July 26: The Juilliard String Quartet Plays Schoenberg – The First Release of the Juilliard Quartet’s Complete 1975 Cycle of String Quartets on CD

The Juilliard String Quartet Plays Schoenberg
with the first release of the Juilliard Quartet’s
Complete 1975 Cycle of String Quartets on CD

Album Release Date: July 26, 2024
Reviewer Rate: $30.01 + shipping/handling fees 
Preorder Now

Schoenberg at 150 on Sony Classical

Arnold Schoenberg, one of the most influential musical figures of the 20th century, was born in Vienna in 1874. Sony Classical is celebrating the 150th anniversary of the great composer’s birth with the reissue of 20 CDs of recordings from CBS/American Columbia. The company was a pioneer in documenting Schoenberg’s achievements and already demonstrated that commitment during his lifetime (he died in 1952). In 1940, with the composer conducting, Columbia Masterworks produced the first recording of one of his most captivating and revolutionary works, Pierrot lunaire; and in the 1950s and 60s, the label undertook a ground-breaking multi-volume series entitled “The Music of Arnold Schoenberg”. But arguably no recordings have done more to further the cause of Schoenberg’s orchestral and vocal works than those of Pierre Boulez, while none have done more to promote his chamber music than those by the Juilliard Quartet. Sony Classical now presents all of Boulez’s Schoenberg for CBS/Columbia in a 13-CD box, and all of the Juilliard’s in a 7-disc set.

The Juilliard Quartet brought its “profoundly intelligent” Schoenberg interpretations (Gramophone) into the studio over an even longer span – four decades, beginning with its first traversal of the numbered string quartets in 1951/52 (“Magnificent recordings” – Gramophone). The Juilliard returned to Columbia’s 30th Street Studio in 1975 for a stereo remake of the four “official” quartets, now coupled with the ensemble’s first recording of the early D major Quartet – a charming student work that could almost be mistaken for Dvořák.

But it wasn’t only advances in technology that prompted the Juilliard Quartet to re-record Schoenberg after years of regularly performing the quartets in concert. In an interview about their evolving interpretations with the recording’s producer, the players spoke of an increasingly romantic approach, especially to Nos. 3 and 4, with less emphasis on rhythmic drive but greater emotional intensity. The set won them the 1977 Grammy for Best Chamber Music Performance.

The mono and stereo quartet cycles are both included in Sony Classical’s new 7-CD collection of the complete Juilliard Schoenberg recordings. And there are also two Juilliard versions for comparison – one from 1966 (the work’s LP premiere), the other from 1985 – of the extraordinarily intense String Trio which Schoenberg composed in the aftermath of a massive heart attack that caused his heart to stop beating. Something of that experience is reflected in the music. And, apropos comparison, the New York Philharmonic’s recording of Schoenberg’s sumptuous orchestral arrangement of his Verklärte Nacht in the Pierre Boulez collection is complemented here by the leaner original sextet version, with the Juilliard Quartet joined in 1991 by violist Walter Trampler and cellist Yo-Yo Ma.

SET CONTENTS - The Juilliard String Quartet Plays Schoenberg

DISC 1:

Schoenberg: String Quartet No. 1, Op. 7 (1952 recording)
Schoenberg: String Quartet No. 4, Op. 37 (1952 recording)

DISC 2:

Schoenberg: String Quartet No. 2 in F-Sharp Minor, Op. 10 (1951 recording)
Schoenberg: String Quartet No. 3, Op. 30 (1951 recording)

DISC 3:

Schoenberg: Trio for Violin, Viola and Cello, Op. 45
Schoenberg: Ode to Napoleon Buonaparte, Op. 41 with John Horton and Glenn Gould

DISC 4:

Schoenberg: String Quartet No. 1 in D Minor, Op. 7 (1975 recording)

DISC 5:

Schoenberg: String Quartet No. 2, Op. 10 (1975 recording)
Schoenberg: String Quartet No. 3, Op. 30 (1975 recording)

DISC 6:

Schoenberg: String Quartet No. 4, Op. 37 (1975 recording)
Schoenberg: String Quartet in D Major (1975 recording)

DISC 7:

Schoenberg: Verklärte Nacht, Op. 4 with Yo-Yo Ma
Schoenberg: String Trio, Op. 45 with Yo-Yo Ma

GRAMMY® Award-Winning American Composer, Collaborator & Guitarist Bryce Dessner Signs Extensive Partnership with Sony Music Masterworks

GRAMMYⓇ Award-Winning American Composer,
Collaborator & Guitarist 
Bryce Dessner

Signs Extensive Partnership with Sony Music Masterworks

Creating A New Home Base
For His Classical Works and Select Soundtracks

Makes Sony Classical Début With New Album Solos
Available Everywhere August 23 – Pre-Order Now

Out Today – Lead Single “Lullaby For Jacques Et Brune”
Listen Here

Featuring Anastasia Kobekina, Colin Currie, Katia Labèque, Lavinia Meijer, Nadia Sirota, Pekka Kuusisto And Bryce Dessner

“Dessner […] moves fluidly between rock and classical and everywhere in between.” 
– The Guardian, October 2021

“Dessner, who closely studied the Labèques’ repertoire, throws all manner of writing at the pianists, who play cascading figures in canon, stuttering syncopations, gently articulated polyrhythms, jabbing chords and twinkling starbursts of notes. The orchestra, mesmerized, follows their lead.” – The New York Times, December 2023

“It’s the sheer brilliance and ebullience of the music, with insistent rhythms that seem to owe as much to rock as they do to Steve Reich.” – The Guardian, February 2024

Sony Music Masterworks announces today, May 3, 2024 a unique far-reaching partnership with versatile composer, sought-after musical collaborator and guitarist Bryce Dessner, who is also a founding member of GRAMMYⓇ Award-winning rock band The National. The newly inked partnership will see Dessner’s classical compositions released on Sony Classical, while sister label Milan Records will continue to be a home for some of his celebrated soundtracks. This innovative tailored approach will give Dessner maximum artistic freedom to pursue these two essential strands of his creative output.

Dessner will make his Sony Classical début on August 23, 2024 with Solos, a collection featuring a series of unaccompanied instrumental works written by the composer over the past few years. Selected from both his classical and soundtrack worlds, the works showcase not only Dessner’s compositional flair but also the immense talent of his acclaimed collaborators, many of whom work regularly with him and are his friends. Featured soloists include cellist Anastasia Kobekina; violinist Pekka Kuusisto; pianist Katia Labèque; harpist Lavinia Meijer; violist Nadia Sirota; percussionist Colin Currie; and Bryce Dessner himself on guitar. Accompanying today’s announcement and album pre-order is the first single from Solos – “Lullaby for Jacques et Brune” – a lullaby for piano, written by Bryce Dessner for his godchildren.

Says Dessner of these pieces:

“Writing a solo piece for me is always a great challenge and joy, as you have all the personality and talent of the player plus the physicality and resonance of the solo instrument, a bit like a Shakespearean monologue. These solo pieces for violin, viola, cello, harp, percussion, guitar and piano represent many years of my compositional process. When I began composing, I mainly wrote solo pieces for myself to play and I have always loved unaccompanied instrumental music – including the solo Bach lute and cello suites and the Renaissance lute fantasies of John Dowland, which I used to play myself on the classical guitar. These pieces of mine are often written like poems, where the musical language itself dictates the form and evolution of the piece, and were often opportunities for me to explore more deeply my relationship to the instruments they were composed for. They also represent in each case close collaborative relationships and friendships I have been very lucky to develop with the incredible musicians who play them. Katia, Pekka, Anastasia, Nadia, Lavinia and Colin are all exceptional artists who brought so much of their amazing talent to these recordings.”   

Dessner is a prolific classical composer, whose output has garnered him a Grammy Award and ranges from intimate chamber pieces and scaled-down works for solo instrumentalists to full orchestral scores and concertos.

In addition to his role as one of eight San Francisco Symphony Collaborative Partners, Bryce Dessner is currently Creative Chair of the Tonhalle-Orchester Zürich, and Artist-in-Residence at London’s Southbank Centre and with the Frankfurt Radio Symphony Orchestra. Major new works include a Piano Concerto premièred by Alice Sara Ott and the Tonhalle-Orchester Zürich in January 2024 and now being performed internationally; a Concerto for Two Pianos premièred by Katia & Marielle Labèque and the London Philharmonic Orchestra; and a Violin Concerto premièred and performed internationally by Pekka Kuusisto. Dessner’s in-demand compositions have been performed by leading orchestras around the world, including the Los Angeles Philharmonic, New York Philharmonic, The Cleveland Orchestra, Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio France, Philharmonia Orchestra of London and San Francisco Symphony Orchestra. 

He has co-founded several new-music festivals, including the Cincinnati-based MusicNOW Festival in 2006, Copenhagen’s Haven Festival and the Cork-based Sounds from a Safe Harbour.

Bryce Dessner’s musical career has been rich and eclectic. Born into a musical family based in Cincinnati, he started out learning the flute as a child before switching to classical guitar in his teenage years, graduating from Yale University with a Masters in Music before finding fame as a founder member, guitarist, arranger and writer for alternative rock band The National.

Alongside his classical compositions, Dessner is also much sought after as a film composer, with recent and upcoming releases including the film Sing Sing starring Colman Domingo (due for release by A24 in summer 2024), limited series Manhunt (released in March 2024 on Apple TV), and John Crowley’s We Live in Time (due for release 2024 on A24). Over the years he has garnered great acclaim for his work on films such as Alejandro González Iñárritu’s The Revenant with the late Ryuichi Sakamoto and for his music to Netflix’s Fernando Meirelles’s The Two Popes. Dessner’s many musical collaborations include working with Philip Glass, Johnny Greenwood, Bon Iver, Steve Reich, Paul Simon, Bruce Springsteen, Sufjan Stevens, Taylor Swift and Thom Yorke.

Extraordinarily gifted, collaborative, secure in his own musical language and brimming with ideas, Bryce Dessner is a singular talent whose addition to the roster is warmly welcomed as he expands the repertoire with his new music, bringing with him his trademark original deep thinking, enthusiasm for all types of music and forward-thinking creative partnerships.

On this new arrangement with Sony Music, Bryce Dessner commented: “I am very much looking forward to an ongoing collaboration with Sony Music Masterworks and their wonderful team on several upcoming projects around my compositional work.”

Per Hauber, President, Sony Classical added: “As Bryce Dessner embarks on this exciting new chapter with Sony Classical, we look forward to showcasing his extraordinary talent and pushing boundaries of classical music together. We believe Sony Music Masterworks is the ideal new home for his releases and we warmly welcome him!”

Alexander Buhr, SVP International A&R adds: “Bryce is a uniquely gifted composer and musician, and a very important voice in contemporary music. With his broad range of influences and inspirations he crafts music that is daring and ambitious, while making instant emotional connection with the audience. All this is introduced perfectly on Solos. We are very happy to welcome Bryce to the Sony family.”

