Franz Schubert’s Complete Songs for voice and piano, including different settings, fragments and part songs
Schubert set the verse of more than 115 poets to music, producing around 650 songs. He selected biblical texts and poetry from classical Greece, the Renaissance, the Enlightenment and the early Romantic era, the poets including Goethe, Schiller, Shakespeare, Petrarca and Heine as well as his Austrian contemporaries and friends. The Complete Lieder includes all the solo songs and part songs with piano, grouped according to the poets who inspired him. Ulrich Eisenlohr, pianist and artistic director of the edition, selected native German singers and used Bärenreiter’s Neue Schubert-Ausgabe as a basis for the recordings, producing a stirring cycle of particular integrity. All the sung texts are included online with English translations. Ulrich Eisenlohr is the artistic director of the Deutsche Schubert-Lied-Edition. Having chosen the repertoire for each recording, he subsequently handpicked the singers, wrote many of the booklet notes and performed on thirty-one out of the thirty-eight CDs.

A virtuoso pianist and renowned conductor in his day, Wilhelm Stenhammar achieved early success with his magnificently wide-ranging and Brahmsian Piano Concerto No 1. After many years of mixed fortunes as a composer he found his personal voice in the remarkable Piano Concerto No 2. Conceived as a single span, this vividly affirmative romantic masterpiece was the wellspring for his Serenade (8572186) and Symphony No 2 (8553888). Award-winning soloist Niklas Sivelov has also recorded Stenhammar’s solo piano works (8553730).

In 1907 Mahler suffered a series of severe losses. Following pressure, he resigned his position as Director of the Court Opera in Vienna. After his elder daughter Maria died, he himself received the diagnosis of a severe heart condition. During the summer of 1908, Mahler sketched Das Lied von der Erde (The Song of the Earth), a ‘symphony for two vocal soloists and orchestra’. The texts, taken from Hans Bethge’s The Chinese Flute, are concerned with the themes of transience and loss, culminating in the overwhelming Der Abschied (The Farewell). The Houston Symphony and Hans Graf have recorded Zemlinsky and Berg on Naxos 8572048; ‘tonally sumptuous and emotionally expansive’. (Allmusic.com)

Leos Janacek’s dramatic Glagolitic Mass is set to a ninth century Old Church Slavonic text. With its highly individual synthesis of thunderous brass outbursts, rhythmic energy, radiant melodies and interludes of rapt contemplation, the work has established itself as a unique contribution to the choral repertoire. An avowed statement of his belief and patriotic pride in Czechoslovakian national independence, Janacek’s Sinfonietta uses spectacular large-scale orchestral forces. Both of these works belong to the composer’s last and most inspired decade, and represent his mature musical language at its most communicative.

Leos Janacek’s dramatic Glagolitic Mass is set to a ninth century Old Church Slavonic text. With its highly individual synthesis of thunderous brass outbursts, rhythmic energy, radiant melodies and interludes of rapt contemplation, the work has established itself as a unique contribution to the choral repertoire. An avowed statement of his belief and patriotic pride in Czechoslovakian national independence, Janacek’s Sinfonietta uses spectacular large-scale orchestral forces. Both of these works belong to the composer’s last and most inspired decade, and represent his mature musical language at its most communicative.

An important marker in Debussy’s compositional development, the Fantaisie reflects something of the influence of Cesar Franck’s Symphonic Variations yet embodies his own new aesthetic. Unpublished in Debussy’s lifetime, it is heard here in its 1968 revision. The delicately evocative Rapsodie for saxophone is an exotic work with an ‘oriental’ atmosphere and Spanish or Moorish associations. Although composed as a Conservatoire test piece, the Premiere Rapsodie for Clarinet has long since entered the repertoire as an important addition for the instrument. The glittering Danses for harp and strings recall Satie’s Gymnopedies, with the Danse profane in particular calling for a degree of virtuosity. Volume 6 of this much admired series (8572583) was praised for its ‘subtle and sensitive readings’. (Gramophone)

World Premiere Recording
Thierry Lancino’s vast Requiem is a challenging and eloquent contemplation on human mortality which the composer describes as ‘both an epic fresco and sacred ceremony’. In a paradox which brings the Christian into dialogue with the Pagan, Lancino presents an exploration of Death and Time which is both human and relevant, as well as posing eternal and unanswerable questions. This recording captures a unique and moving event, performed by a stellar cast of artists and France’s leading choir and orchestra.

