The Buffalo Philharmonic’s new recording of Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons and Piazzolla’s The Four Seasons of Buenos Aires has been released on the orchestra’s Beau Fleuve label. Music Director JoAnn Falletta conducts; violinist Nikki Chooi is soloist in the Vivaldi, and Tessa Lark is soloist in the Piazzolla. Both works were recorded live in Buffalo’s Kleinhans Music Hall this past fall as part of the BPO OnDemand series. The U.K.’s City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra has released The British Project: Elgar, Britten, Walton, Vaughan Williams, on Deutsche Grammophon; Music Director Mirga Gražinytė-Tyla conducts. The Kansas City Symphony’s recording of one-movement symphonies by Barber, Sibelius, and Scriabin has been released on Reference Recordings; Music Director Michael Stern conducts. The Lansdowne Symphony Orchestra, based outside Philadelphia, has released an album on the New Focus Recordings label, featuring previously unrecorded works by three women composers: Alexandra Pierce (1934-2021), Priscilla Alden Beach (1902-1970), and contemporary composer Linda Robbins Coleman. Reuben Blundell is music director of the Lansdowne Symphony. The Los Angeles Philharmonic’s recording of Mahler’s Eighth Symphony (“Symphony of a Thousand”), led by Gustavo Dudamel, has been issued on Deutsche Grammophon. The work was recorded with the Los Angeles Master Chorale, Pacific Chorale, Los Angeles Children’s Chorus, National Children’s Chorus, and vocal soloists at Walt Disney Concert Hall in May and June 2019. Florida’s Nu Deco Ensemble will release an album entitled Paint the Roses: Live in Concert on September 17 with violinists Rebecca and Megan Lovell, who perform as the duo Larkin Poe; the music on the album is from a live-streamed concert in December 2020. Nu Deco was founded by conductor Jacomo Bairos and Sam Hyken, a composer, arranger, and music producer. The Orpheus Chamber Orchestra has released a 55-CD box set of their complete recordings on Deutsche Grammophon, to mark the ensemble’s 50th birthday. Sony Classical has issued a 120-CD set of Philadelphia Orchestra recordings made under Music Director Eugene Ormandy from the 1930s through the 1950s. The Los Angeles-based ensemble Wild Up has released Julius Eastman Vol. 1: Femenine, the first of a planned multi-volume anthology celebrating Eastman, on the New Amsterdam Records label. Christopher Rountree is founder and artistic director of Wild Up.
John Luther Adams’s Arctic Dreams album has been released on the Cold Blue Music label; performers include a string quartet (Robin Lorentz, violin; Ron Lawrence, viola; Michael Finckel, cello; Robert Black, double bass) and vocalists Micaela Haslam, Amanda Morrison, Heather Cairncross, and Simon Grant. The Attacca Quartet is featured on Real Life, performing adaptations of electronic dance music by Flying Lotus, Louis Cole, and Daedelus, on Sony Classical. Violinist Randall Goosby’s first solo album, “Roots,” has been released on Decca. The disc, with pianist Zhu Wang, includes selections from Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess arranged by Jascha Heifetz; Dvořák’s Sonatina in G; Shelter Island, a duet for violin and double bass by Xavier Dubois Foley; Blue/s Forms by Coleridge-Taylor Perkinson; Florence Price’s Adoration and Fantasies Nos 1 and 2; and William Grant Still’s Suite for Violin and Piano. Cellist Matt Haimovitz’s “Primavera I: the wind,” a digital album on Pentatone, features the first 14 of 81 new pieces written for Haimovitz in response to Sandro Botticelli’s painting Primavera and the large-scale triptych Primavera 2020 by contemporary artist Charline von Heyl. Composers include Lisa Bielawa, inti figgis-vizueta, Jake Heggie, Vijay Iyer, David T. Little, Tod Machover, Nkeiru Okoye, David Sanford, Laura Elise Schwendinger, Roberto Sierra, Asher Sizemore, Gabriella Smith, Jorge Sosa, and Luna Pearl Woolf. A second installment is expected in the fall. Violinist Daniel Hope has recorded music by Schubert, Elgar, and Pärt, a new arrangement of the Misa Criolla by Ariel Ramírez, and other traditional songs on an album entitled Hope, from Deutsche Grammophon on September 3. Carolyn Kuan, music director of the Hartford Symphony Orchestra, is conductor on a new recording of Scott Wheeler’s opera Naga on New World Records; in addition to vocal soloists, performers include the White Snake Projects Orchestra and Chorus and Boston Children’s Chorus. Composer Paola Prestini and cellist Jeffrey Zeigler will issue Houses of Zodiac: Poems for Cello as a digital album on the National Sawdust Tracks label on September 10; the recording, which combines spoken word, movement, music, and images, will be released later on vinyl. The Spektral Quartet—Maeve Feinberg, violin; Clara Lyon, violin; Doyle Armbrust, viola; and Russell Rolen, cello—has released the first recording of Anna Thorvaldsdóttir’s first string quartet (“Enigma”), on Sono Luminus. Du Yun and Raven Chacon’s opera Sweet Land will be available on multiple streaming platforms on September 24. Sweet Land, produced by The Industry—the Los Angeles-based opera company founded by Yuval Sharon in 2010—was recorded live at the Los Angeles State Historic Park on March 15, 2020, the evening Los Angeles County gave the first lockdown orders due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
