August 2002
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In the studio
Philip Pickett - Songs of Angels
Solti's Strauss: Die Frau ohne Schatten on DVD
Coming soon: Renée Fleming sings bel canto
Jean-Yves Thibaudet and The Magic of Satie
Salzburg festival competition winners
Andrea Bocelli - Sentimento due in November
Soundtrack news: Road to Perdition
Preview special: Ashkenazy - Rachmaninov transcriptions
Luciano Pavarotti re-signs exclusive contract with Decca
In the studio
Ute Lemper has been in the studio recently, recording arrangements of songs by Weill, Heymann, Eisler, Brel & Piazzolla for her forthcoming album, due out later this year. August is also a busy month for Renée Fleming and Bryn Terfel, who are recording a selection of Broadway classics from shows such as Kiss Me Kate, Phantom of The Opera, Ragtime, Sweeny Todd and many more. Meanwhile in Budapest, Ivan Fischer is recording Duke Bluebeard's Castle.
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Philip Pickett - Songs of Angels |
Songs Of Angels is a brand new recording from renowned early-music specialist Philip Pickett and the New London Consort, featuring beautiful and unusual music by Gautier do Coincy. This new recording on mystical and spiritual subjects provides a fascinating insight into the development of French sacred music in the 13th Century whilst delighting with the evocation of an earlier age.
Gautier de Coincy (1177-1236) is considered to be one of the first composers of sacred songs and one of the greatest poets of the French language during the 13th Century. He had a profound influence on French culture and his musical works represent the earliest substantial collection of sacred songs in the language.
We spoke to Philip Pickett recently, who explained more about the music of Guatier de Coincy…
"According to the Chronicum S. Medardi Suessonensis, Gautier de Coincy became a monk when fifteen or sixteen years old in 1193. In 1214 he was named Prior of the monastery at Vic-sur-Aisne (about ten miles west of Soissons). At around the age of fifty-five he became Abbot of St.-Médard in Soissons, where he died in 1236. His literary works - the Miracles de Nostre-Dame and a number of religious chansons - reveal him to have been a man of great learning and culture, clearly familiar with the many forms of secular and sacred song and verse current at the time.
This new realisation of Gautier de Coincy's Chansons à la Vierge from his Miracles de Nostre-Dame delves deeply into the medieval musical imagination, combining thirteenth-century earthly performance practices with contemporary concepts of angelic music-making - the hierarchy of the heavens, the harmony of the spheres and the heavenly muses. It draws on medieval paintings and stone-carvings as well as visionary and mystical descriptions left by St John, Hildegard of Bingen, Aurelian of Réôme, Richard Rolle and the Blessed Henry Suso, who not only saw angels playing rebecs, fiddles and harps but joined with them in round dances:"
Songs Of Angels is released this month on Decca, catalogue number 460 794-2. Click here for more
information.
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Solti's Strauss: Die Frau ohne Schatten on DVD |
Sir Georg Solti was regarded as without peer in Strauss opera, and his early 90s audio recording of Die Frau ohne Schatten immediately
established itself as the reference version. Complementing this
celebrated CD recording is Solti's powerful video performance of
Strauss's mystical fable, in Götz Friedrich's magnificent staging
for the Salzburg Festival, filmed in the summer of 1992. This
performance also presents (at Solti's insistence) the opera uncut.
In this exclusive extract from the sleeve notes, Michael Kennedy details some of the background to the opera.
"You've never written anything more beautiful and compact in your life - I only hope my music will be worthy of your fine poetry." With these words Richard Strauss acknowledged receipt of the libretto of Act Two of Die Frau ohne Schatten from Hugo von Hofmannsthal in July 1914, words that contradict the suggestion, sometimes made, that the composer was out of his depth with the symbolism and complexities of the plot of this opera. On the contrary, he made light of its difficulties. "Is it really so difficult?" he asked Hofmannsthal. "Aren't what are presented quite simple symbols? The Emperor who must be turned to stone, the woman who doesn't cast a shadow - those are all things that anyone can see and understand." Yet he recognised that this "fairy tale", in which three layers of existence are intermingled, was a special creation that might puzzle some of its audiences. "The point at which comprehensibility ceases is precisely where the quintessential realm of music begins, for music is always the expression of the immeasurable", he said in 1935. Die Frau ohne Schatten was "not an entertainment, as indeed opera, as I understand it, and as Wagner regarded it, can never be entertainment but rather the expression in the language of music of something that happens in the soul". It was, after all, Strauss himself who fashioned the great climax of Act Three when the Empress refuses to accept the shadow with a cry of "I will not!" (Ich will nicht!) like - in Strauss's vivid words - "the scream of a woman in childbirth".
