kyjo
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« on: September 12, 2012, 02:54:02 am » |
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We are now getting into CD-crazy season (if you know what I mean) and Martin Anderson and his crew over at Toccata are really aiming to please with these two new releases ;D:
-Peggy Glanville-Hicks (1912-1990): Sappho, opera in three acts (soloists, Coro and Orquestra Gulbenkian/Jennifer Gordon):
Sappho, the last grand opera of Australian composer Peggy Glanville-Hicks (1912–90), was written in her stone cottage on Mykonos in 1963. Never heard before this recording, Sappho reflects Glanville-Hicks’ fascination with the orient and folk music, encapturing the colours of ancient Greece, with a heroic brass fanfare and epic writing for chorus, haunting woodwind solos and shimmering percussion evoking the stillness of crystal island waters. Deborah Polaski, who creates the role of the disenchanted Sappho, describes it as ‘the kind of music that singers want to sing’. The libretto, based on Lawrence Durrell’s verse-play, incorporates fragments of Sappho’s own verse.
Although I'm no opera buff, this description sounds tantalising enough to convince me to buy it ;D!
-Vissarion Shebalin (1902-1963): Orchestral Music, Volume One: Orchestral Suite no. 1, op. 18; Orchestral Suite no. 2, op. 22 (Siberian Symphony Orchestra/Dmitri Vasilyev)
Like his close friend and colleague Dmitry Shostakovich, Vissarion Shebalin (1902–63) knew a life of both celebrity and hardship: he was another of the composers condemned in the infamous 1948 Party congress in Moscow, and in later life he fought to overcome a series of crippling strokes. But his personality remained undaunted, as his music resolutely proves. This is the first recording of his First Suite for Orchestra and the first appearance on CD of the Second, both of them prepared from theatre music, and showing the lighter side of Shebalin’s symphonic music. They have been recorded by the orchestra of his home town, Omsk, the capital of Siberia.
Being impressed by his symphonies (on OOP Melodiya CDs that are still available at ArkivMusic last time I checked), this CD will be a must buy for me ;D!
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