Bryce Dessner’s music is published by and available from Chester Music, part of the Wise Music Group.

Solos Tracklist

1. Lullaby for Jacques et Brune 2:26
Katia Labèque piano

2. Francis 2:19
Bryce Dessner guitar

3. Tuusula 11:24
Anastasia Kobekina cello

4. Song for Octave 3:42
Katia Labèque piano

5. Tromp Miniature 6:59
Colin Currie percussion

6. Ornament and Crime I 4:16

7. Ornament and Crime II 2:14

8. Ornament and Crime III 6:28
Pekka Kuusisto violin

9. A Good Person 2:42
Katia Labèque piano

10. On a Wire 11:02
Lavinia Meijer harp

11. Walls 2:58
Bryce Dessner guitar

12. Delphica I 7:31

13. Delphica II 4:32
Nadia Sirota viola

14. Ornament III Piano 7:21
Katia Labèque piano

15. Song for Ainola 1:19
Anastasia Kobekina cello

Sony Classical Signs Pianist Jeneba Kanneh-Mason – First Recital Album to be Released in 2025

© Johanna Berghorn/Sony Classical

Sony Classical Signs Pianist Jeneba Kanneh-Mason
for First Recital Album to be Released in 2025

Sony Classical is delighted to announce the exclusive signing of pianist Jeneba Kanneh-Mason, who records her first recital album this year for release in Spring 2025.

The 22-year-old British pianist has already impressed critics with her “poetry and confidence” (The Guardian) and as a “vivid soloist” (The Sunday Times) who performs “straight from the heart, with care, sparkle and self-possession” (BBC Music Magazine). Following her début tour of Australia, the Chronicle exclaimed: “There was maturity in performance and interpretation … Effortless, yes. Impressive, even more so – and exciting is probably an understatement.”

Jeneba’s first recording on the label displays her wide-ranging curiosity for repertoire and individual approach to programming, with a recital that juxtaposes works by Frédéric Chopin, Claude Debussy and Alexander Scriabin with music by under-represented composers Margaret Bonds, Florence Price and William Grant Still.

Already an established performer of music by Florence Price, on her 2023 recording of the composer’s Concerto in One Movement, The Observer noted that “Price could have no more persuasive an advocate”. Of her performance of the work at the BBC Proms, the Evening Standard wrote that “she proved an eloquent advocate for the piece with her sensitive yet alert playing”.

Jeneba notes: “I am so happy and honoured to join the prestigious roster of artists at Sony Classical. I can’t remember a time when classical music wasn’t an integral part of my life, and I am a huge advocate for its positive influences and ability to really connect with such a wide range of people. The piano repertoire is enormous and I’m excited to be able to explore it, discovering the old, the new, and to perform pieces by more women, as well as black and minority ethnic composers.”

“I am delighted to welcome Jeneba Kanneh-Mason to Sony Classical. We can’t wait to shape the next steps of Jeneba’s career together with her as her exclusive recording partner.” Per Hauber, President, Sony Classical International

“Jeneba’s musical prowess is simply electrifying. With curiosity and a vibrant spirit, she brings her very own fresh perspective to every piece she plays. We are absolutely thrilled to have Jeneba join the Sony Classical family, bringing her infectious energy to our joint musical journey!” Dr. Alexander Buhr, SVP A&R, Sony Classical International

“We are thrilled that Jeneba is joining the fantastic roster of artists at Sony Classical. From the beginning of our discussions with the label, it was clear that the whole international team understood Jeneba’s needs and wishes as a young pianist, starting to forge her own path. We look forward to a close and collaborative relationship with the label and can’t wait to see what the future will bring!” Kathryn Enticott, Enticott Music Management

Jeneba, who was a finalist in the 2018 BBC Young Musician competition and a recent Classic FM Rising Star, completes her studies at the Royal College of Music this summer, where she holds the Victoria Robey Scholarship. Pianist magazine celebrates Jeneba’s signing to Sony Classical by featuring her on the June cover.

“I’ve wanted to be a pianist for as long as I can remember and it feels like a wonderful opportunity to work with the label and to have their confidence and support. I will look forward to our first recording!” Jeneba is well on track as she joins the Sony Classical roster and begins her journey alongside eminent fellow pianists Leif Ove Andsnes, Khatia Buniatishvili and Igor Levit, as well as historical legends such as Glenn Gould and Arthur Rubinstein.

Biography

Pianist Jeneba Kanneh-Mason was a finalist in the 2018 BBC Young Musician and made her London début in 2020 at the age of 18, performing Rachmaninoff’s Second Piano Concerto with the Philharmonia Orchestra. In the same year she gave the UK première of Florence Price’s Concerto in One Movement with Chineke! at the Royal Festival Hall, returning to the work for her first BBC Proms appearance in 2021.

Early reviews encapsulate the young pianist’s talent:

“Poised, polished, professional and full of the joy of music-making … It’s rare to find such a youthful pianist able to listen to and blend with an orchestra quite so expertly” – The Arts Desk.

“Kanneh-Mason is perfectly attuned to Price’s world – her clarity is remarkable … Although still at music college, it is clear this is a name that will be one to watch” – Seen and Heard International.

Now, three years later, as she completes her studies at the Royal College of Music, Jeneba is ready to embrace the future. Having recently returned from the United States, where she made her début with the Detroit Symphony Orchestra, she is currently preparing for a recital tour that takes her across the UK and culminates at London’s Wigmore Hall in September.

Highlights of the 2024/25 season include performances with the Philharmonia and Marin Alsop, as well as débuts with the Munich Symphony Orchestra, Oslo Philharmonic, Orchestre National de Lyon, Stockholm Philharmonic and Royal Philharmonic. This autumn Jeneba also tours with the Hungarian Radio Symphony Orchestra performing Chopin’s and Rachmaninoff’s Second Piano Concertos in concert throughout the UK.

Jeneba holds the Victoria Robey Scholarship at the Royal College of Music, where she has been studying piano with Vanessa Latarche. She is grateful to Lady Robey, to The Nottingham Soroptimist Trust and to The Nottingham Education Trust, who have all supported her studies and early career.

Cellist Pablo Ferrández Releases Night Sessions Vol. 2 on Sony Classical

Private Moments from Cellist Pablo Ferrández

Sony Classical Releases Night Sessions Vol. 2

Out Today – Listen Here

For his latest EP on Sony Classical, Pablo Ferrández invites listeners to eavesdrop on some of the most intimate and meaningful moments in his life.

Each track on Night Sessions Vol. 2 is connected to a memory dear to the Spanish cellist’s life. It opens with the serene melody of Elgar’s Salut d’Amour - music that came on the radio each evening when Ferrández was bathed by his mother as a baby. ‘I recorded this song for her,’ he says.

The cellist’s intimate recital continues with the first music he played outside Spain, a work Alexander Glazunov dedicated to the Tsar’s cellist in 1901, Chant du ménestrel. Playing this sensitive, poetic piece in the Tchaikovsky Hall in Moscow was, for the teenage Ferrández, ‘the biggest deal’.

Saint-Saëns’s ‘The Swan’ - the most popular movement of the composer’s Carnival of the Animals - holds special memories for the cellist. He heard it performed by a hotel band while on holiday with his family as a child, and recalls eventually being invited to join the musicians to perform it. The piece gets a soulful performance here from Ferrández and his partner on all four tracks, the pianist Julien Quentin.

More recent memories are evoked by the final track, Schumann’s ‘Du bist wie eine Blume’, an arrangement of the song in which the composer compared his wife Clara to a flower in bloom. This was the music played when Ferrández and his fiancé walked up the aisle to marry recently, and was recorded by the cellist ‘as a little present’ for his new wife. 

In his new EP played from the heart, Ferrández sets out ‘to bring listeners with me into these pictures of my life.’

Pablo Ferrández was born in 1991 Madrid and named after the great Spanish cellist, Pablo Casals. He released his debut solo album on Sony in 2021 to critical acclaim and has since recorded as a concerto partner with Anne-Sophie Mutter and won an Opus Klassik Award.

May 17: Sony Classical Releases Two Orchestral Works by Danny Elfman Featuring Percussionist Colin Currie and the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra Conducted by JoAnn Falletta

Sony Classical Releases Two Major Orchestral Works by Danny Elfman

The Percussion Concerto with – Colin Currie – and Wunderkammer
featuring the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra 

Conducted by JoAnn Falletta

New Single: Percussion Concerto I. Triangle – Out Today  
Listen Here

Album Release Date: May 17, 2024 

Danny Elfman, known the world over for his scores to over 115 movies, including numerous collaborations with directors Tim Burton, Gus van Sant and Sam Raimi, not to mention the classic theme for The Simpsons, adds two major orchestral works to his recorded catalog. The dynamic American conductor JoAnn Falletta directs the forces of the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic in this new studio recording.

The Percussion Concerto was written for the Scottish virtuoso Colin Currie and was co-commissioned by the London Philharmonic Orchestra, who gave the world premiere at London’s Royal Festival Hall in May 2022, and Soka University of America. The concerto is Elfman’s third work in the form, following the Violin Concerto, Eleven Eleven, of 2017 (also recorded by Sony Classical) and the Cello Concerto of 2022. ‘The audience were captivated by Colin Currie’s every move as he performed the piece. Darting across the stage between instruments, Currie is a true showman,’ wrote Amy Melling (Abundant Art) of the US premiere. 

Elfman says: “I met Colin by chance when I was in London working on a score, and he came into the studio. We started talking, and I started getting an idea in my head, just a kernel. And literally while I was talking to him I got excited about the idea of what I was calling the triangle. And he says, "What do you mean?" I go, "I'm imagining you in front of the orchestra with all these instruments and two small percussion ensembles to your right and to your left, always echoing and playing off of what you're doing and creating this kind of sonic percussion triangle." And he's like, "Well, that sounds interesting." And then once I get it in my head, I'm hopeless. It's like I'm stuck!”

Triangle forms the first section of this four-movement work for strings and percussion. The second is a tribute to a composer Elfman reveres, Dmitri Shostakovich, and uses the DSCH (D, E flat, C, B) signature motif that the composer wove into many of his works, and which Elfman sneaks into most of his concert pieces too. (He actually has DSCH tattooed on his shoulders!) The third is the work’s most harmonically adventurous. He says: “Inevitably it’s the third movement where I feel, ‘Oh, I've written a lot of really crazy stuff in the first and second movements, I really need to pull myself in here and find myself with my third movement before ending with a bang! Which it does!’

I knew Colin was a devotee of Steve Reich and many contemporary percussion composers that I knew from my youth. I was really thinking about keeping him moving, moving, moving all the time and interlocking sensibilities. You get kind of caught up in the soloist’s personality and the challenge is writing for that personality.”

