Detroit Symphony Orchestra

Leonard Slatkin, Detroit Symphony Orchestra – Tchaikovsky: The Six Symphonies (Live) (2015) [Official Digital Download 24bit/96kHz]

Studio Masters By admin · May 20, 2023 · Comments off

Leonard Slatkin, Detroit Symphony Orchestra – Tchaikovsky: The Six Symphonies (Live) (2015)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 04:33:52 minutes | 4,55 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Live from Orchestra Hall

The symphonies of Tchaikovsky are richly scored and very demanding technically, as well as displaying a remarkable and highly individual amalgam of Russian characteristics and Western symphonic structure. In the case of his first three symphonies, we find many unusual features, a desire on his part for affirmation from his teachers and mentors, and an unease on their part due to what they expected him to compose and what he actually did. There is, of course, the question of an influence of native folk music in his output. About this, he once wrote: “…as far as the Russian element in my music is concerned, i.e. the relationship between the national songs and my melodies and harmonies, this is because I grew up in the backwoods, from earliest childhood saturated with the indescribable beauty of the characteristic traits of Russian folk music.”

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Detroit Symphony Orchestra – Bizet: Suites d’après Carmen & L’Arlésienne (Stereo Version) (1959/2014) [Official Digital Download 24bit/96kHz]

Studio Masters By admin · April 2, 2023 · Comments off

Known for one of the world’s most popular operas, Carmen, Georges Bizet deserves attention as well for other works of remarkable melodic charm. Many of his works received cool receptions upon their premieres but are now considered central to the repertory of classical music. Bizet was born in Paris on October 25, 1838 and grew up in a happy, musical family that encouraged his talents. He learned to read music at the same time he learned to read letters, both equally well. Entering the Paris Conservatory before he was ten, he earned first prize in solfège within six months, a first prize in piano in 1852, and eventually, the coveted Prix de Rome in 1857 for his cantata Clovis et Clotilde. His teachers had included Marmontel for piano and Halévy for composition, but the greatest influence on him was Charles Gounod, of whom Bizet later said “You were the beginning of my life as an artist.” Bizet himself hid away his Symphony in C, written when he was 17, feeling it was too much like its models, Gounod’s symphonies. The two years spent in Rome after winning his prize would be the only extensive amount of time (and a greatly impressionable one) that Bizet would spend outside of Paris in his brief life. When he returned to Paris, he lost confidence in his natural talents and began to substitute dry Germanic or academic writing for his own developing idiom. He composed a one-act opera for production at the Opéra-Comique, but the theater’s director engaged him to write a full-length opera instead, Les pêcheurs de perles (The Pearl Fishers). It was not a success at the time, but despite a few weaknesses, the work was revived in 1886, and its sheer beauty has earned it a respected position among the lesser-played operatic repertory. In 1863, Bizet’s father bought land outside Paris where he built two bungalows, one of which Bizet frequently used as a compositional retreat. He began a friendship (apparently not a physical one) with a neighbor-woman named Céleste Mogador, a former actress, author, courtesan, circus rider, and dancehall girl. She is said to have been the model for his masterpiece’s title role of Carmen. Bizet earned his living as an accompanist and publishing house arranger. Meanwhile, he poured his creative efforts into an immense five-act opera in the grand tradition, Ivan IV, but it was never performed. This proved to be a pattern for the rest of his career. Bizet would work hard to get an opera produced, and even if he did, it would usually receive only a handful of performances. Bizet’s corpus of unfinished works is large, and testifies to his unsettled existence and his difficulty in finding a place in France’s notoriously hierarchical and conservative musical world. In 1869, Bizet married Geneviève Halévy, daughter of his teacher. The marriage did not turn out to be a happy one, primarily due to her family’s history of mental illness. In 1872, Bizet’s splendid incidental music for the play L’arlèsienne was poorly received, but when the composer assembled the music into an orchestral suite for a November performance, it found great acclaim. At last confident of his creative vision, Bizet was able to steer his final masterpiece through various obstacles, including the objections of singers and theater directors who were shocked by Carmen’s subject matter. When the opera had its premiere on March 3, 1875, it was received barely well enough to hang on for future productions. Although it took audiences a few months to catch on, Bizet died convinced it was a failure. – Rovi Staff

