BBC Symphony Orchestra

As late as 1982 Soviet musicologists claiming any significance for Nikolay Roslavets were vigorously suppressed. Only in 1990 was his unmarked grave identified. How many scores were lost when his flat was ransacked just after his death in 1944? The ruthless vengeance of a reactionary proletariat—branding Roslavets, himself born of peasant stock and a fervent 1917 revolutionary, a mere pedlar of bourgeois ‘art for art’s sake’—has fortunately now given way to a gradual recognition of the very real significance of this ‘Russian Schoenberg’. Hyperion has played an important part in the composer’s contemporary rehabilitation, with a benchmark recording of some orchestral works performed by Ilan Volkov and the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra. The same performers are joined here by the brilliant young violinist Alina Ibragimova.

Roslavets’s Violin Concerto No 1 was thought to exist only in piano reduction form until 1989 when the full score was unearthed in the archives of the State Music Publishers in Moscow. It is an ambitious work, laid out on a large scale. Roslavets’s mastery of a leaner symphonic idiom, virtuosic and elegant, is immediately apparent. It ranks as one of the most important Russian works of its era.

Violin Concerto No 2 was completed in 1936, and was written shortly after the composer’s remarkable Chamber Symphony of 1934–5 (recorded on Hyperion CDA67484). Thus it belongs to the period following Roslavets’s return to Moscow from Uzbekistan, when he seems to have been trying to re-establish his reputation as a composer of substantial works, but after the notorious Pravda denunciations of Shostakovich and musical modernism in January 1936 he probably felt it stood little chance of performance. Since then it has remained in total obscurity until very recently, and these notes were heard for the first time in Glasgow’s City Hall in January 2008—the performance on the present disc is in fact the world premiere.

Hyperion’s virtually single-handed rehabilitation of the music of York Bowen (known in his time as ‘The English Rachmaninov’), continues apace with this recording of the third and fourth piano concertos. Piano Concerto No 3 is a vigorous one-movement work with three well-defined sections of varying tempos in Fantasia style. Bowen’s sparkling performances of it drew plaudits from contemporary critics, who hailed it as his best composition thus far.

The Piano Concerto No 4 (said by Sorabji to be the greatest work for piano and orchestra ever written by an Englishman) is a large-scale Romantic, virtuoso work, impressionistic solo passages alternating freely with Straussian orchestral textures throughout. It was written for a BBC broadcast, and for the composer himself to perform; Bowen considered the work his best composition for the piano and an important addition to the concerto literature. It has not been given a studio recording until now.

The young British pianist Danny Driver, a Bowen specialist, gives a virtuoso performance with the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra under Martyn Brabbins.

‘Driver boasts an impressive technique and a clear musical intelligence’ (The Observer)

‘Danny Driver is a thoughtful and musical player and the possessor of a formidable technique … [his] control of dynamic and phrasing were exceptional’ (Musical Opinion)

‘Driver has all the makings of becoming a notable musician—one of integrity and intelligence, commodities all too rare … his naturalness, thinking, and understatement reminded, respectively, of Lupu, Brendel and Curzon’ (The Classical Source)

The CD showcases Jacqueline du Pré whose recordings, notably of the Elgar Cello Concerto, are still major sellers in every market around the world.

This BBC Legends release features one of her live performances of the Elgar at the 1964 London 'Proms' made six months prior to her commercial studio recording.

The release also comprises two Du Pré performances which are totally new to her discography - the world premiere of the South African born Priaulx Rainier's Cello Concerto (from the same concert as the Elgar) and Edmund Rubbra's Cello Sonata in G minor from the Cheltenham Festival in 1962. Rubbra dedicated his cello sonata to William Pleeth, Du Pré's cello teacher.

This CD recorded in excellent stereo (the Rubbra is mono) is a 'must have' purchase for the many Jacqueline du Pré fans in addition to hearing her in English music as well as in two works she never recorded before.

Du Pré's BBC Legends's recording of the Dvorak Cello and Ibert Cello Concertos (BBCL41562) has been a best seller since its release.

Kurt Sanderling has recently been featured on BBC Legends with his recording of Mahler Symphony No.9 (BBCL42322) which received excellent reviews.

The follow-up is Mahler Symphony No.4, which unlike Mahler Symphony No.9, has never been recorded by Sanderling either in the studio or in a broadcast recording. This is a new addition to his discography.

Soprano Felicity Lott is one of the most celebrated and loved singers today and this has been recognized on the packaging by making a double bill of both artists.

Superb stereo sound from the BBC Studios in Manchester.

Kurt Sanderling, who still lives in Berlin in his 90's, represents one of the great conductors of the past - he was joint conductor of the Leningrad Philharmonic Orchestra during Evegeny Mravinsky's sensational years and has since enjoyed a cult status in London, Salzburg, New York etc.

If for many British music students in the early 1960s, modern music ended with Bartók and the neo-classical Stravinsky, the two recordings on this CD disc helped to change all that.

