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Zina Schiff, Royal Scottish National Orchestra & Avlana Eisenberg – Still: Orchestral Works (2022)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 01:00:15 minutes | 1,14 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Naxos
William Grant Still, the “Dean of Afro-American Composers,” was part of the Harlem Renaissance and wrote nearly 200 works including nine operas and five symphonies. Still’s many awards included three Guggenheim Fellowships and eight honorary doctorates. His work combines Classical forms with jazz and blues idioms and was inspired by the rich tradition of African American spirituals. Still hoped that his music would serve a larger purpose of interracial understanding, and this joyous, moving and hauntingly beautiful program – featuring all world premiere recordings – is infused with Still’s love of God, country, heritage, and even his mischievous dog Shep.
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Royal Scottish National Orchestra, Neeme Järvi – A Festival of Fučík (2015)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 01:19:51 minutes | 1,44 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Chandos
Thirty years after having recorded Dvořák’s complete Symphonies on Chandos, the Royal Scottish National Orchestra and its laureate conductor Neeme Järvi tackle another romantic Czech composer: Julius Fučík, famous for his more than 400 polkas, marches, and waltzes, some of the best of which are featured here.
Fučík studied violin in his early years, switching later to the bassoon, with a subsidiary in percussion and timpani. Playing in Austrian regiments, he gained invaluable experience of writing for military band and became a very prolific composer of marches. The most famous of these is of course Entry of the Gladiators, completed in 1899 and performed throughout the world ever since.
Full of energetic, effervescent Bohemian crossrhythms, tuneful brass melodies (often now associated with a circus atmosphere), but also more lyrical expressions, this album is a festival in itself.
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Tchaikovsky & Khachaturian – Piano Concertos – Xiayin Wang, Royal Scottish National Orchestra, Peter Oundjian (2016)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96kHz | Time – 01:15:19 minutes | 1,22 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download – Source: theCLASSICALshop | Digital Booklet | © Chandos Records
Recorded: Royal Concert Hall, Glasgow; 8 and 9 November 2015
After a year off the concert platform, Xiayin Wang, a specialist in the romantic repertoire, presents a new recording of two relatively little-played piano concertos: No. 2 by Tchaikovsky, in its much lesser-known yet extremely virtuosic original version, and Khachaturian’s. The disc also marks the 125th anniversary of the Royal Scottish National Orchestra, here conducted by its Music Director, Peter Oundjian.
Involving the same forces as Wang’s earlier recording of American concertos (Editor’s Choice in the magazine Pianist), the album follows a performance in Edinburgh’s Usher Hall, described by The Scotsman as ‘breathtakingly athletic’.
Composed more than fifty years apart, these pieces have perhaps only one thing in common, namely an opening grandiosity or grandeur. Yet, while Tchaikovsky in 1879, in his heyday, undercut imperial splendour with a wealth of contrasting material that pointed the way ahead to more experimental, post-imperial concertos such as Prokofiev’s Second, Khachaturian’s folk generalisations, vaguely Armenian or Georgian, remain the consistent thumbprint of a rather heavier style.
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