St. Louis Symphony Orchestra - Williams: Violin Concerto No. 1; Bernstein: Serenade - COMPACT DISCS [CD]

Abbey Simon and Leonard Slatkin's much-admired set of Rachmaninov's works for piano and orchestra makes a welcome return to the catalogue with this of Piano Concertos Nos. 1 and 4 plus the Paganini Rhapsody. These classic performances originally issued on the Vox tag in the late 1970s were produced by Marc Aubort and Joanna Nickrenz whose recordings are considered by audiophiles to be amongst the finest available. Piano Concertos Nos. 2 and 3 with Simon and Slatkin are available on VOX-NX-3014CD.

Ensemble Daedalus - Musa Latina L'invention de L'antique [COMPACT DISCS] date 06/09/2009

Here is an album whose contents seem odd as it couples the violin concerto of a (still) Russian composer to the viola concerto of an English one. Instead, the coupling is very clever since Prokofiev's First Violin Concerto, whose premiere was in 1923 (while the composer was still living in France, a few years before his return to Soviet Union) served as a much-admired model to Walton's Viola Concerto, whose first performance was played by Paul Hindemith in 1929. The similarities between the two works go beyond the three-movement structure slow-quick-slow and concern themes, accompaniments and the rondo form of the virtuoso central Scherzo. The smart idea of such unusual coupling came to one of the few great living violinists who can really play the viola with equal skill Isabelle van Keulen. This glorious album is crowned by the orchestrated version of Vaughan Williams' masterpiece The Lark Ascending. One of German radio's best orchestras, the NDR Radiophilharmonie is conducted by Andrew Manze, Keri-Lynn Wilson, and Andrew Litton.