Singapore Symphony Orchestra Shui - MacBeth / Rosenkavalier Suite - SUPER-AUDIO CD [Super Audio CD (SACD)]

Sergei Rachmaninov was one of the twentieth century's outstanding pianists, but the large body of purely orchestral music he composed is no less an expression of his musical character. His great strength was that he managed to preserve intact a vision he had discovered very early in life. This contemporary of Schoenberg, Scriabin, Ravel and Ives was unconcerned with musical fashions and had no wish to be a pioneer. Instead, and over a period of half a century he refined and deepened a language which derived naturally from his late-nineteenth-century Russian background. With this four-disc box set, the Singapore Symphony Orchestra and Lan Shui present a comprehensive collection of Rachmaninov's music for orchestra - from the Scherzo in D minor, his first surviving piece for orchestra, completed just before his fifteenth birthday to the canonical works the Symphonies and the Symphonic Dances. The recordings were made between 2008 and 2015, with the three symphonies (previously released on separate albums) described as 'eine formidable Gesamteinspielung' on the website Pizzicato. But there is much more to Rachmaninov's orchestral music besides the symphonies, and this box offers the listener opportunity to explore the young composer's fascination with Gypsy themes (in the excerpts from the opera Aleko and Capriccio bohemien) as well as his lifelong preoccupation with death, in the form of the four notes of the Dies irae plainchant motif. This is heard again and again in Rachmaninov's music, up until his very last work, the Symphonic Dances, where, at the very end of the third and final dance, this symbol of death is finally laid to rest.

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.

Bernard Herrmann is widely regarded as one of Hollywood's most important composers, responsible for more than fifty film scores (in addition to his work for TV, radio, and the concert hall), and noted for his collaborations with Orson Welles and, later, with Alfred Hitchcock. Welles was unofficially involved with Robert Stevenson's film of Jane Eyre in the 1940s, and it was Welles that suggested Herrmann as composer for the project. Herrmann became obsessed with all things Brontë, and within months was writing to friends of his plans to write an opera on Wuthering Heights. It took him eight years to complete the vocal score, using a libretto written by his wife, Lucille Fletcher. Although he conducted a recording of the work, in 1966, he failed to see a live production in his lifetime. Although the opera features eight solo roles, Cathy and Heathcliff dominate the action and are the only singers in Hans Sørensen's Suite of excerpts - recorded here for the very first time. Keri Fuge and Roderick Williams take the vocal roles in this recording. Echoes was composed in 1965 for string quartet, and was later arranged for string orchestra by Hans Sørensen - the version heard on this album. The recording was made in the Esplanade Concert Hall, Singapore. In Surround Sound, and is available as a Hybrid SACD and in Spatial Audio. Details 1. Suite from 'Wuthering Heights' for Soprano, Baritone, and Orchestra~I. Prologue. The Snow and Wind. Allegro tumultuoso - Lento. Molto sostenuto e tempestoso Oh, Cathy! Come in. Oh, come in - 2. Suite from 'Wuthering Heights' for Soprano, Baritone, and Orchestra~II. Act I. Scene 1. Allegretto pastorale (molto tranquillo) I have been wandering through the green woods - 3. Suite from 'Wuthering Heights' for Soprano, Baritone, and Orchestra~III. Act I. Scene 1. Sunset. Moderato Do you remember the day you first came to Wuthering He