Among orchestras with recent recordings news is the Pacific Symphony, which has released a recording of Richard Danielpour’s Toward a Season of Peace, conducted by Music Director Carl St.Clair, on the Naxos label. The work was commissioned and premiered in 2012 around the Persian holiday of Nowruz. The Park Avenue Chamber Symphony and Music Director David Bernard—based in New York City and currently marking their 15th season—have released a complete set of Beethoven symphonies, available as downloads from ClassicsOnline, iTunes, and Amazon.com. The Boston Modern Orchestra Project and Music Director Gil Rose have released two CDs of music by contemporary composers on the BMOP/sound label: Anthony Davis: Notes from the Underground, and Lewis Spratlan: Apollo and Daphne Variations. The New York Philharmonic and Music Director Alan Gilbert have released the third digital recording from the Philharmonic’s 2013-14 season, featuring Beethoven’s Fidelio Overture and Symphony No. 1, and Gershwin’s An American in Paris. The Minnesota Orchestra’s 2011 and 2012 performances of Beethoven’s Third Piano Concerto and Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 24, led by then Music Director Osmo Vänskä and featuring Yevgeny Sudbin as soloist, have been released on the BIS label. American Grace, a new Canary Classics CD featuring piano works by Steven Mackey and John Adams, features performers including the Los Angeles Philharmonic, which performs Mackey’s Stumble to Grace for orchestra and piano, led by David Robertson with soloist Orli Shaham. The Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra and Music Director Louis Langrée have released a live recording made from the orchestra’s November 2013 “One City, One Symphony” concerts of Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No. 6 and Mozart’s cantata Davide Penitente. The recording is available as a free stream.
The Chiara String Quartet—quartet in residence at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln’s School of Music and Blodgett Artists-in-Residence at Harvard University—have released Brahms by Heart, an all-Brahms CD on the Azica label. The CD features Brahms’s first, second, and third quartets, plus the second string quintet, with violist Roger Tapping—performed and recorded from memory, without sheet music. Violinist Gil Shaham has released a compilation CD, Music to Drive Away Loiterers, Vol. 1, on Canary Classics. Featuring fifteen tracks of music by Bizet, Fauré, Mozart, Mendelssohn, Sarasate, and others, the tongue-in-cheek CD title references the common method of deterring loiterers at train and subway stations by playing classical music.
Posted April 4, 2014
