Munich Chamber Orchestra - Enrico Onofri - COMPACT DISCS [CD]

Giacomo Puccini wrote only a few works for voice with piano accompaniment. Eleven songs were published during his lifetime; others remained lost for over a century. In 2010, a first critical edition of the total of sixteen vocal compositions was presented. Several of them are closely related to Puccini's operas and had already been written during his studies in Milan. It was this edition that inspired Johannes X. Schachtner to arrange the piano score-like accompaniments for orchestra. In early February 2023, the US tenor Charles Castronovo sang these sixteen songs for the first time together with the Münchner Rundfunkorchester conducted by Ivan Repušic. Charles Castronovo has worked with the Münchner Rundfunkorchester ever since a concert performance of Mozart's La clemenza di Tito in 2006. In the 2023/24 season, he will return to Munich as the orchestra's InchArtist in ResidenceInch. BR-KLASSIK now presents the CD InchGiacomo Puccini - I CantiInch. Puccini's piano songs are entirely in the Italian tradition of the 19th century. Most Italian opera composers - from Rossini, Donizetti and Bellini to Verdi - also wrote lieder, but unlike the German art song, these were always closely related to bel canto, the Inchbeautiful songInch. Priority is given here to an irresistible melos over a mostly simple accompaniment, which is nevertheless supported by charming harmonies; hardly ever do these Italian songs eschew the dramatic flair of the opera composer. In the course of his work, Johannes X. Schachtner was increasingly fascinated by the way in which these songs, which were written for very different occasions and have no contextual connection, nevertheless convey the highly exciting story of a composer's life. From the youthful, almost innocent love song InchA teInch to Puccini's last songs with the impressive InchMorire?Inch - but also small album leaves such as the setti

Album Tracks 1. Grieg Prelude from Holberg Suite 2. Tchaikovsky Waltz from Serenade 3. The Moon Is Shining 4. Sinsalo 3 Russian Folk Songs 5. The Rush Light 6. Clouds 7. Festive Dance 8. The Plainsmen 9. Vagarshapati Par 10. Spring 11. Bridge Valse-Intermezzo in E minor 12. Vieuxtemps Yankee Doodle 13. Gershwin Summertime 14. Gershwin Soon 15. Davidov At the Fountain 16. Rachmaninoff Vocalise 17. Rimsky-Korakov Flight of the Bumblebee 18. Shostakovich Spanish Dance from the Gadfly 19. Piazolla Libertango

Born in 1947, Salvatore Sciarrino has been delighting and perplexing his audiences, often at the same time, ever since the mid-60s, though his reputation has long since spread beyond European avant-garde circles, particularly with the opera Luci miei tradici and it's stagings in Brussels, New York, Salzburg and Berlin. The basic premises of Sciarrino's language explore the limits of perception, the borderline between sound and silence, and the abstraction of gestures and forms from the tonal contexts that supply them. 'I don't write music, I write a psychological experience,' Sciarrino he declared, and his output certainly resists description or classification except insofar as it takes it's place in a grand tradition of Italian postwar experimentalists in the laboratory of sound, headed by figures as diverse as Luciano Berio and Luigi Nono. Even at the level of his works for orchestra and the stage, Sciarrino writes with an immediacy and intimacy of expression which finds it's natural home in the kind of chamber ensemble works recorded here. Scored for flute, guitar, bass clarinet and violin, the album's title work dates from 1986 and lives up to it's title by discovering how many shades of sound can be found near the border with silence, a sonic analogue to a Rothko painting or an Agnes Martin drawing. Vagabonde blu makes full use of the accordion's potential to set weightless and ceaseless waves of sound in motion. By contrast, the scoring of alto flute, cor anglais and bass flute makes Muro d'orizzonte a study in furtive attacks and explosions. The most recent work is Alba meònia from 2020, receiving it's first recording on this album, and scattering it's timbres across a still wider soundscape through the diverse scoring for flute, violin and guitar. Album Tracks 1. Esplorazione Del Bianco II, for Flute, Bass Clarinet, Guitar and Violin 2. Vagabonde Blu,