Wunderkammer, a concerto for orchestra, was written for the National Youth Orchestra of Great Britain, which toured the piece in the UK before playing it at the BBC Proms in London’s Royal Albert Hall in August 2022. ‘Wunderkammer lived up to its name, as one door after another opened to reveal a striking nugget of loosely-connected musical material,’ wrote Boyd Tonkin (The Arts Desk) of the Proms performance.

Elfman says: “It was written for the kids, just to have some fun with them, and give them something that's fun for them to play. It was very clear to me when I saw them play in London that they were very capable and that it made no sense to me to try to write down for them, try to write simply. It was actually quite the opposite. I was thinking, "Write something that's very difficult and very challenging that they could get their teeth into because they're quite capable." And I could see in some of the really difficult sections how it wouldn't intimidate them, it would just perk them up. I love seeing that with musicians.

‘I have the hardest time coming up with titles, but the idea came into my head of a Wunderkammer, a wonder room just filled with little, lovely, strange, odd treasures. I said, "Oh, I like that image." I even have an 18th-century book called Wunderkammer, an oddity, from a collection of an Austrian duke or aristocrat. A Wunderkammer can be fun, or scary, intriguing or instructive, but never normal or boring! And that’s just what I was hoping to bring to the players of the NYOGB’.” 

Talking of his concert music, Elfman commented: “I have a friend who's a novelist, and I guess it's the same thing for him. It's starting those first words on the piece of paper that can be brutally difficult, but there is a point where the momentum of the piece starts to feel like it's carrying me along, and that is my joy in writing, those moments. It's because I've had those moments writing for film here and there that it attracted me to the idea of what if I got an idea and I didn't have to stop? I can keep developing it.”

The album is completed with a short choral piece in French, ‘Are you lost?’, from Elfman’s song-cycle Trio. Scored for women’s voices, piano, strings and various percussion

instruments, the work was actually premiered at the recording sessions in Liverpool, and give a glimpse at a sonic world that we don’t usually associate with the composer: gentle, reflective and delicate.

The Percussion Concerto and Wunderkammer are released by Sony Classical on May 17, 2024. New single: Percussion Concerto I. Triangle is out today: listen here

Sony Classical Announces Alexis Ffrench's New Album Classical Soul; First Single Out Today

Sony Classical Announces Fourth Studio Album
by Alexis Ffrench

Classical Soul Volume One
Out Autumn 2024 on Sony Classical

New Single The Way It Was Out Today – Listen Here

Today, March 22, 2024, chart-topping pianist and composer Alexis Ffrench, announces details of upcoming studio album, Classical Soul Volume One, set for release this Autumn via Sony Classical. Classical Soul Volume One by Alexis Ffrench is a collection of original compositions for piano & orchestra, interspersed with tiny snippets of beloved soul anthems dotted throughout the record as palette cleansers.

As one of the UK’s most distinctive and groundbreaking artists, who pioneered the genre ‘Classical Soul’ and has amassed over 1 billion streams on his catalog, the news is accompanied with the release of his nostalgic new solo piano single The Way It Was, inspired by his late Father’s record collection and recorded at Brad Pitt and Damien Quintard’s renowned Miraval Studios – listen here.

Alexis brings piano to the mainstream. Whether it's performing at the King's Coronation Concert in 2023 to an audience of over 18 million viewers, hosting his Apple Music show after Elton John's Rocket Hour, performing at major music festivals & sold out venues worldwide, hosting nationwide music education masterclasses, or posting covers of today’s hits by Central Cee, Billie Eilish and more to an enthusiastic social media audience, Alexis is passionate about music being accessible to all. 

The Way It Was is inspired by Alexis’ late Father’s record collection. In the first single, out today, Alexis takes the depth and emotion from his childhood love of soul, and combines it with his classical capabilities to craft a song that feels nostalgic and moving, yet timeless and uplifting. 

Speaking about The Way It Was, Alexis writes: 

“The Way It Was draws inspiration from my dad’s vast record collection. Growing up, our home was filled with a rich soundtrack of Sam Cooke, Aretha Franklin, Stevie Wonder, Roberta Flack – some of whom I consider to be my earliest teachers. 

As I played ‘imaginary’ piano on the kitchen table, to classics like Superstition and At Last, I was transported to a place of wonder and felt a calling. And as I listened, I absorbed the passion, pride & purpose of these soul icons and dreamt of a parallel pathway - informed by the storied lives of these soul greats and their wider mission. 

As I look back and remember the way it was, and the limitless space I was given to grow creatively and spiritually, I have come to better understand all that I had been gifted, and the debt that I owe.These artists, and the power of their collective voices, connected with me deep within and opened a gateway to a world of Classical Soul, and for that I am truly grateful.” 

Speaking about the forthcoming album, Alexis adds:

“It is for this reason that I wanted to create a modern mixtape, classical-soul symphony for the 21st century. An album which seeks to reframe the classical story - building soaring symphonic pillars of ‘Black Ivy’ from the echoes of soul classics into a majestic expression of pride, love, nostalgia, and healing elixir.”

A pioneering superstar of Classical Soul, Alexis’s sound refuses to be penned in by genre, time period, or by expectations of the kind of musician he should be. Rather than leaning into the narrow, traditional understandings of ‘classical’, Alexis instead leans outward, expansive in his perspective, drawing on a multifarious mosaic of influences that takes the listener by the hand and leads them on a journey through a world of possibility.

The Way It Was is the first track in Alexis' big year of music, and on Classical Soul Volume One we can expect some of his most heartfelt and purposeful material to date.

Follow Alexis Ffrench on:
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April 25-May 9: Guitarist MILOŠ tours North America with Les Violons du Roy in Music from Sony Classical Album Baroque - Quebec, Montreal, DC, Kansas City, Stanford, Denver

CLASSICAL GUITARIST MILOŠ TOURS NORTH AMERICA
WITH LES VIOLONS DU ROY 

INCLUDING MUSIC FROM LATEST SONY CLASSICAL ALBUM BAROQUE

LISTEN NOW

“one of the most exciting and communicative classical guitarists today” – The New York Times

Upcoming North American Tour with Les Violons Du Roy and Jonathan Cohen:  
Quebec City, QC: Palais Montcalm on April 25, 2024
Montreal, QC: Salle Bourgie on April 26, 2024
Washington, DC: Library of Congress on April 30, 2024
Overland Park, KS: Johnson County Community College on May 2, 2024
Stanford, CA:  Stanford Live at Bing Concert Hall on May 5, 2024
Denver, CO: Newman Center for the Performing Arts on May 9, 2024 

CONCERT SCHEDULE

Read the Financial Times feature on MILOŠ

MILOŠ, the superstar musician who has led today’s classical guitar revival, began a new era in his exceptional career with his October 2023 debut album for Sony Classical. Titled simply Baroque, the album presents MILOŠ’ carefully curated selection of baroque works especially transcribed and arranged for the guitar, both solo and in collaboration with Jonathan Cohen and his ensemble Arcangelo.

In April and May, MILOŠ comes to North America for a six-concert tour with Cohen’s ensemble Les Violons du Roy, performing concerts that include music from the new album. Tour performances include Quebec on April 25 at Palais Montcalm; Montreal on April 26 at Salle Bourgie; Washington, DC at the Library of Congress on April 30; Overland Park, KS on May 2 at the Performing Arts Series at Johnson County Community College; in Stanford, CA on May 5 presented by Stanford Live at Bing Concert Hall; and on May 9 in Denver, CO at the Newman Center for the Performing Arts.

The spring tour follows MILOŠ’s highly praised tour in fall 2023 which included performances in St. Paul, MN presented by the Schubert Club, in Quebec, QC at Palais Montcalm, and at Carnegie Hall in New York.

Watch MILOŠ's stunning video of his performance of Handel's Menuet from Suite in B-Flat Major, from Blenheim Palace.

Since his incredible breakthrough in 2011, when his debut album held the no. 1 position in the UK Classical charts for a breathtaking 28 weeks, MILOŠ has built an impressive international career by performing solo recitals and concertos at most of the world’s leading concert venues. His six studio albums have sold the equivalent of over half a million copies and conquered the classical album charts in multiple territories, earning him a Classical BRIT, Echo Klassik and two Gramophone Awards.

BBC Music Magazine included him in “Six of the Best Classical Guitarists of the Past Century” and The New York Times cited him as “one of the most exciting and communicative classical guitarists today.” His wide variety of musical influences and repertoire, ranging from baroque to contemporary music, via the Beatles and beyond, has helped MILOŠ build a loyal international fanbase and introduce his instrument to a whole new generation of listeners. His long list of musical collaborators ranges from Yannick Nézet-Séguin, Lisa Batiashvili, Alison Balsom, and Jess Gillam, to Tori Amos, Gregory Porter and Anoushka Shankar. He was the first-ever classical guitarist to perform a sold-out solo show at the Royal Albert Hall, where he returned last summer playing to a capacity audience. He has presented on both BBC and Sky TV and has his own series of educational books Play Guitar with Miloš published by Schott Music.

He recently launched the Miloš Karadaglić Foundation. Based in Porto Montenegro, this philanthropic organisation aims to act as a regional hub of influence by empowering artistic excellence though various educational opportunities, partnership and close mentorship.

Baroque heralds a new milestone in MILOŠ’ career.

He says, “Since the very beginning of my life as a musician, I have been deeply inspired by the incredible variety and electrifying energy of the baroque repertoire. This golden era of music is mysterious and extraordinary, flamboyant, often endlessly lyrical, ultimately timeless. And yet within the classical guitar context, apart from J.S. Bach, I believe we have only ever managed to touch the surface. This very thought inspired me to, over the years, try and dig deeper, go beyond the obvious, experiment, collaborate and transcribe, to open a new door of possibilities for my instrument and its own baroque voice.” 

MILOŠ’ own transcription of Bach’s monumental Chaconne sits at the heart of this recording, anchoring the richly varied constellation of baroque composers’ masterpieces. MILOŠ particularly wanted to present the guitar across a wide range of European influences, and not merely within the more familiar Spanish context. He has selected luminescent works by nine composers here, the majority of which have never been played on solo guitar before.

There is plenty of light and shade within the music, reflecting baroque’s unique chiaroscuro character. Works such as Alessandro Marcello’s Adagio from Oboe Concerto in D Minor; Domenico Scarlatti’s Sonata in D minor; the Menuet from George Frideric Handel’s Suite in B-Flat Major; Jean-Philippe Rameau’s The Arts and the Hours or François Couperin’s Les Barricades mystérieuses offer more introspective moments, while Antonio Vivaldi’s movements from La Notte and L’estro Armonico, originally written as a concerto for four violins, or indeed Boccherini’s Fandango from ‘Quintet No. 4 in D Major’ provide fireworks of thrilling virtuosity.