World Premiere Recording
Thierry Lancino’s vast Requiem is a challenging and eloquent contemplation on human mortality which the composer describes as ‘both an epic fresco and sacred ceremony’. In a paradox which brings the Christian into dialogue with the Pagan, Lancino presents an exploration of Death and Time which is both human and relevant, as well as posing eternal and unanswerable questions. This recording captures a unique and moving event, performed by a stellar cast of artists and France’s leading choir and orchestra.

World Premiere Recording of the Complete Score
This recording of New Babylon, one of Shostakovich’s most inventive and truly symphonic film scores, is the first complete recording of all the surviving music from the original ‘lost’ manuscript full score and the first to use five solo string players only, as conceived by the composer. A remarkable collage of marches, can-cans, carnival music, tumultuous rhythms and musical quotations, New Babylon bristles with witty dissonance and brassy ebullience, emphasizing the film’s content rather than its visual surface. Mark Fitz-Gerald’s two previous Naxos world première recordings of Shostakovich’s film scores for Alone (8570316) and The Girlfriends (8572138) have been highly acclaimed.

‘Da-da-da-DAAAAH, Da-da-da-DAAAAH’: listen to track 7 and see if you recognise that music! It’s one of the most famous pieces of classical music ever written. There are some animals here, too – an elephant and a swan. And right at the end, guess which boy wizard joins the party…Come and join it too!

If you listen carefully to this CD, you will get to know one of best the composers in the world. Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart lived 250 years ago but he carries on being famous – so he must have been special. He giggled a lot. He was also good at playing the piano and the violin. And he wrote this amazing music, which people still love hearing today. See if you love hearing it too!

Beethoven was a musical giant. He wasn’t taller or fatter than everyone else, but his music is big and his name is important. Beethoven is like the Olympic champion of classical music. Some of the music he wrote is strong and serious, and some of it is very gentle. Listen here to orchestras, pianos, violins and other instruments playing some of the most famous pieces of all.

If you listen carefully to this CD, you will get to know one of best the composers in the world. Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart lived 250 years ago but he carries on being famous – so he must have been special. He giggled a lot. He was also good at playing the piano and the violin. And he wrote this amazing music, which people still love hearing today. See if you love hearing it too!

Christmas music in the style of Bach, Handel and Vivaldi arranged by Peter Breiner
The Places The tour lingers for some time in Zurich, in its celebration of Christmas. There is a visit to the famous Toy Museum at Nuremberg, a city well known as the centre of the German toymaking industry. Churches seen are the Great Minster in Zurich, where Zwingli once preached, and the monastery at Einsiedeln, at the heart of Catholic Switzerland.
The Music The tour is accompanied by witty arrangements of Christmas favourites in the style of Baroque masters, of Bach, Handel and Vivaldi, by the Slovak-born composer Peter Breiner.

The Places The tour visits the Tin Soldier Museum at Kulmbach, the National Army Museum, the Wellington Memorial and St Paul’s Cathedral in London, and the Bavarian Army Museum at Ingolstadt, with its relics of the Thirty Years War and of conflicts with the Ottoman Empire.
The Music The tour brings Beethoven’s musical celebration of Wellington’s victorious campaign in Spain, Liszt’s Battle of the Huns and a Georgian war march by Ippolitov-Ivanov. The tour ends with two military works by Rimsky-Korsakov, King Dodon on the Battlefield, from his last opera, The Golden Cockerel, and The Massacre at Kerzhenets from The Legend of the Invisible City of Kitezh.

The Places The tour visits historic sites in the Czech Republic, Austria, Germany, Switzerland and Belgium. These include the castles of Litomyšl and Konopiště in Bohemia, and the historic town of Mělnik, the Horological Museum at Le Locle in Switzerland, relics of war from the Bavarian Army Museum in Ingolstadt, and a glimpse of the Belgian Château of Gaasbeek.
The Music The tour brings two of Joseph Haydn’s most famous symphonies, written for a London concert season in 1794, Symphony No. 100, the so-called Military Symphony, and Symphony No 101, nicknamed The Clock.