgar: Enigma Variations, Op. 36 (2019)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 01:22:42 minutes | 1,33 GB | Genre: Klassik
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Digital Booklet, Front Cover | © BIS
It is striking that two of the true classics in English orchestral music were composed within the short space of some fifteen years around the turn of the previous century. Edward Elgar’s Enigma Variations have charmed as well as fascinated listeners since the first performance in 1899. In 14 remarkably diverse variations Elgar demonstrates his compositional mastery while creating miniature portraits of his closest friends, as well as of his wife and himself. By turns gentle, idyllic, tempestuous and boisterous, the pieces which often run seamlessly into each other nevertheless make up a coherent whole, like a group portrait taken during a country weekend.
In 1916 Gustav Holst completed another set of musical character sketches his suite The Planets, in seven movements. These have little to do with astronomy and even less with the Roman deities whose names they carry. Holst was rather inspired by astrology and the suite actually concerns human character as influenced by the planets.
Performing the programme in the warm acoustics of Bergen’s Grieg Hall, the Bergen Philharmonic Orchestra under Andrew Litton give it their all in this sonic spectacular.
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![Edward Gardner, Bergen Philharmonic Orchestra, Sara Jakubiak - Schoenberg: Erwartung, Op. 17 & Pelleas und Melisande, Op. 5 (2020) [Official Digital Download 24bit/96kHz] Download](https://i0.wp.com/imghd.xyz/images/2022/09/01/tlv64vpwgsaza_600.jpg?resize=500%2C500&ssl=1)
Edward Gardner, Bergen Philharmonic Orchestra, Sara Jakubiak – Schoenberg: Erwartung, Op. 17 & Pelleas und Melisande, Op. 5 (2020)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 01:07:36 minutes | 1,10 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Digital Booklet, Front Cover | © Chandos
Written only six years apart, these two works share a common narrative of frustrated love, and the concept of the forest as a metaphor for the subconscious mind. Musically they are wildly different, however; Pelleas, which Schoenberg wrote in his late twenties, is the epitome of his late romantic style, indebted to Richard Strauss. Erwartung (his first work for the stage) was written after his conversion to atonality.
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![Bergen Philharmonic Orchestra, Edward Gardner, James Ehnes, Hans-Kristian Kjos Sørensen - Bartók: Concerto for Orchestra; Dance Suite; Rhapsodies Nos. 1 & 2 (2017) [Official Digital Download 24bit/96kHz] Download](https://i0.wp.com/imghd.xyz/images/2022/08/23/uko24ust30dec_600.jpg?resize=500%2C500&ssl=1)
Bergen Philharmonic Orchestra, Edward Gardner, James Ehnes, Hans-Kristian Kjos Sørensen – Bartók: Concerto for Orchestra; Dance Suite; Rhapsodies Nos. 1 & 2 (2017)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 01:20:24 minutes | 1,29 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Digital Booklet, Front Cover | © Chandos
Among the rare works by Bartók for a full orchestra, the Dance Suite “immediately” precedes the Concerto for Orchestra, albeit by more than two decades… As with theConcerto, this was commissioned by Budapest City Hall for the 50th anniversary in 1923 of the unification of Buda, on the north bank of the Danube, with Pest, on the south. As so often with Bartók, this is “imaginary folk music”: the themes are assembled on a formal melodic and rhythmic base, made up from a stock of popular airs from Hungarian villages, but also from Romanian, Slovak and North African Arab sources. Unlike the two major orchestral works recorded here – the Concerto for Orchestra and the Dance Suite – the two rhapsodies for violin and orchestra from 1928 show us a Bartók who is returning to the “export” style of Eastern Europe, which he had inherited – like Brahms and Liszt before him – from Viennese café musicians: that is, from musicians much closer to the Romany accents than to the reality of Magyar folk music. The First Rhapsody is tinted with local colour thanks to the addition of a cimbalom in the orchestra, his one and only use of this instrument. As for the score for the Concerto for Orchestra – the most major work that he would produce in the last five years of his life in the USA, where he was a sick and demoralised refugee – it was commissioned by Serge Koussevitzky. Bartók began the work in August 1943 and completed it in eight weeks, a remarkably short period which proves that the was genuinely reinvigorated by the work: “Perhaps it’s thanks to this improvement that I was able to write the work Koussevitzky commissioned – or vice versa,” he wrote. The work was performed in December 1944 by the Boston Symphony Orchestra, and Bartók then altered the final portion, which became a little longer. On solo violin for the Rhapsodies we have James Ehnes, while Norway’s Bergen Orchestra is conducted with admirable clarity by Edward Gardner.
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