Singapore Symphony Orchestra

Singapore Symphony Orchestra, Lan Shui – Russian Spectacular (2021)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 01:07:17 minutes | 1,11 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © BIS

This programme of orchestral showpieces features four of the five members of the “Mighty Handful”, a group of Russian composers who during the second half of the 19th century collaborated to create a distinct national style. The recorded works illustrate different aspects of their endeavours – both in terms of the musical means they employ and their subject matter. Orientalism is one of the typical features of the music of the group, as witness Balakirev’s Islamey – employing material from the Caucasus Mountains – and Borodin’s Polovtsian Dances, describing the revels of a nomadic eastern tribe during a 12th-century raid into the Russian lands.
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Singapore Symphony Orchestra, Lan Shui – Debussy: Nocturnes, L. 91 & Other Orchestral Works (2019)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 01:15:37 minutes | 1,18 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Digital Booklet, Front Cover | © BIS

The works on this recording were written at various periods in Claude Debussy’s life, and reflect different aspects of him: from a young man stylistically unsure of himself to the confident maître, from a jobbing composer struggling to fulfill sometimes incongruous commissions to a man worn down by illness and outer events. The disc opens with Printemps – a work originally for choir, piano and orchestra written in 1887 during Debussy’s stay in Italy as a winner of the Prix de Rome, but only published 25 years later in an orchestration made by Henri Büsser under the composer’s supervision. Three of the works that follow were commissions – the Rapsodie from a lady saxophonist, the Marche écossaise from an American general of Scottish descent and the Deux Dances from the instrument-maker Pleyel wanting to market a new model for a chromatic harp. Chronologically the last work on the programme, Berceuse héroique is Debussy’s contribution to a tribute to the king of Belgium at the beginning of the Great War. Having rejected the idea of writing a heroic march in the safety of his own home he instead opted for a lullaby for piano, which he orchestrated the following year. The closing work on the disc, however, is Nocturnes, for which Debussy borrowed the title from a series of atmospheric paintings by James Whistler. Made up of three equally atmospheric movements, it is today one of Debussy’s best-loved compositions for orchestra. Nocturnes also forms the end of a trilogy of Debussy albums from the Singapore Symphony Orchestra and Lan Shui. Critical acclaim for the team range from ‘superb’ (BBC Music Magazine, about La mer) and ‘unquestionably world-class’ (Klassik-Heute.de, about the orchestra) to ‘a magnificent disc’ – the French magazine Classica’s verdict on the three ballet scores Jeux, Khamma and La Boîte à joujoux.
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Singapore Symphony Orchestra, Lan Shui – Rachmaninoff: Symphonies & Orchestral Music (2021)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 05:05:07 minutes | 4,67 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Digital Booklet, Front Cover | © BIS

Sergei Rachmaninov was one of the twentieth century’s outstanding pianists, but the large body of purely orchestral music he composed is no less an expression of his musical character. His great strength was that he managed to preserve intact a vision he had discovered very early in life. This contemporary of Schönberg, Scriabin, Ravel and Ives was unconcerned with musical fashions and had no wish to be a pioneer. Instead, and over a period of half a century he refined and deepened a language which derived naturally from his late-nineteenth-century Russian background.
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Singapore Symphony Orchestra, Lan Shui – Debussy: Jeux (2017)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 01:15:18 minutes | 1,23 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © BIS

Shui proves a first-rate interpreter of all three works. Jeux is startlingly dramatic, the ebb and flow of the music beautifully judged, the mood unsettlingly erotic and menacing, the orchestral sounds darkly sensual…the Singapore orchestra’s playing is persuasively vivid and precise … It’s all essential listening if you’re interested in the relationship between music and dance. –Gramophone, Oct 17

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