Benjamin Schmid - Gulda & Weill: Concertos for Violin & Wind Orchestra - COMPACT DISCS [CD]

The present album is a reissue of a legendary recording by a legendary ensemble, La Venexiana. Recorded at the 2005 Semana de Mu´sica Religiosa Festival in Cuenca, Spain, the ensemble's founding members (Rossana Bertini, Giuseppe Maletto, Sandro Naglia and Daniele Carnovich) are to be heard in the company of a select group of instrumentalists and singers, all of them under the direction of Claudio Cavina, for a memorable journey through the pieces contained in Claudio Monteverdi's Selva morale e spirituale. Rather than following the order of the printed edition, La Venexiana has preferred here to arrange the sequence of pieces into three substantial liturgical settings, each one equipped with it's own self-governing character. The first two albums contain one office of Vespers each, taking advantage of the fact that Monteverdi provided double (and sometimes even triple) versions of the Dixit Dominus, Confitebor, Beatus vir, Laudate pueri, Laudate Dominum, Magnificat and Salve Regina. The programme for the third album has essentially been created around the Messa a 4 and includes other free-standing mass sections. The effect is of constructing a grand Missa solemnis that perhaps might have been heard on November 21, 1631 in Saint Mark's to celebrate the cessation of the plague epidemic in Venice.

In May 2018 the premier of Franz Lehar's The Merry Widow was a thundering success. It was not only Claus Guth's sophisticated and insightful production that earned critical acclaim, the musical performance also received several accolades in it's own right. The energetic conducting by Joana Mallwitz, Marlis Petersen in the title role, with Iurii Samoilov as Danilo by her side and Kateryna Kasper and Martin Mitterrutzner as Valencienne and Camille de Rosillon, the perfect couple, had audiences spellbound. The present is a live recording of the phenomenal premier at Oper Frankfurt.

On the occasion of the 2025 Kreisler anniversary year, the exceptional violinist Benjamin Schmid posed the question What happens for the violin in Vienna roughly 100 years after Fritz Kreisler?The result is this phenomenal recording with the ORF Radio Symphony Orchestra Vienna under Lorenz Aichner, featuring orchestrated works by Kreisler and the world premiere recording of the Concerto for Beni for Solo Violin and String Orchestra (2023) by Georg Breinschmid, born in Vienna in 1973.To quote the dedicatee, it is a Inchmagnificent violin concerto that, from my perspective, shares much with the musical understanding of Fritz Kreisler music with unadulterated joy of playing, which devotes itself immediately and as artfully as possible to the parameters of melody, harmonic experience, and dance-like (or groovy) rhythm. There is always a close relationship to instrumental virtuosity and sonority - something very strongly pronounced in both composers.InchThe album includes Fritz Kreisler's Preludium and Allegro Inchin the Style of PugnaniInch and the Viennese Rhapsodic Fantasietta in arrangements for (string) orchestra. Kreisler's Concerto in One Movement, based on the first movement of Paganini's Violin Concerto in D major, Op. 6, is presented here in an arrangement for wind orchestra, recorded with the Salzburg Wind Philharmonic under Hansjörg Angerer.