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Detroit Symphony Orchestra, Paul Paray – Berlioz: Symphonie fantastique (Stereo Version) (2014) [Official Digital Download 24bit/96kHz]

Studio Masters By admin · April 2, 2023 · Comments off

Berlioz, the passionate, ardent, irrepressible genius of French Romanticism, left a rich and original oeuvre which exerted a profound influence on 19th century music. Berlioz developed a profound affinity toward music and literature as a child. Sent to Paris at 17 to study medicine, he was enchanted by Gluck’s operas, firmly deciding to become a composer. With his father’s reluctant consent, Berlioz entered the Paris Conservatoire in 1826. His originality was already apparent and disconcerting – a competition cantata, Cléopâtre (1829), looms as his first sustained masterpiece – and he won the Prix de Rome in 1830 amid the turmoil of the July Revolution. Meanwhile, a performance of Hamlet in September 1827, with Harriet Smithson as Ophelia, provoked an overwhelming but unrequited passion, whose aftermath may be heard in the Symphonie fantastique (1830). Returning from Rome, Berlioz organized a concert in 1832, featuring his symphony. Harriet Smithson was in the audience. They were introduced days later and married on October 3, 1833. Berlioz settled into a career pattern which he maintained for more than a decade, writing reviews, organizing concerts, and composing a series of visionary masterpieces: Harold en Italie (1834), the monumental Requiem (1837), and an opera, Benvenuto Cellini (1838), a crushing fiasco. At year’s end, the dying Paganini made Berlioz a gift of 20,000 francs, enabling him to devote nearly a year to the composition of his “dramatic symphony,” Roméo et Juliette (1839). And then, to commemorate the tenth anniversary of the July Revolution, came the Symphonie funèbre et triomphale (1840). Iridescently scored, an exquisite collection of six Gautier settings, Les nuits d’été, opened the new decade. This was a difficult time for Berlioz, as his marriage failed to bring him the happiness he desired. Concert tours to Brussels, many German cities, Vienna, Pesth, Prague, and London occupied him through most of the 1840s. He composed La Damnation de Faust, en route, offering the new work to a half-empty house in Paris, December 6, 1846. Expenses were catastrophic, and only a successful concert tour to St. Petersburg saved him. He sat out the revolutionary upheavals of 1848 in London, returning to Paris in July. The massive Te Deum – a “little brother” to the Requiem – was largely composed over 1849, though it would not be heard until 1855. L’Enfance du Christ, scored an immediate and enduring success from its first performance on December 10, 1854. Elected to the Institut de France in 1855, he started receiving a members’ stipend, and this provided him with a modicum of financial security. Consequently, Berlioz was able to devote himself to the summa of his career, his vast opera, Les Troyens, based on Virgil’s Aeneid, the Roman poet’s unfinished epic masterpiece. The opera was completed in 1858. As he negotiated for its performance, he composed a comique adaptation of Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing, which met with a rapturous Baden première, on August 9, 1862. Unfortunately, only the third, fourth, and fifth acts of Les Troyens were mounted by the Théatre-Lyrique, a successful premiere, on November 4, 1863, and a run of 21 performances notwithstanding. This lopsided production stemmed from a compromise (bitterly regretted by the composer) that Berlioz had made with the Théâtre-Lyrique. Though frail and ailing, Berlioz conducted his works in Vienna and Cologne in 1866, traveling to St. Petersburg and Moscow in the winter of 1867-1868. Despondent and tortured by self-doubt, the composer received a triumphant welcome in Russia. Back in Paris in March 1868, he was but a walking shadow as paralysis slowly overcame him. – Adrian Corleonis

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