Christine Rice, Stuart Skelton, The BBC Symphony Orchestra & Edward Gardner – Verklärte Nacht (2021)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 01:03:35 minutes | 1,05 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Chandos
Hot on the heels of their acclaimed recording of Britten’s Peter Grimes, Stuart Skelton and Edward Gardner join forces with Christine Rice and the BBC Symphony Orchestra for this fascinating programme of early twentieth-century works. Schoenberg’s Verklärte Nacht needs no introduction, but far rarer is Oscar Fried’s contemporaneous setting of the same poem.
Composed in 1901 for soloists and orchestra, Fried’s version is a true setting of (as opposed to Schoenberg’s reflection on) the text by Richard Dehmel. Lehár wrote Fieber in 1915 as the closing part of his song cycle Aus eiserner Zeit – he then made the orchestral setting a year later. Korngold’s Lieder des Abschieds (“Songs of Farewell”) date from the early 1920s, whilst he was still in Vienna, and shortly after he had completed the opera Die tote Stadt. Setting poetry by Christina Rossetti, Edith Ronsperger, and Ernst Lothar, the cycle is a poignant reflection on the Great War.
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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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![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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BBC Symphony Orchestra, Edward Gardner, Tasmin Little – Walton: Symphony No. 1 & Violin Concerto (2014)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 01:16:26 minutes | 1,28 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Chandos
Edward Gardner, a Chandos exclusive artist, conducts the BBC Symphony Orchestra in two masterpieces by William Walton, the Violin Concerto and Symphony No. 1.
Walton burst onto the British musical scene in his twenties, the success of works such as Façade, the Viola Concerto, and Belshazzar’s Feast establishing him in both the avant-garde and the mainstream of British composers. The obvious next step for Walton was to compose a symphony and he was duly commissioned to do so by Sir Hamilton Harty in 1932. The first complete performance of his Symphony No. 1, in 1935, was a triumph, immediately gaining the work an honoured place in British music which it has never lost. It is a highly virtuosic work with a remarkable expressive range, in turns powerful and broad, malicious, melancholic, and majestic.
James Ehnes, BBC Symphony Orchestra, Edward Gardner – Walton: Viola Concerto, Partita for Orchestra & Sonata for String Orchestra (2018)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 01:05:42 minutes | 1,11 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Chandos
In this third volume of Edward Gardner’s Walton series with the BBC Symphony Orchestra, James Ehnes leaves his violin to tackle the taxing soloist role in the Viola Concerto. In a recent Strad interview, Ehnes confesses: ‘This is a piece I have loved since I was a teenager, so it is wonderful that the opportunity has come my way to record it… With Walton’s Viola Concerto, none of the writing is impossible but a lot of it is close. And in a way that is exactly where you want it to be: on the edge of technical limitations. There’s a tremendous amount of excitement in that.’ This album in surround sound also features two much later works: the 1957 Partita for Orchestra and the Sonata for String Orchestra, adapted in 1971 from the String Quartet in A minor of 1945 – 47. There is a striking contrast between the uncomfortable modernism of the up-and-coming young composer’s Viola Concerto and the relaxed brilliance of the mature Partita. But the Sonata shows Walton late in his life re-engaging as an arranger with his earlier manner, and so with the characteristic vein of restless unease that runs through most of his output.
Read more![Alison Balsom, Edward Gardner, Göteborgs Symfoniker - Caprice (2006/2014) [Official Digital Download 24bit/44,1kHz] Download](https://i0.wp.com/imghd.xyz/images/2022/06/10/0825646222698_600.jpg?resize=500%2C500&ssl=1)
Alison Balsom, Edward Gardner, Göteborgs Symfoniker – Caprice (2006/2014)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/44,1 kHz | Time – 59:46 minutes | 534 MB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Digital Booklet, Front Cover | © Warner Classics
Voted Young British Classical Performer of the Year at the 2006 Classical Brits, Alison Balsom follows her critically-acclaimed album Bach: Works for Trumpet with Caprice, a novel and demanding programme of specially arranged popular classical works.
The album features sparkling transcriptions of Mozart’s ‘Rondo alla Turca’ and the Queen of the Night’s aria (from The Magic Flute) as well as the scintillating ‘Variations on Bellini’s Norma’ by the French virtuoso Jean-Baptiste Arban. Amongst the more lyrical numbers, Balsom plays arrangements of Rachmaninov’s haunting Vocalise and the exquisite Nocturne from Tomasi’s Trumpet Concerto. She also brings her unique sound to two pieces played by the trumpet alone: Paganini’s well-known violin Caprice No.24 and Debussy’s Syrinx.
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