Symphony CDs

ank Horizon Tracks: Disc 1 BJ Cole, Millsy & Davy Spillan-Pipegroove City-Your Life Kirsty Hawkshaw-Meteors Flying Saucer Attack-Beach Red Lullaby Maurice Ravel-Adagio Assai Simon And Eliza-Its Happening Pieter Nooten and Michael Brook-Several Times II Chungking-Angel Eyes Bent...

Victoria’s Lamentations Of Jeremiah is The Tallis Scholars’ 50th recording for its own Gimell label. The world renowned Tallis Scholars celebrate their 30th anniversary with some of Victoria’s most intense, mystical & moving music, ranking alongside the Requiem as one...

Jorge Bolet made this superbly languid and delicate recording of 16 Préludes by Debussy less than two years before his untimely death in 1990 at the age of 75. The Cuban-born pianist's reputation was largely founded on his mercurial, blockbusting performances and recordings of R...

Deutsche Grammophon/CherryTree announces the release of Symphonicities, the new studio album, comprised of twelve of Sting's most celebrated songs re-imagined for symphonic arrangement. Highlights on the new album include arrangements of fan-favorites culled from The Police songbook such as &ldqu...

2Cellos (stylized 2CELLOS) is a cello duo consisting of Croatian cellists Luka Šulić and Stjepan Hauser. Signed to Sony Masterworks since 12 April 2011,the two were discovered after uploading a music video of their cello-only cover of Michael Jackson's "Smooth Criminal" to YouTube. ...

Hamburg, 1674: to his contemporaries, the death of Matthias Weckmann seemed to herald the end of a glorious period. In his post as organist of the Jacobikirche since 1655, the composer had breathed new life into the city’s musical scene with his Collegium Musicum. Among his finest sacred works...

Biography As a pianist, conductor and recording artist Howard Shelley has enjoyed a distinguished career since his highly acclaimed London debut in 1971, performing each season with renowned orchestras at major venues around the world. Much of his current work is in the combin...

This live CD and DVD collection features Sting 'Live in Berlin', accompanied by the Royal Philharmonic Concert Orchestra, conducted by Steven Mercurio. Culled from Sting's critically acclaimed world tour, 'Symphonicity', this exclusive compilation features many of his greatest hits, including &qu...

Rodolphe Kreutzer’s final three violin concertos are among his greatest achievements as a composer. While handling a Beethovenian orchestra with a craftsman’s sure touch, it is the purity and depth of tone, energetic fire and complete technical mastery required of the soloist that set...

Dazzlingly virtuosic fireworks, spirited passion and astonishing technique combine in the youthful Chinese violinist Tianwa Yang who leaves the critics grasping for superlatives whenever she plays. In this second volume of Naxos’s cycle of Sarasate’s complete works for violin and orch...

Vector Wellington Orchestra’s 70th anniversary commemoration of Kristallnacht was one of the most unforgettable concerts of 2008. Now available on CD Requiem is live recording taken from the concert, featuring Boris Pigovat’s ‘Holocaust Requiem’ for solo viola and orc...

The Chicago Symphony Orchestra inaugurates Riccardo Muti's tenure as music director with one of the most anticipated releases of the year Verdi's Requiem Mass, featuring the Chicago Symphony Chorus and four outstanding soloists. Recorded live from sold-out, electrifying concerts, this stunning perfo...

New Zealand Symphony Orchestra, James Judd, Varsity Voices, Nota Bene Choir In 1826 Felix Mendelssohn, aged only seventeen, composed his famous overture to A Midsummer Night’s Dream. He wrote incidental music for the same play sixteen years later, and effortlessly recaptured the world of hi...

It's not widely known that Bach’s great mass wasn’t originally conceived as a single entity. Indeed, when he presented the Elector of Saxony Friedrich August II with a score of his ‘Missa’ in B minor in 1733, it consisted of only Kyrie and Gloria, the first two parts of the m...

Alexander Zemlinsky (1871-1941) grew up in Vienna, and perhaps unsurprisingly was attracted to the music of Brahms rather than Wagner. This accounts for the composition of chamber works and symphonies in his youthful output and the lack of operas. Brahms praised Zemlinsky's First Symphony in D minor...

“Herreweghe has the measure of the mighty work. Everything, even the slow Kyrie, carries intense conviction. The Dona nobis, so difficult to get right, rounds off ideally a performance in which all participants seem moved by a single impulse.” - Sunday Times Records of the Year 2005.

Unlike many piano arrangements, all these pieces have been arranged by the composers themselves for four hands. The Piano Duo Trenkner-Speidel presents these arrangements in authentic interpretations on a sonorous Steinway concert grand piano from 1901. Evelinde Trenkner and Sontraud Speidel have re...

The Borodin Quartet is a string quartet founded in 1945 in the former Soviet Union. It’s one of the world’s longest lasing string quartets, marking its 65th anniversary season in 2010. The quartet were one of the Soviet Union’s best-known in the West during the Cold War era, thr...