MILOŠ worked very closely with Jonathan Cohen on all the orchestral transcriptions, as well as with Michael Lewin, the eminent British guitarist and lutenist with whom he studied at the Royal Academy of Music in London and with whom he now shares a wonderful creative collaboration.

“Everything I have learned and experienced in my musical life so far, all the influences and various musical traditions, converge in this album,” says MILOŠ. “I wanted to convey a new vision of baroque here, with all the variety of style and texture, while preserving the innate intimacy and typical beauty of the guitar sound.”

While for MILOŠ one creative circle closes with the release of this album, Baroque ultimately serves as the foundation of a brand-new era in this artist’s already extraordinary career. 

Website: milosguitar.com
Instagram: instagram.com/milosguitar
Facebook: facebook.com/milosguitar
TikTok: tiktok.com/@milosguitarist

May 3: Sony Classical Announces Antonello Manacorda & Kammerakademie Potsdam Conclude Their Recording of Beethoven's Complete Symphonies

Sony Classical Announces
Antonello Manacorda and Kammerakademie Potsdam

Conclude Their Recording of
Beethoven - The Complete Symphonies
with Release of All Nine Masterworks Together

First Single “Scherzo” from “Eroica Symphony No. 3” Out Today

Final Installment in Series Celebrates the 200th Anniversary of the Ninth Symphony’s Premier Performance
Cycle Out May 3, 2024 on Sony Classical as Special Boxset and Digitally

“Those listening to these new recordings will be richly rewarded.” – Westdeutsche Allgemeine Zeitung

The Kammerakademie Potsdam (Chamber Academy Potsdam) and its principal conductor Antonello Manacorda will complete their new Beethoven cycle with the release of all nine symphonies in a special box set out on Sony Classical on May 3, 2024. As the third and final installment in the series, the release will include their new recording of Beethoven’s Third, Fourth and Eighth Symphonies as well as the composer’s legendary Ninth Symphony. The release coincides with the 200-year anniversary celebrations of the premiere performance of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony in early May. The first single is out today - the “Scherzo. Allegro vivace” from Symphony No. 3 in E-Flat Major, Op. 55 "Eroica” – listen here.

The first two installments in the ensemble’s Beethoven cycle recording have been released to great critical acclaim. Reviewing their first installment, German magazine Stereoplay spoke of an “incredible anticipatory pleasure and love of life,” Gramophone Magazine remarked “The orchestra’s rhythmic assurance is similarly impressive, and especially in the way they bring a sense of the dance to these scores,” while Fono Forum singled out the performances’ “inner logic and power of conviction.” Reviewing the second installment, the Westdeutsche Allgemeine Zeitung wrote, “Those listening to these new recordings will be richly rewarded.”

Antonello Manacorda explains his approach to the cycle “What matters to me personally is that Beethoven is not just a composer but basically also a philosopher. He tells us not just about music but also about ourselves: who we are, where we are coming from and where we are going; why we are here in this world and what we hope to achieve here. A traversal of these symphonies is far more of a philosophical journey than a musical one.”

Of the composer’s seminal Ninth Symphony Manacorda believes, “it was and remains a hugely provocative piece. Every instrument in the orchestra is taken to its limits. Then comes a theme that is so simple and yet so memorable but which he repeats with dangerous frequency. What he does with the four vocal soloists borders on the ridiculous. The bass is a kind of Evangelist of Joy, the tenor a hero for the whole of humankind and the poor women are two angels. To me it’s like a Mass but with secular words, a philosophical credo. Beethoven spent his whole life asking himself why humankind has been placed on this earth and what our mission may be. Here he gives his answer: it revolves around the ideal of brotherly love, the great fraternization of humankind in a spirit of life-affirming joy.”

The Kammerakademie Potsdam and its music director Antonello Manacorda have garnered multiple awards with their complete recordings of the symphonies of Schubert and Felix Mendelssohn, while their release of Mozart’s last three symphonies earned them the title of Orchestra of the Year at the 2022 OPUS Klassik Awards – Germany’s leading televised classical awards. Brandenburg’s first orchestral academy appears in Potsdam and throughout Brandenburg, performing concerts geared to all age-groups, while also undertaking Europe-wide tours. The musicians perform on a combination of old and modern instruments which allows them to perform works for relatively large ensembles without a large string section, while enabling them to achieve the right balance and requisite degree of clarity.

As an Italian with a pronounced affinity for German music, Manacorda has appeared in many of the world’s leading opera houses from London and Munich to New York. Among the internationally renowned symphony orchestras with which he has worked are the Berliner Philharmoniker, where he returns in May, the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra, the Dresden Staatskapelle, the Danish National Symphony Orchestra, the Munich Philharmonic, the Royal Philharmonic and the Zurich Tonhalle Orchestra. He will also conduct Carmen at London’s Royal Opera House in April this year.

Sony Classical will release Beethoven – The Complete Symphonies on May 3 as boxset and on all digital formats. The artwork has been created by renowned German artist Jorinde Voigt.

Antonello Manacorda & Kammerakademie Potsdam
Beethoven: The Complete Symphonies
Ludwig Van Beethoven 1770–1827

Tracklist
CD 1

Symphony No. 1 In C Major, Op. 21
Symphony No. 3 In E-Flat Major “Eroica”, Op. 55

CD 2

Symphony No. 2 In D Major, Op. 36
Symphony No. 4 In B-Flat Major, Op. 60

CD 3

Symphony No. 5 In C Minor, Op. 67
Symphony No. 6 In F Major “Pastoral”, Op. 68

CD 4

Symphony No. 7 In A Major, Op. 92
Symphony No. 8 In F Major, Op. 93

CD 5

Symphony No. 9 In D Minor “Choral”, Op. 125

Kammerakademie Potsdam
Antonello Manacorda, Conductor

Sony Classical Announces New Solo Album from Award-Winning Composer Mike Post – Message From The Mountains & Echoes Of The Delta

Sony Classical Announces
Message From The Mountains & Echoes Of The Delta
New Solo Album from Mike Post

The Award-Winning Composer Behind TV’s Most Memorable Music
The Iconic Composer For Law & Order, The Rockford Files, Magnum P.I. & More Brings A-List
Soloists Together with a Full Orchestra In Celebration of Bluegrass & Blues Music

Lead Single Campfire Breakdown/Night Sky
Out Today – Listen Here

Available April 5, 2024 – Preorder Now

From the iconic “dun-dun” sting that has become synonymous with the Law and Order universe to instantly recognizable riffs from The Rockford Files, Hill Street Blues, Magnum P.I., L.A. Law and more, Emmy®- and Grammy®-winning composer Mike Post has helped shape half a century of pop culture with his beloved television themes. Now, he celebrates the music that inspired this prolific career with Message from the Mountains & Echoes of the Delta, a truly unique solo album that pays homage to bluegrass and blues music, available April 5, 2024 via Sony Classical. Making its debut today alongside the album preorder is the collection’s lead single, Campfire Breakdown/Night Sky – listen here.

The way composer Mike Post simply describes himself now – “I’m an American musician” – is as grateful and respectful as it is limitless in its compass and its ambition. His new solo album, Message from the Mountains & Echoes of the Delta, emerged as his own celebration of the music of the American people that has inspired him in a career spanning six decades. Presented as a pair of original works, the album combines the sounds of a bluegrass band (Message from the Mountains) and a blues band (Echoes of the Delta) – joined by two “dream teams” of soloists who are his longtime friends and colleagues – with the rich palette and expressive power of a full orchestra.

The first in a pair of original works encompassing the album, Message from the Mountains features nine multifaceted movements utilizing the sounds of bluegrass to celebrate the mingling of tradition and diverse cultural experience in American music. The immensely talented and decorated members of these rhythm sections are as follows: Herb Pedersen (5-string banjo); Gabe Witcher (fiddle); Mike Witcher (dobro); Patrick Sauber (acoustic guitar/mandolin); and Amy Keys (orator). Echoes from the Delta, meanwhile, reflects and explores the exuberant joy and the well of anguish that forged the blues in 14 short, expressive movements. Joining Post and the orchestra as soloists are Sonny Landreth (slide guitar); Eric Gales (electric guitar); Abe Laboriel Sr. (bass); Abe Laboriel Jr. (drums); Robert Turner (organ/piano); Jon O’Hara (keyboards); and Amy Keys (vocalist). 

Mike Post: Message From The Mountains & Echoes Of The Delta

Tracklisting

1. Message from the Mountains: I. Journeys - The Message

2. Message from the Mountains: II. Onward

3. Message from the Mountains: III. Sunrise Special

4. Message from the Mountains: IV. Redemption Valley

5. Message from the Mountains: V. Campfire Breakdown - Night Sky

6. Message from the Mountains: VI. Fort Smith Waltz

7. Message from the Mountains: VII. Strings Afire

8. Message from the Mountains: VIII. Spirit of the Owl

9. Message from the Mountains: IX. Destined to Dream

10. Echoes of the Delta: I. John the Revelator

11. Echoes of the Delta: II. River Walkin'

12. Echoes of the Delta: III. Just Before Dawn

13. Echoes of the Delta: IV. Highway 41

14. Echoes of the Delta: V. Little Zion

15. Echoes of the Delta: VI. The Gate to Greenwood

16. Echoes of the Delta: VII. Crossed Road

17. Echoes of the Delta: VIII. Riley Smiles

18. Echoes of the Delta: IX. Riffs 'Round the Sun

19. Echoes of the Delta: X. Sunday With Maudes

20. Echoes of the Delta: XI. Boogie Offspring

21. Echoes of the Delta: XII. Backside Middle

22. Echoes of the Delta: XIII. Sonny in the Second Line

23. Echoes of the Delta: XIV. Light the Dark Sky

24. Echoes of the Delta: XV. The Call

25. Echoes of the Delta: XVI. Circle Back Home

About Mike Post

If his name is not instantly recognizable, Mike Post’s music is. His unforgettable themes for The Rockford Files, Hill Street Blues, The A-Team, Magnum P.I., NYPD Blue, L.A. Law and many other TV classics – including the Law & Order family of dramas (notably, in the landmark, two-note “dun-dun” effect he created) – are part of the soundtrack of modern American life.

Steeped in music from childhood, Post was a go-to session musician as a teenager in the Los Angeles area, quickly becoming part of a legendary collective of studio musical virtuosos known as The Wrecking Crew. Post played for virtually everyone active in the LA recording scene during this time. Most notably he worked on all of Sonny and Cher’s early hits, starting with “I Got You Babe.” While working for producer Jimmy Bowen, he formed The First Edition, featuring then unknown bassist/vocalist, Kenny Rogers. A breakout success – and at 23, winning the first of his five Grammy® Awards – with his arrangement of the 1968 instrumental smash hit “Classical Gas” raised Post’s profile as a composer, arranger and producer, before television changed the course of his career in the early 1970s.