Roger Nichols’s note goes on to relate: ‘The story behind the quartet has often been told: its composition in a wash-house in a prisoner-of-war camp in Silesia in 1940, its first performance on 15 January 1941 before an audience of 400 fellow prisoners with a piano whose keys kept sticking, and the audience’s response to the work’s life-affirming properties – “I was never listened to”, the composer said later, “with such attention and understanding”.’

The work treats of ‘the abolition of time itself, something infinitely mysterious and incomprehensible to most philosophers of time, from Plato to Bergson’.

In this great recording from 1968, Nichols singles out Gervase de Peyer as supremely equal to his starring role: ‘surely no clarinettist has yet matched his “désolé” tone and phrasing at the start of the third movement solo’.

The substantial coupling is the far less accessible Chronochromie, recorded in 1964 and written just four years earlier. This came about through a subvention from the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation and had the further benefit that Antal Dorati had conducted the work’s stormy Paris première in 1962. Here the BBC SO respond to the considerable challenges with playing of remarkable accuracy, energy and colour: as Nichols says, with repeated listening, the work’s difficulties become beauties.

Again, both works are newly transferred and remastered to ART standard at Abbey Road Studios.

A rarity from the British Library Sound Archive - Mstislav Rostropovich in a dramatic live account of Richard Strauss's Don Quixote given during an early visit to the London Proms at the Royal Albert Hall in 1964.

Rostropovich only recorded the work eleven years later in 1975 in a studio version.

Haydn's Cello Concerto in D from 1965 follows on Rostropovich's account of the earlier Concerto in C (BBCL 4198-2) which was given excellent reviews at the time of it's release.

Recorded:

Usher Hall, Edinburgh, 4 September 1962 (Symphony No.12)

Royal Albert Hall, London, 10 December 1980 (Symphony No.6)

Royal Albert Hall, London, 14 August 1981 (J. Strauss II, Youmans)

This CD contains the first Western performance of Shostakovich's vast Symphony No.12 'The Year 1917' given in the Usher Hall, Edinburgh in September 1962 with the composer in attendance.

This historic event was recorded by the BBC in excellent stereo and follows the premiere, also given in the Usher Hall the same year, of Shostakovich's Symphony No.4 (BBCL 4220-2)

The coupling of Shostakovich's high spirited Symphony No.6 showcases Rozhdestvensky as music director of the BBCSO in 1980, this time from the Royal Festival Hall in superb stereo.

Three Shostakovich arrangements have been added as bonuses including the famous treatment given to Youman's Tea for Two.

The three compositions which comprise Britten’s music for solo piano and orchestra constitute a unique, yet still little explored, part of his output. Here they are brought together in a stunning disc that pays tribute to the great artistry of all involved.

Steven Osborne’s performance of Britten’s Piano Concerto with the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra under Ilan Volkov at the 2007 BBC Proms redefined this often undervalued work in the ears of his listeners, imbuing it with hitherto unsuspected emotional and musical weight; playing the bravura passages with glittering assurance and joie de vivre. The same musicians have put down a benchmark recording here.

Diversions for left-hand piano and orchestra is a gem of a piece, which has rarely been recorded. It is highly virtuosic and incredibly well laid out for the left hand, at times almost in the form of études for piano and orchestra. Britten reaches unexpected levels of emotional intensity, most notably in the Chant and the powerful Allegro.

Seventy years or so after these works were first performed, their freshness and vitality speaks with the same musical truth that Imogen Holst divined in Britten’s work, when, writing to him after attending an early performance of Peter Grimes, she said: ‘You have given it to us at the very moment when it was most needed.’ In revisiting these unjustly neglected early works, and, through performances of matchless brilliance, discovering qualities that were missed or overlooked when they first appeared, we have good cause to echo her sentiments.

The Times called it a “superbly played concert:” Ivan Ženatý and the BBC Symphony Orchestra conducted by Jirí Belohlavek performed Foerster’s first violin concerto at London’s Barbican Hall in December, 2007. The concerto was written at the urging of Czech violin virtuoso Jan Kubelík, the dedicatee of the work, and the soloist who premiered it in Chicago in 1910. The second concerto, recorded in the studio, is a somewhat neglected part of the solo repertoire, not being a work for the presentation of superficial violin virtuosity. Ženatý, however, succeeds in delving beneath the piece’s surface and uncovering its introverted beauty for the audience. Thus these pieces appear together for the first time ever on this album, produced in cooperation with BBC Radio 3.

The combination of Foerster’s music with a soloist and conductor of this calibre could be called a truly fortunate constellation. Belohlávek is a conductor of worldwide reknown whose years of musical activity have earned him the position of a specialist in the Czech symphonic and operatic repertoire. Under his guidance, the London orchestra rings with the tones, colors and ardor traditionally associated with Czech ensembles, while Ženatý’s playing is characterized as always by passion and virtuosity in the service of the composition.

The unique first recording of Foerster’s complete violin concertos in a spectacular performance by Ivan Ženatý and the BBC Symphony Orchestra conducted by Jirí Belohlávek.