Mahler's Eighth Symphony is truly epic work drawing on an enormous choir, orchestra, off-stage brass, and eight soloists, and is divided into two distinct but related parts. The symphony opens with an exuberant hymn of praise to the creator spirit before moving to an ethereal setting of the Final Sc...

To create what became his most popular oratorio, Handel chose Biblical excerpts telling the story of Christ's birth, death and resurrection. In this 2006 live performance Sir Colin Davis returned to the work he had first recorded in 1966. The stirring new account is sure to set the standard for year...

The second in Harmonia Mundi’s Winterreise triptych is again presented by a tenor, the lyric-voiced Werner Gura, but using a Rönisch fortepiano of 1872, played by Christoph Berner. Winterreise, composed in 1827, is the embodiment of Romanticism in music, the ultimate expression of ‘...

 One of the leading baritones and dramatic interpreters of his generation, Gerald Finley is an artist who sets alight the stage and delights the ear in whatever the role he portrays. On this (his first arias disc, and first for Opera in English) he explores a broad range of repertory: old fa...

 A greater prodigy even than Mozart, German composer, pianist and conductor Felix Mendelssohn was composing fully mature works from the age of 12. Stirred by his classical upbringing and inspired by art and nature, his music flows with melodic freshness and inventive orchestration. The energy, ...

From All Music Guide: Many discs intended to serve as an introduction to a particular composer's works offer only single movements of larger works, leaving the listener somewhat unfulfilled and wanting more. Not so with the Chandos line of "intro" CDs, which actually does a better job of i...

 Praised for her exquisite recordings for Hyperion and hailed as one of the most original interpreters of the music of J.S. Bach since Glenn Gould, Canadian pianist Angela Hewitt has surpassed her usual high standards in this astonishing set of The Well-Tempered Clavier. Critical response to th...

Herbert Blomstedt's Beethoven cycle with the Staatskapelle Dresden is one of the great ones, as much for the magnificent playing of this finest of all German orchestras as for Blomstedt's effortlessly musical interpretations. The only possible weak link here might be the first movement of the Fifth,...

Classically trained from the age of 7, composer and keyboard player Jon Lord was diverted for over 40 years with his involvement in the rock group Deep Purple during which time he penned such rock anthems as Smoke on the Water and Child in Time. He returned to full-time classical composing in 2002 a...

Recording made in 1994 Tchaikovsky thought highly of his music to Ostrovky's drama The Snow Maiden, writing to his patroness Nadezhda von Meck in 1879 'one of my favourite offspring....I think this music is imbued with the joys of spring that I was experiencing at the time' It was an important co...

Mozart's piano sonatas date from 1773 until 1788 -- a period in which his style matured at a truly remarkable rate. The earliest sonatas are very much in the galant style of W.F and CPE Bach, and in places Scarlatti's influence can be detected. However, the late sonatas, such as K457 are full of sur...

34 years after her death Maria Callas remains the definition of a diva. She is not only the world's bestselling soprano but also EMI Classic's bestselling artist of all time. Widely regarded for her intense characterisation and unique interpretations she has become a cultural icon whose music and li...

The Colours of Chrisŕrnas is the brand new album from John Rutter, the prolific British composer who is synonymous with this time of year for hundreds of thousands of choral singers and listeners across the world. His notable arrangemenœ of some ofthe best-loved Christmas carols alongside his ow...

Homage to Maria Callas is a collection of beloved French and Italian operatic masterpieces performed by Angela Gheorghiu, the defining diva of this century. The program is inspired by the career and recordings of Maria Callas, the greatest diva of the last century. The arias are shared favorites...

This two CD set includes two classic albums from Nigel Kennedy.

This 29-track double set includes disc one with studio recordings and disc two being live in concert and featuring "Blue Danube", "Emperor Waltz", and a British Medley.

At the beginning of the year Naïve announced the signing of an exclusive contract with the singer Anne Sofie von Otter. Diversity and discovery are the hallmark of this collaboration: the Swedish mezzosoprano has chosen to make her first recording for Naïve with the jazz pianist Brad Mehld...

Without doubt, Monteverdi was the greatest of the early baroque European composers. He revolutionised the music of the theatre and the church by his dramatic and imaginative use of voices and instruments and by his daring harmonies and rhythms. Next to his Vespers of 1610, the Selva morale e sp...

Stravinsky’s early ballets The Firebird and The Rite of Spring are soaked in the folklore of the Russian people. Parisian arriviste Stravinsky, collaborating with flamboyant impresario Sergei Diaghilev and his Ballet Russes de Monte Carlo, brought out The Firebird in 1910. Supercharged with be...

Isabelle Faust has gone back to the original manuscript sources to offer us her versions of these iconic masterpieces of the violin repertoire. In Bach s time, music for solo instruments was still little explored territory, and his Sonatas and Partitas immediately established themselves as a benchma...

From Siegmund's stormy entrance to Wotan's sorrowful exit, Die Walkure is the most dramatic opera in Wagner's Ring cycle. Here, this 4-CD set with a star cast, James Levine produces "the maximum dramatic significance from the orchestral music" -Gramophone -