Over the years, he’s written the music for seven thousand hours of TV including: Law & Order: Special Victims Unit. Law & Order Criminal Intent, Law & Order, NYPD Blue, The Rockford Files, Magnum PI, Hill Street Blues, L.A. Law, The A-Team, Wiseguy, Hunter, The Commish, Quantum Leap, Doogie Howser MD, Blossom, Hooperman, The White Shadow, Hardcastle & McCormick, Byrds of Paradise, News Radio, Silk Stalkings and Renegade. Theme songs from The Rockford Files, The Greatest American Hero, Hill Street Blues and L.A. Law all became chart-topping records and landed Post four of his five Grammy® Awards. In 1996 he won the Emmy® for outstanding achievement in Main Title composition for the critically acclaimed Murder One.

Connect With Mike Post: Website | Facebook | Instagram | YouTube | Tiktok
Mike Post Approved Images (Credit Lawrence Sumulong): Download 

# # #

Sony Music Masterworks comprises Masterworks, Sony Classical, Milan Records, XXIM Records and Masterworks Broadway imprints. For email updates and information please visit www.sonymusicmasterworks.com/

March 15: Emanuel Ax, Leonidas Kavakos, and Yo-Yo Ma Announce Third Album in Beethoven for Three Series

Emanuel Ax, Leonidas Kavakos, and Yo-Yo Ma
Announce Third Album in Beethoven for Three Series

Symphony No. 4 and Op. 97, “Archduke”

“Symphony No. 4: Mvmt. IV Allegro ma non troppo”
Out Now – Listen Here

Album Release Date: March 15, 2024 – Pre-Order Now

Emanuel Ax, Leonidas Kavakos, and Yo-Yo Ma’s Beethoven for Three: Symphony No. 4 and Op. 97, “Archduke" is set for release on March 15, 2024 on Sony Classical and available now for preorder. Accompanying today’s announcement and preorder is the first track release: “Symphony No. 4: Mvmt. IV Allegro ma non troppo” — listen here.

Like the artists' two previous Beethoven for Three releases, this new recording challenges the traditional distinction between chamber and orchestral repertoire, pairing the unforgettable "Archduke" trio with one of the composer's most internally varied symphonies, thoughtfully re-arranged for piano, violin, and cello by Shai Wosner. Beethoven for Three: Symphony No. 4 and Op. 97, “Archduke" is the latest chapter in three friends’ ongoing exploration of what Beethoven’s invention means for musicians and audiences today.

The Beethoven for Three series features three artists in pursuit of the essential elements of Beethoven's musical language, presenting Beethoven's most iconic symphonies in intimate arrangements that maintain the power and immediacy of his orchestral works. By performing the symphonies on three instruments alongside the composer’s canonical piano trios, the artists present a wealth of insight into both Beethoven and his earliest audiences. 

“We all feel that being able to participate in a symphony is such a wonderful thing to do,” says Ma. “One of the things that has separated people since recording began is the categories that we put people in, in which chamber musicians, orchestra players, people who play concertos, people who do transcriptions, people who compose, people who conduct, are all viewed as separate categories with no overlap. That siloed thinking discourages actual creativity and collaboration between people. And so we feel that one of the things that is really important to do today is to actually go back to the first principles of music, the simple interaction between friends who want to do something together."

Beethoven for Three has its origins in the 2021 Tanglewood Music Festival, where Ax, Kavakos, and Ma first played Beethoven's Symphony No. 2 in trio format. The performance was an instant success, and the first release in the series, Beethoven for Three: Symphonies Nos. 2 and 5, was recorded soon after. Gramophone highlighted their recording of Symphony No. 5, noting that “the performance by Ax, Kavakos and Ma is not just aptly intense—the opening Allegro con brio is as involving as any orchestral performance I've heard—but also incredibly sensitive to the music’s crucial juxtapositions, as one can hear in the Andante con moto, where they so deftly balance delicacy and heroic swagger—note the vulnerability in Kavakos's tone at 1'42"—in a way that I find deeply moving."

The second installment in the project, Beethoven for Three: Symphony No. 6 “Pastorale” and Op. 1, No. 3 was released in 2022 to further acclaim. The Strad noted that "the blend and balance between these three hugely experienced players is just about ideal in the relaxed outer movements [of Symphony No. 6] and in the ‘Scene by the Brook’, while the ‘Peasants’ Merrymaking’ is as rustic and playful as the ‘Storm’ is disruptive...They are just as urbane and sophisticated in the C minor Piano Trio...This is Ax’s stamping ground and he brings his string-playing friends along with him for a performance that beguiles and delights from beginning to end."

Ax, Kavakos, and Ma first performed together as a trio at the 2014 Tanglewood Festival, playing a program of Brahms's piano trios. Their first recording effort, Brahms: The Piano Trios, was released in 2017 to universal critical acclaim; Gramophone observed that "These performances get straight to the heart of Brahms’s music, relishing its pull of opposites," while Limelight noted, "There’s no doubting the ardour that these players bring to the music, which is delivered with an eye to creating broad, sweeping phrases … there are plenty of opportunities to swoon along the way.”

Sony Music Masterworks comprises Masterworks, Sony Classical, Milan Records, XXIM Records, and Masterworks Broadway imprints. For email updates and information please visit www.sonymusicmasterworks.com/.

Beethoven for Three: Symphony No. 4 and Op. 97 "Archduke"
Yo-Yo Ma, Leonidas Kavakos & Emanuel Ax

Symphony No. 4 in B-Flat Major, Op. 60

1 I. Adagio - Allegro vivace
2 II. Adagio
3 III. Allegro vivace
4 IV. Allegro ma non troppo

Piano Trio No. 7 in B-Flat Major, Op. 97, "Archduke"

5 I. Allegro moderato
6 II. Scherzo. Allegro
7 III. Andante cantabile, ma però con moto
8 IV. Allegro moderato

2023 Trio Performance Dates:

January 30 Ann Arbor, MI – Hill Auditorium
January 31 East Lansing, MI – Cobb Great Hall
February 1 Cleveland, OH – Mandel Concert Hall: Severance Music Center
February 3 Chicago, IL – Chicago Symphony Center: Orchestra Hall

Connect with the Artists

Emanuel Ax
Website | Facebook | Twitter

Leonidas Kavakos
Website | Facebook | Instagram

Yo-Yo Ma
Website | Facebook | Instagram | Tiktok | Twitter | YouTube

Sony Classical Announces Vivaldi – The Four Seasons the New Album from Violinist Luka Faulisi

Sony Classical Announces
Vivaldi – The Four Seasons
the New Album from Violinist Luka Faulisi

New Single: "Spring" I. Allegro
Out Today

Vivaldi is the exceptional new recording of the much loved Vivaldi “Four Seasons” by rising Italian-Serbian-French violinist Luka Faulisi, taking on the piece with his bright, youthful energy. For this album, scheduled for release via Sony Classical on April 12, 2024, he collaborated with the excellent Polish baroque ensemble (oh!) Orkiestra Historyczna, directed by concertmaster and ensemble leader Martyna Pastuzka. New single, "Spring" I. Allegro is out today – listen here.

The combination of Luka’s romantic sound, formed in French impressionistic repertoire, and the ensemble’s energetic and forceful take let the well-known masterpiece shine in a new light.

Providing an additional feature, Luka has chosen three corresponding romantic pieces, sitting between the Vivaldi concertos to provide a change of perspective – the Catalan traditional Song of the Birds, Lili Boulanger’s Nocturne and Tchaikovsky’s Autumn Song.

About Luka Faulisi

With ‘a million-dollar sound’ (Pinchas Zukerman), twenty-one-year-old Luka Faulisi is one of the most promising violinists of his generation. Having started to play the violin at the age of three, Luka was a student of Boris Belkin at the Conservatorium Maastricht in the Netherlands. Over the years, through personal mentoring, several distinguished artists have influenced Luka’s musical formation. Pavel Berman describes him as an ‘an incredibly gifted virtuoso violinist’. Flautist Emmanuel Pahud praises Luka as ‘an extremely talented young man with great instrumental abilities and a strong musical expression’ and according to Jean-Jacques Kantorow Luka possesses ‘incredible facilities.’

Recent European concerti highlights include Luka’s Polish debut with the Szczecin Philharmonic; French debut with the Orchestre National du Capitole de Toulouse; Italian debut with the Orchestra Filharmonica di Torino; Serbian debut with the Radio Television Serbia Symphony Orchestra at the Kolarac Hall in Belgrade and a North Macedonian debut with FAME'S European Orchestral Performing Institute. Luka’s Asian presence is also growing, having collaborated recently with the Macao Orchestra and the Hong Kong Sinfonietta. Shortly upcoming is Luka’s British debut with the Liverpool Philharmonic at the Royal Albert Hall; Finnish debut with the Oulu Symphony and Parisian orchestral debut with the Orchestre National d'Île-de-France.

Recent recital highlights include debuts in Paris at the Salle Colonne and debut at the 30th anniversary of the “Festival du Salon de Provence” in summer 2023.

Luka’s debut recital album “Aria”, recorded with the pianist Itamar Golan, was released with Sony Classical International in Spring 2023.

Sony Classical Announces Leonidas Kavakos THE APOLLΩN ENSEMBLE Bach Violin Concertos

Leonidas Kavakos
THE APOLLΩN ENSEMBLE
Bach Violin Concertos

New Single: “Allegro” (BWV 1052R)
Out Today

Pre-Order Available Now

For his latest release on Sony Classical, to be released on March, 29, 2024, violinist Leonidas Kavakos goes back to Bach – the composer whose music has inspired him for decades.

Having played Bach as a youngster, Kavakos stopped performing the composer’s music in public in order to reexamine his relationship with the scores and recalibrate his baroque technique. In 2022, he released an acclaimed recording of the composer’s Partitas and Sonatas for Solo Violin on Sony Classical - his first release including music by Bach. New single “Allegro” (BWV 1052R) is out today –– listen here.

Now Kavakos turns to Bach’s four solo violin concertos - varied and vivid orchestral works from the first half of the 18th century in which the composer combined the best of German and Italian instrumental styles.

Ever questioning orthodoxies, Kavakos experimented with a one-per-part playing in preparation for his recording. With the members of The ApollΩn Ensemble, he concluded that the best approach was to use the smallest possible group of musicians - just five ensemble string players and a harpsichordist.

‘You couldn’t get more intimate with the music than this’, the violinist says. Using a single instrument for each of the ensemble parts creates ‘a particular harmonic and rhythmic world that both complements and enhances what everyone else is doing’ and ‘brings an enormous variety and richness to the sound and was a constant inspiration.’

Having experimented with baroque and classical bows, Kavakos uses a bow modeled on a François Tourte example from the early 1800s, together with his 1734 Willemotte Stradivarius.

