Singapore Symphony Chorus Singapore Symphony - Russian Spectacular - SUPER-AUDIO CD [Super Audio CD (SACD)]

Dmitri Shostakovich was the most versatile of composers popular and serious styles came to him with equal ease and are frequently found together in the same work. In his twenties, before the heavy hand of Soviet officialdom slapped him down in 1936, music of every kind poured out of him symphonies, operas and full-length ballets but also a great amount of music for film and theatre. Here Andrew Litton leads the Singapore Symphony Orchestra in a program which explores this lighter side of a composer who is otherwise often regarded as unrelentingly serious. The album opens with Suite for Jazz Orchestra No. 1, which Litton conducts from the piano. Consisting of three brief movements, it is the only truly original work on the disc, written in 1934 for a competition aimed at making 'Soviet Jazz' more respectable. The remaining suites are all reworkings of existing music, such as the ballets The Age of Gold - about the adventures of a Soviet football team visiting the decadent West - and The Limpid Stream, portraying a group of entertainers visiting an idyllic collective farm. The Suite for Variety Orchestra is a compilation that the composer made in the late 1950s from three film scores, a ballet movement and four piano pieces. Closing the album is Shostakovich's 1927 orchestration of a Broadway classic, Vincent Youmans' Tea for Two, which had become a hit under the title Tahiti Trot.

Having spent much of his childhood in Latvia, where he also began his violin studies, Vadim Gluzman makes a return to his roots with this disc of music by Peteris Vasks. The ample programme (+ 84 minutes!) opens with the violin concerto 'Distant Light', which in the two decades since it was composed has become a modern classic. The composer has described it as 'a song, coming from silence and floating away into silence, full of idealism and love, at times melancholy, at times dramatic.' For the concerto, Gluzman found support from the strings of the Finnish Radio Symphony Orchestra under Hannu Lintu, just across the Baltic See from Latvia. For the other works on the disc he is however joined by Latvian colleagues and friends. These include the violinist Sandis Šteinbergs who appears in the duo Summer Dances, one of Vasks' more carefree and buoyant pieces. This recent work in seven brief movements is, in the composer's own words, the musical equivalent of a naïvist painting. In comparison, the Piano Quartet from 2001 is one of his longest and most imposing chamber works. Beginning with a perfect fifth in the piano, it takes the listener on an emotional roller-coaster, through hectic dances and dramatic songs to a typical 'Vasks ending' with a distant light offering a tempered hope. In the quartet, Vadim Gluzman leads an ensemble consisting of Ilze Klava, Reinis Birznieks, and Angela Yoffe.

The Singapore Symphony and it's music director Hans Graf present a recording of Józef Kozlowski's Requiem, together with the Singapore Symphony Chorus & Youth Choir, as well as a quartet of outstanding soloists Olga Peretyatko (soprano), Olesya Petrova (mezzo-soprano), Boris Stepanov (tenor) and Christoph Seidl (bass). The Requiem (1798) was commissioned to Kozlowski by the abdicated King Stanislaw of Poland, and can be perceived as a requiem not just for the monarch, but for the entire Polish nation, absorbed by the Russian state during the 1780s. Interestingly, the work was also heard during the funeral of Tsar Alexander I of Russia, in a different version with heavier orchestration and choruses for more drama. The current recording uses a new edition created by conductor Graf himself, realizing the intimate character of the original 1798 version. Composed just 7 years after Mozart's famous Requiem, the work is rooted in Viennese Classicism, yet also adumbrates nineteenth-century developments, with a subtle Slavonic tinge. This revival is a gem to anyone interested in music from the early Romantic era. Album Tracks 1. Requiem in E-flat Minor~Requiem et Kyrie 2. Requiem in E-flat Minor~Dies irae 3. Requiem in E-flat Minor~Tuba mirum 4. Requiem in E-flat Minor~Judex ergo 5. Requiem in E-flat Minor~Confutatis 6. Requiem in E-flat Minor~Lacrymosa 7. Requiem in E-flat Minor~Domine Jesu Christe 8. Requiem in E-flat Minor~Sanctus 9. Requiem in E-flat Minor~Benedictus 10. Requiem in E-flat Minor~Agnus Dei 11. Requiem in E-flat Minor~Quia pius es / Requiem aeternam