Bach’s four violin concertos communicate strikingly different moods. The dark D minor concerto ‘opened up an incredible world for me,’ says Kavakos, who describes the contrasting E major concerto as ‘pure sunshine.’ Bach’s slow movements, says Kavakos, ‘carry us to the place where every human soul would love to be.’

An exclusive Sony Classical artist, Kavakos is one of the world’s most respected violinists. He continues to be a guest of the great concert halls and orchestras of the world as both violinist and conductor.

Sony Classical Presents Derek Solomons – L'Estro Armonico – Haydn Symphonies

Sony Classical Presents Derek Solomons
L'Estro Armonico – Haydn Symphonies

Album Release Date: March 29, 2024
Pre-Order Available Now

“among the most brilliant Haydn performances” – BBC Music Magazine, 2012 

The previously unreleased Haydn project by L'Estro Armonico, recorded between 1980-1986 appearing on available on 18 CDs for the first time

36 Symphonies appearing on CD for the first time

16 CDs remastered from analog and digital tapes

In the 1980s, as the movement for historically informed performance was booming, there was a sudden flurry of attempts by period-instrument ensembles to record all of Haydn’s 106 symphonies. It was perhaps inevitable that none of them would reach the summit of this musical Everest – most made it about halfway up to this ambitious and costly undertaking.

One of these Haydn series that created a stir at the time was directed by the London-based violinist-conductor Derek Solomons. Between 1980 and 1986, he recorded 49 symphonies with his hand-picked ensemble, L’Estro Armonico. Sony Classical is now pleased to present all of these pioneering Haydn performances for the first time on CD. Included in this new collected edition of 18 newly mastered discs are several recordings never before issued in any medium.

In an interview for Gramophone, Solomons stated: “There seemed no better composer to look at than Joseph Haydn to make our recording début on original instruments – and also the début of these symphonies in this kind of performance. I’d discovered that there was a group of 14 symphonies written for Count Morzin before Haydn started working for Count Esterhazy.”

On questions such as the historically correct size of the ensemble, Solomons’s guide (and the annotator of all his Haydn symphony releases) was H.C. Robbins Landon, the doyen of Haydn scholars. Landon had determined from contemporary sources that Haydn’s “Morzin” orchestra initially comprised only three first and three second violins, one each of viola, cello and bass, with a pair of oboes, a pair of horns and a bassoon.

After recording the early “Morzin” group, Solomons turned to the ground-breaking “Sturm und Drang” symphonies that Haydn composed in the years following his move – in around 1760 – from Count Morzin’s Vienna establishment to the wealthy, influential, music-loving Hungarian court of Count Esterházy. In 1982, L’Estro Armonico began with the six earliest of this astonishing body of works. They were released by CBS, which, having taken over the project from Saga, went on to record the ensemble’s Haydn until 1986 – long enough to complete the remaining symphonies from the “Sturm und Drang” period as well as a few earlier and later ones also written for Esterházy.

Although Derek Solomons’s vision of performing all the symphonies with L’Estro Armonico would, sadly, never materialize, there was almost unanimous enthusiasm for the works that were ultimately recorded and released: “It would be hard to imagine performances of more freshness and conviction … One is impressed by the light-textured quality of the playing, its neatness and precision … The string section is small … which enables the winds – especially the splendid high horns – to be heard with absolute clarity” (Gramophone); “I find it very difficult to go back to conventional Haydn, which seems so mannered and dull in comparison” (Classical Music); “The exhilaration I feel as I rediscover Haydn’s inventiveness, underlines the fact that I will never be able to listen again to Haydn being flattened by a steamroller of a large symphony orchestra” (Music & Video Week). As recently as 2012, a BBC Music Magazine critic called these “among the most brilliant Haydn performances I’ve heard.”

SET CONTENTS

DISC 1:

Haydn: Symphony No. 39 in G Minor, Hob. I:39
Haydn: Symphony No. 35 in B-Flat Major, Hob. I:35
Haydn: Symphony No. 38 in C Major, Hob. I:38, “The Echo”

DISC 2:

Haydn: Symphony No. 59 in A Major, Hob. I:59, “Fire”
Haydn: Symphony No. 49 in F minor, Hob. I:49, “La passione”
Haydn: Symphony No. 58 in F Major, Hob. I:58

DISC 3:

Haydn: Symphony No. 26 in D Minor, Hob. I:26
Haydn: Le pescatrici: Overture, Hob. I:106
Haydn: Symphony No. 41 in C Major, Hob. I:41

DISC 4:

Haydn: Symphony No. 48 in C Major, Hob. I:48, “Maria Theresia”
Haydn: Symphony No. 44 in E Minor, Hob. I:44, “Trauer”

DISC 5:

Haydn: Symphony No. 52 in C Minor, Hob. I:52
Haydn: Symphony No. 43 in E-Flat Major, Hob. I:43, “Mercury”

DISC 6:

Haydn: Symphony No. 42 in D Major, Hob. I:42
Haydn: Symphony No. 51 in B-Flat Major, Hob. I:51

DISC 7:

Haydn: Symphony No. 45 in F-Sharp Minor, Hob.I:45
Haydn: Symphony No. 46 in B Major, Hob. I:46

DISC 8:

Haydn: Symphony No. 47 in G Major, Hob. I:47
Haydn: Symphony No. 65 in A Major, Hob. I:65

DISC 9:

Haydn: Symphony No. 50 in C Major, Hob. I:50
Haydn: Symphony No. 64 in A Major, Hob. I:64
Haydn: Symphony No. 54 in G Major, Hob. I:54

DISC 10:

Haydn: Symphony No. 55 in E-Flat Major, Hob. I:55
Haydn: Symphony No. 56 in C Major, Hob. I:56

DISC 11:

Haydn: Symphony No. 57 in D Major, Hob. I:57
Haydn: Symphony No. 63 in C Major, Hob. I:63

DISC 12:

Haydn: Symphony No. 60 in C Major, Hob. I:60 “Il distratto”
Haydn: Symphony No. 68 in B-Flat Major, Hob.I:68

DISC 13:

Haydn: Symphony No. 66 in B-Flat Major, Hob. I:66
Haydn: Symphony No. 69 in C Major, Hob. I:69, “Laudon”
Haydn: Symphony No. 67 in F Major, Hob. I:67

DISC 14:

Haydn: Symphony No. 16 in B-Flat Major, Hob. I:16
Haydn: Symphony No. 17 in F Major, Hob. I:17
Haydn: Symphony No. 19 in D Major, Hob. I:19
Haydn: Symphony No. 20 in C Major, Hob. I:20
Haydn: Symphony No. 108 in B-Flat Major, Hob.I:108

DISC 15:

Haydn: Symphony No. 1 in D Major, Hob. I:1
Haydn: Symphony No. 37 in C Major, Hob. I:37
Haydn: Symphony No. 2 in C Major, Hob. I:2
Haydn: Symphony No. 15 in D Major, Hob. I:15

DISC 16:

Haydn: Symphony No. 4 in D Major, Hob. I:4
Haydn: Symphony No. 10 in D Major, Hob. I:10
Haydn: Symphony No. 18 in G Major, Hob. I:18

DISC 17:

Haydn: Symphony No. 5 in A Major, Hob. I:5
Haydn: Symphony No. 32 in C Major, Hob. I:32
Haydn: Symphony No. 11 in E-Flat Major, Hob. I:11

DISC 18:

Haydn: Symphony No. 33 in C Major, Hob. I:33
Haydn: Symphony No. 27 in G Major, Hob. I:27
Haydn: Symphony No. 107 in B-Flat Major, Hob. I:107
Haydn: Symphony No. 3 in G Major, Hob. I:3

Sony Classical Releases New EP of Bach Transcriptions by Young Piano Star Mao Fujita

Sony Classical Releases New EP of Bach Transcriptions
by Young Piano Star Mao Fujita

“Fujita is a musician of tremendous versatility and taste, with a poetic sense of pulse and eloquent, insightful, fearless articulation” – The Times

“Proportion and purpose” – The Guardian

“One gets the feeling that when Mao Fujita looks at a score he sees not scales, chords and octaves but shapes”  
– New York Classical Review

Sony Classical releases a brand new recording project by acclaimed Berlin-based Japanese pianist, Mao Fujita. Following on from his lauded and highly significant 2022 debut recording of Mozart’s Complete Piano Sonatas and his subsequent 2023 EP ‘Mozart Reworked’, which features a selection of Mozart transcriptions, Mao Fujita turns his attention here to transcriptions by Alexander Siloti and Sergei Rachmaninov, of sublime works by J.S. Bach, scheduled for release on February 9, 2024. Bach Transcriptions was recorded in Summer 2023 in Berlin, where this young artist now lives and studies.

Mao Fujita’s chosen works for his new six track Bach Transcriptions EP include:

Prelude in B Minor, BWV 855a (Transcribed by Alexander Siloti)
Andante from the Sonata for Solo Violin, BWV 1003 (Transcribed by Alexander Siloti),
Paraphrase on the Prelude in C-Sharp Major, BWV 872 (Transcribed by Alexander Siloti)
Suite from the Partita for Violin in E Major, BWV 1006 (Transcribed by Sergei Rachmaninov)

I. Preludio
II. Gavotte
III. Gigue

Mao Fujita is rapidly gaining a name for himself internationally. This in-demand young pianist, who started his piano studies at the age of three, won the Clara Haskill Competition in 2017 and took the silver medal at the International Tchaikovsky Competition in 2019.  Since his arrival on world stages, including hugely successful recent debut appearances at both Carnegie Hall in New York and Wigmore Hall in London, his performances draw audiences into the music through his personable and intimate style, complemented by a sense of roving curiosity and delight that comes from constantly discovering new aspects of the music.  His innate musical sensitivity, natural ability, vitality and good humor shine through all of his performances, whether live or recorded and he continues to charm audiences all over the world. 

Sony Classical to Release Winter The New Album from Lavinia Meijer

Sony Classical Announces Winter
The New Album from Lavinia Meijer
One of the World’s Most Critically Acclaimed Harpists

New Single “Open Window Part II” Out Now

Album Release Date: February 2, 2024
Preorder Now

Featuring original compositions and interpretations of works by the likes of
Max Richter, Philip Glass, and Nils Frahm

The album is the culmination of a year long project dissecting the seasons

Sony Classical is proud to announce the release of a brand-new album from Lavinia Meijer, a pioneering and exciting musician and composer, and one of the most important harpists of her generation. Winter is the culmination of a year-long project taking inspiration from the changing of the seasons, and the effect climate change is having on them. The album, to be released on February 2, 2024, features two new compositions by Meijer alongside interpretations of works by, among others, Max Richter, Philip Glass, and Nils Frahm, and collaborations with violinist Nadia Sirota, the Wishful Singing ensemble, and Alma Quartet. New single “Open Window Part II” is out today – listen here.

The idea for Winter crystallized over a year ago, with a piece of music left over from Meijer’s last record Are You Still Somewhere? Titled “Open Window” and written during the pandemic, it provided, she says, fresh inspiration; about winter, coldness, and those special days you spend with your family. “I wrote it hoping I could ‘travel’ myself, but also so that listeners could travel in their own minds to other places. Places they could not physically be. It became very symbolic of that whole time.”

The “coldness” of pandemic lockdowns, and the winters they occurred in, became a theme; so did the idea of people being physically separated, and the “suffocating” nature of alienation in society. Linking this to changing of the seasons, and the effect of climate change, was a natural extension, and so Meijer began intuitively researching and gathering works. Some, she’d never heard before; others, she’d struggled to adapt for the harp. Connecting the titles and moods with a season, the result was a neat, conceptual, full circle of releases: two “winter” singles a year ago, followed by three, four-track EPs for spring, summer, and fall. And now Winter, a full-length record of 18 works.

“Winter for me isn’t just about the cold – it’s also about long stretches of endurance. So the songs I composed for this record have long lines, and go deeper down into this season,” she says. They’re also deeply personal; the second movement of “Open Window” is based on a well-known folk song from Korea, the country of her birth. Elsewhere, works by other famous composers proved a great fit: Philip Glass’ “Freezing”, wonderfully augmented by the acapella singing ensemble Wishful Singing and “Amethyst” by Dutch composer Reyer Zwart and featuring Alma Quartet, concerning a metaphorical transformation into the precious stone.

Even with the tone and subject matter of the featured works and compositions – and with the way Meijer wanted to open up “the dark tones of the harp, because without them, you cannot hear the lighter ones as clearly” – Winter is not sad or melancholic. In fact, quite the opposite. “I want the listener to feel alive, and that the music triggers more awareness of everything around them and the beauty that exists in the world,” she says. “I want them to feel inspired.”
 

Sony Classical Presents Cellist Anastasia Kobekina and the Mysteries of Venice – New Single Abendserenade Out Today

Sony Classical Presents
Cellist Anastasia Kobekina and the Mysteries of Venice

From the Renaissance of Claudio Monteverdi and John Dowland
to the twenty-first-century with Brian Eno and Caroline Shaw

New Single “Abendserenade”
Out Today

Album Trailer - Watch Here

Album Release Date: February 2, 2024
 Preorder Now

“My ultimate goal in making music is getting beyond cello technique and instead attempting to reach for that feeling when I sing in my most expressive, private and personal moments. Music at its most direct.” – Anastasia Kobekina

“She is the embodiment of grace.” – Le Monde

“Kobekina plays with gorgeous elegance and effortlessly wide lines”
– Der Tagesspiegel

Sony Classical presents its debut album from charismatic cellist Anastasia Kobekina, to be released on February 2, 2024. The “unrivaled musician” (Le Figaro) known for her fearless musicianship and “almost overwhelming sincerity” (The Strad) presents an eclectic concept album exploring her own multifaceted relationship to the city of Venice. New single, “Abendserenade” is out today – listen here.

Anastasia Kobekina is a trailblazing artist who is proving a major force in shaping the future of classical music. A former BBC New Generation Artist and Borletti-Butoni Trust Artist, her communication skills and imaginative flair combine with a command of modern and baroque cellos, both of which mingle seamlessly on her new album.

Venice, which showcases many sides of Kobekina’s artistry, draws listeners away from the lugubrious gondoliers and carnival masks that have provided our standard musical image of Venice. Instead, the album asks how much of what we’ve internalized about the iconic city is actually real. ‘Venice feels not just a city but an idea, a character in itself,’ says the cellist; ‘or maybe it presents a different character to each of us. It asks questions of you, fires your imagination.’

Her album, on which Kobekina is joined by a team of handpicked soloists and the Basel Chamber Orchestra, presents an embracing, personal conversation between past and present, including music from the Renaissance of Claudio Monteverdi and John Dowland to the twenty-first-century of Brian Eno and Caroline Shaw.

In reflecting on a city that exists both physically and in the imagination, Venice creates and links musical worlds. Some of the most familiar music on the album is invigorated for being both taken out of one context and placed in another. More unfamiliar music sounds strangely close-to-home. The effect is dream-like, enchanting and thought provoking - as mysterious, timeless and surprising as Venice itself.

Among the works included are those of the free-spirited Venetian composer Barbara Strozzi (1619-1677). Between concerto movements by Vivaldi and Bach, American composer Caroline Shaw’s work Limestone and Felt yanks us into the present day, the puncturing of history being played out in sound. There are works by twentieth-century greats in whose lives Venice played a role: Gabriel Fauré, Nino Rota and Benjamin Britten.

Also included is Kobekina’s performance of her own father Vladimir Kobekin’s work based on a melody by Monteverdi, Ariadne’s Lament. ‘This piece goes right under my skin, and recording it was one of the most intense musical experiences I have ever had,’ she says.

Monteverdi, a former Director of Music at St Mark’s Basilica in Venice, is a near-constant presence on the album. Likewise, the most famous composer to have emerged from Venice, Antonio Vivaldi, is represented across a number of cello concertos.

Of Vivaldi, Kobekina says: ‘There are such extreme contrasts in Vivaldi’s music, especially between the orchestra and soloist, it’s as if between sun and shade. There is this almost physical feeling of getting picked up and carried off in the waves. An unconscious dance, eternal, as if beating a rhythm innate in all of us, movement as the root of music. It is so easy to get swept away in.’

In the music of the baroque as in the music of today, Kobekina displays instinctive flair and tangible sincerity. She states firmly that this is not an album about the cello but the human voice - in both the adaptation of songs and arias and the desire to achieve, even in music conceived for instruments, the most natural communicative expression.

‘The voice exists closest to our thoughts and imagination…our everyday speech,’ she says.

‘My ultimate goal in making music is getting beyond cello technique,’ says Kobekina, ‘beyond the wood, the strings, the bow, beyond simply reproducing a sound or echoing a particular voice, and instead attempting to reach for that feeling when I sing in my most expressive, private and personal moments. Music at its most direct.’

Anastasia Kobekina
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Sony Classical
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Sony Classical Presents Copland Conducts Copland – The Complete Columbia Album Collection

Sony Classical Presents 
Copland Conducts Copland – The Complete Columbia Album Collection

Album Release Date: February 16th, 2024
Preorder Now

Aaron Copland’s complete own recordings for Columbia Masterworks from 1935 to 1976 on 19 CDs plus recordings of two of his works by Leonard Bernstein on one additional CD

Additionally includes his first recording of The Tender Land Suite and the first recording by the composer of Appalachian Spring for RCA Red Seal

6 works in this set appearing on CD for the first time, remastered from the original master tapes using 24 bit / 96 kHz technology

Collaborations with Benny Goodman, Isaac Stern, the Juilliard String Quartet, William Warfield, Henry Fonda, and more

Original LP sleeves and labels, booklet with full discographical notes

The “Dean of American Composers” was a formidable interpreter of his music. Gramophone called Aaron Copland “a splendid advocate of his own scores”, and shortly after his death in 1990 The New York Times wrote: “Composers’ performances are not always definitive, but Copland was a fine, communicative conductor and pianist, and Columbia recorded him with first-rate orchestras and soloists. … In every way, these recordings must be regarded as the heart of the composer’s discography.”

As a gifted pianist, Copland took part in the earliest recordings of his music back in the 1930s, as well as in many others that followed over nearly three decades. Although it wasn’t until 1950 that he first conducted in a studio, he later took up the baton with increasing frequency. He once said to the choreographer Agnes de Mille: “I don’t think I’m ever going to compose anything else. I’m having such a good time conducting.”

Although Sony Classical has issued many of his CBS/Columbia recordings on CD before, including a major 5-disc set in 2013, this new 20-disc collection marks the first all-inclusive compilation of Aaron Copland’s authoritative interpretations with the composer’s six early recordings for the first time on Sony Classical CD.

Columbia recorded the oldest items here in 1935: Copland playing the thorny Piano Variations of 1930, one of his most challenging masterpieces, and joined by the Russian-born soloist and quartet leader Jacques Gordon in two pieces for violin and piano. “Gordon plays the tangy Americana of the Ukulele Serenade, the second of the pieces … with unbridled brio,” wrote MusicWeb International. And for this “evocative, powerfully declamatory reading” (MusicWeb International) of his piano trio Vitebsk, he teamed up with violinist Ivor Karman, who played in the première, and cellist David Freed.

Flash forward to the 1960s. Now with the Juilliard Quartet, Copland recorded Vitebsk again, along with his Piano Quartet and Sextet. He partnered Isaac Stern in the Violin Sonata and, with Leonard Bernstein and the New York Philharmonic, recorded “a wonderful and certainly historically important performance” of his Piano Concerto. Thus wrote Copland’s definitive biographer Howard Pollack, who goes on to say: “Copland plays the solo part with unmatched élan, and Bernstein communicates the music’s big-city edge – which may have provided no small foundation for his own cityscapes – with inimitable gusto.”

Copland’s first recording as a conductor was of the Clarinet Concerto in 1950, with its dedicatee Benny Goodman and the Columbia Symphony Orchestra. This is its first appearance on CD. In the new set you’ll be able to compare it with their well-known stereo remake from 1963. Another classic interpretation from the early 60s is the Old American Songs with baritone William Warfield and Copland at the piano. There are also mono and stereo versions of the 12 Poems of Emily Dickinson, with Copland accompanying mezzo Martha Lipton in 1950 and soprano Adele Addison in 1964.

In the case of Copland’s best-loved work, the ballet Appalachian Spring he composed in 1944 for Martha Graham, there are even more versions to enjoy and compare. In 1959, he conducted the Boston Symphony Orchestra in what is still considered by many to be the definitive recording of the concert suite for full orchestra: “The performance has an appealing breadth and warmth of humanity, helped by the Symphony Hall resonance: the Shaker climax is wonderfully expressive” (Penguin Guide). RCA Victor coupled it with the suite from The Tender Land, Copland’s only opera, which he later recorded more fully (in an hour-long abridged version) with the New York Philharmonic. That 1966 release, also included here, won him a Grammy®.

Then in 1973, with the Columbia Chamber Orchestra, Copland recorded the complete original ballet score of Appalachian Spring for chamber ensemble. It is followed here by a bonus track: the rehearsal that also accompanied it on LP. Three years earlier he had re-recorded the suite in its full concert scoring with the London Symphony Orchestra, with which he enjoyed a happy and productive association on the concert platform as well as in the studio.

His other recordings with the LSO include the atmospheric Quiet City as well as such important but less familiar works as the neo-classical Short Symphony – a “remarkable synthesis of the learned and the vernacular. … A singularly ‘complete’ representation of its inventor” (critic Michael Steinberg) – as well as the Dance Symphony, Orchestral Variations, Statements for Orchestra and Symphonic Ode. Copland clearly liked conducting English orchestras. He chose the Philharmonia to record his Third Symphony and suites from his celebrated film scores.

Aaron Copland not only created some of the most original, influential, and appealing compositions in the history of American music. He also left posterity a body of recordings that illustrate exactly how he wanted these pieces to go – a priceless, new 20-CD legacy of authentic performances, the “heart of the composer’s discography.”

SET CONTENTS

DISC 1:
Copland: Concerto for Clarinet, Strings & Harp with Benny Goodman (1950)
Copland: Piano Quartet
Copland: Piano Variations (1930)
Copland: Nocturne (1928)
Copland: Vitebsk, Study on a Jewish Theme for Piano Trio
Copland: Ukulele Serenade

DISC 2:
Copland: Old American Songs with William Warfield (1951/53)
Copland: Twelve Poems of Emily Dickinson with Martha Lipton

DISC 3:
Copland: Appalachian Spring (Ballet for Martha)
Copland: The Tender Land: Suite

DISC 4:
Copland: Concerto for Clarinet, Strings & Harp with Benny Goodman (1963)
Copland: Old American Songs with William Warfield (1962)

DISC 5:
Copland: Piano Concerto
Copland: Music for the Theatre (Suite in 5 Parts for Small Orchestra)

DISC 6:
Copland: The Tender Land (Opera in Three Acts)

DISC 7:
Copland: Music for a Great City
Copland: Statements for Orchestra

DISC 8:
Copland: Twelve Poems of Emily Dickinson with Adele Addison
Copland: Las Agachadas
Copland: In the Beginning
Copland: Lark

DISC 9:
Copland: Piano Quartet
Copland: Sextet for Clarinet, Piano and String Quartet
Copland: Vitebsk, Study on a Jewish Theme for Piano Trio

DISC 10:
Copland: Short Symphony "Symphony No. 2"
Copland: Dance Symphony

DISC 11:

Copland: An Outdoor Overture
Copland: Our Town Suite
Copland: 2 Pieces for String Quartet (Instrumental)
Copland: Quiet City

DISC 12:
Copland: Billy the Kid Suite
Copland: 4 Dance Episodes from Rodeo

DISC 13:
Copland: Fanfare for the Common Man
Copland: Lincoln Portrait
Copland: Appalachian Spring

DISC 14:
Copland: Symphonic Ode
Copland: Preamble for a Solemn Occasion
Copland: Orchestral Variations

DISC 15:
Copland: Appalachian Spring
Copland: Copland Rehearses Appalachian Spring

DISC 16:
Copland: Sonata for Violin and Piano (1942/3) with Isaac Stern
Copland: Duo for Flute and Piano with Elaine Shaffer
Copland: Nonet for String Orchestra

DISC 17:
Copland: Danzón Cubano
Copland: 3 Latin American Sketches
Copland: El Salón México
Copland: Dance Panels

DISC 18:
Copland: The Red Pony Suite
Copland: John Henry
Copland: Music for Movies
Copland: Letter from Home
Copland: Down a Country Lane

DISC 19:
Copland: Symphony No. 3

DISC 20:
Copland: Inscape
Copland: Connotations
 

Sony Classical Releases Edward Power Biggs Plays Historic Organs of Europe

Sony Classical Releases
Edward Power Biggs Plays Historic Organs of Europe

The first set presenting recordings by British-American organist

Album Release Date: January 26, 2024
Preorder Now

The legendary series by Columbia’s top organist for the first time in a set of 6 CDs
All CDs remastered from the original analog tapes using 24 bit / 192 kHz technology
Original LP sleeves and labels, booklet with full discographical notes

The legendary English organist Edward Power Biggs became a household name when his Sunday morning CBS broadcasts introduced radio listeners all over North America to the sound of historic pipe organs and the classical organ repertoire from every period.

In a lifelong search for authenticity, the indefatigable Biggs visited places in Holland, North Germany, England, France, Italy, Spain, and Switzerland where some of the great organist-composers of the Renaissance and Baroque had lived and worked. Between 1961 and 1970, Columbia recorded him in a “Historic Organs of Europe” series, performing music by Bach, Buxtehude, Couperin, Dunstable, Frescobaldi, Andrea and Giovanni Gabrieli, Purcell, Soler, Sweelinck, Tallis and many others.

In his original notes to this ambitious project, which Sony Classical is now reissuing complete in a collection of 6 CDs, Biggs wrote: “It is fascinating to play a composer’s music on the organ he played. You feel that you have touched the lifeline of history. … Beethoven’s orchestra, Bach’s choir are all gone, but the same organs on which great musicians played are still available.”

When these famous recordings were released on LP, Gramophone’s reviewer wrote that “the commanding sweep of the whole panorama makes compulsive listening. … The enthusiasm of Mr. Power Biggs for his subjects makes him the ideal guide: he can turn his hand to any organ and make a neat job of the music, however recalcitrant the actions may be. His performances are sumptuously recorded.” Organ aficionados will relish this new opportunity to experience these musical milestones in this new box set.

Set Contents

DISC 1: Historic Organs of Switzerland
DISC 2: Historic Organs of Spain
DISC 3: Historic Organs of Italy
DISC 4: Historic Organs of France
DISC 5: Historic organs of England
DISC 6: Famous Organs of Holland and North Germany

Sony Classical Announces the 2024 New Year’s Concert with the Vienna Philharmonic Conducted by Christian Thielemann

Sony Classical Announces the 2024 New Year’s Concert
with the Vienna Philharmonic

Conducted by Christian Thielemann

Album Release Dates:
CD / Digital: February 9, 2024
DVD, Blu-ray, and Vinyl: March 8, 2024
Preorder Here

As in previous years, the Vienna Philharmonic’s 2024 New Year’s Concert will be released by Sony Classical in both audio and video formats. Under the baton of Christian Thielemann, no fewer than nine of the works from the foot-tapping world of the waltz and polka are featured for the first time on the program of what remains the most popular event in the world of classical music.

The live recording of the 2024 New Year’s Concert can now be pre-ordered and will be available on CD and digitally from February 9, 2024 as well as on DVD, Blu-ray, and Vinyl from March 8, 2024. There are few concerts in the world that are awaited with as much excitement as the New Year’s Concert from Vienna. This year, it was broadcast to over 90 countries all round the world, reaching an audience of millions of people.

The conductor at the 2024 New Year’s Concert will be Christian Thielemann, the principal conductor of the Dresden Staatskapelle and Daniel Barenboim’s successor at the Berlin State Opera. Thielemann has had close musical links with the Vienna Philharmonic since 2000. He first conducted a New Year’s Concert in 2019 and regularly appears with the orchestra at its subscription concerts in the Vienna Musikverein, at the Salzburg Festival and on tour in Japan, China, Europe and the United States

Daniel Froschauer, the chairman of the Vienna Philharmonic’s board of directors, stresses the conductor’s important role with the orchestra: “For many years we have enjoyed a close artistic partnership with Christian Thielemann, especially in the field of the symphony. He is one of the orchestra’s conductors to whom we feel an especial affinity. This is the reason why we have again invited him to conduct our New Year’s Concert on January 1st, 2024.”

Sony Classical Announces Jonas Kaufmann in Parsifal – Wagner’s Complete Opera Recorded Live From Vienna State Opera’s Hit 2021 Production

Sony Classical Announces Jonas Kaufmann in Parsifal
Wagner’s Complete Opera Recorded Live From
Vienna State Opera’s Hit 2021 Production

Album Release Date: March 1, 2024
Preorder Now

Stellar cast and musicians includes Jonas Kaufmann, Ludovic Tézier, Elīna Garanča and Wolfgang Koch, as well as Wagner-specialist Philippe Jordan conducting the Vienna State Opera orchestra and chorus

Jonas Kaufmann sings the title role in a new live recording of Wagner’s Parsifal that Sony Classical will release on March 1, 2024. It derives from performances at the Vienna State Opera under conductor Philippe Jordan with Elīna Garanča as Kundry, Georg Zeppenfeld as Gurnemanz and Ludovic Tézier as Amfortas.

Press reactions following the first night in the spring of 2021 were unanimously positive. Der Standard spoke of “a feast of fine singing” and even of “a sensational cast”, while Die Zeit hailed the achievements of “a luxurious ensemble”. Time and again the critics mentioned the wealth of nuance in the musical interpretation. As the “innocent fool” Parsifal, Jonas Kaufmann was praised for his ability to modulate between a bewitching mezza voce and the most thrilling dramatic outbursts. Two singers were tackling their roles for the very first time: Elīna Garanča was making her long-awaited debut as Kundry, to which she brought sovereign authority, while Ludovic Tézier was singing his first Amfortas. Both Tézier and Georg Zeppenfeld as Gurnemanz brought a bel canto beauty to their roles in the spirit that Wagner himself had always valued. Internationally acclaimed as Hans Sachs in Wagner’s Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg, Wolfgang Koch gave a riveting performance as Klingsor.

The production had been eagerly awaited but had to be presented – and recorded – without an audience when it was finally unveiled in April 2021 at the height of the coronavirus pandemic. The director Kirill Serebrennikov took his cue from the line “Here time becomes space” and set the work in a prison. Serebrennikov had spent a number of years under house arrest and on probation and at the time in question was banned from leaving his homeland with the result that he had to direct his new production from a distance, while a team of associates worked on the staging in Vienna. His concept of the work as what the Süddeutsche Zeitung called an “opera on the theme of liberation” and as what Der Standard described as “a multilayered drama about human relationships” proved convincing. Die Welt spoke of a compelling “futuristic dystopia”.

It is unsurprising that Wagner’s final music drama continues to fascinate audiences to this day thanks to its Grail-related mysticism, its Christian symbolism, and its underlying questions about guilt and atonement. Nor should we forget its harmonically dense narrative vein, its complex use of tonality and tone colors, its psychoanalytical advance on Wagner’s earlier works, its highly metaphorical and detailed symbolism and, last but not least, its duration. All of these elements represent a tremendous musical challenge for both the orchestra and the soloists.

Philippe Jordan had already conducted a whole series of other productions of the work elsewhere, including the 2012 Bayreuth Festival, and so he was intimately familiar with the score’s musical demands. But, as the Swiss-born conductor has observed, “Every Parsifal conductor must do more than simply guide the performance, he must also allow certain aspects to run their own course if he is to do justice to a work of such monumental proportions.”

Wagner’s Parsifal with Jonas Kaufmann, Elīna Garanča, Georg Zeppenfeld, Ludovic Tézier, Wolfgang Koch, the Chorus and Orchestra of the Vienna State Opera under the direction of Philippe Jordan will be released by Sony Classical on CD and digital formats on March 1, 2024.