Die Frau ohne Schatten is at once a hymn to the glory of married love and its fulfilment by children and a search for humanity, understanding and love. This search can be directly related to the experience of the 1914?18 war, during which Act Three of the libretto and the music of the whole opera were written. Hating the war, Strauss looked forward to a better world after it was over. As he wrote to his friend Romain Rolland in 1917: "We artists must try to keep our eyes open to the beautiful and the sublime on every side and place ourselves at the service of truth which will in the end, as surely as light pierces darkness, penetrate the dense web of lies and deceit into which the deluded world seems to have spun itself for the present".
See more details about the DVD on ourDVD site
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Coming soon: Renée Fleming sings bel canto |
Renée Fleming's forthcoming release on Decca is a splendid new recording of scenes from bel canto operas. Long admired for her mastery of the operas of Mozart and Strauss, Fleming returns to the music that inspired her to become a singer: the ineffably beautiful and poignant melodies of Bellini, Rossini and Donizetti.
Here, Renee talks to Evans Mirageas about her decision to record bel canto opera.
EM: What was your first exposure to bel canto?
RF: When I first started singing and learning about singers, I thought that the bel canto operas were the centre of every artist's repertoire, because the singers I was originally exposed to were Joan Sutherland, Maria Callas, Montserrat Caballé and Beverly Sills. These were all artists who specialised to a degree in this repertoire. So, I was shocked when I began to learn more about the professional world of opera to find that there was something called a Mozart/Strauss soprano; one who never sang bel canto.
I also felt and still feel that bel canto is the very definition of everything that is great singing in that it requires the greatest accomplishment of all of the vocal repertoire. One has to have the line and beauty of tone required in Mozart with the added virtuosity of coloratura. It is also the most expressive, the freest repertoire. I guess I am drawn to this repertoire because it presents the ultimate challenge.
The album will be released in the USA on September 10th, and internationally in October. Read our the complete interview with Renee, and listen to excepts from the album with our new website feature at www.deccaclassics.com/reneefleming
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Jean-Yves Thibaudet and The Magic of Satie |
Jean-Yves Thibaudet has recently been in to tell us about his latest recording project, the complete works for solo piano by Erik Satie, and its first release "The Magic of Satie". Jean-Yves explains:
"With all the respect that I already had for Satie, I was not expecting something at this level. I discovered pieces that are absolutely first class…. I'll tell you frankly, the seventh Gnossienne is a masterpiece - and that has never been published. It is in a world of its own. So far, this is my favourite, an incredible discovery for me. Harmonically, it is so intense, so interesting. . . Satie doesn't have the respect that I think he deserves - He is thought of as an eccentric, a sophisticated drawing-room composer who didn't have such a great talent. Some people think of him as an amateur. Now, having played all these pieces I think he is a genius, not only a genius but also the precursor of many things - minimalism, for example. It has taken a long time to research for the recording. Some of the pieces were published and are now out of print, some of them were rediscovered quite recently, some had never been published… the recording will have at least five or six world premieres."
The Magic of Satie is released next month on Decca, Catalogue Number 470 290
Have a look at our new
video feature
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Salzburg festival competition winners
The Universal Classics and iClassics competition to win a week at the Salzburg Festival attracted over 10,000 entries from around the globe.
The lucky winners are:
Miyuki Kobayashe from Tokyo
Mr. Charles Wheeler from Kentucky, USA
Rosalind MacLachlan from UK
Elena Königsfeld from Germany
Congratulations to you all, and enjoy the festival!
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Andrea Bocelli - Sentimento due in November |
Andrea Bocelli's new recording, Sentimento is now due to be released worldwide on November 4th.
Meanwhile, Andrea has recently announced concert dates in the following cities
24 October - Zurich, Switzerland
26 October - Rotterdam, Netherlands
9 November - Manchester, UK
10 November - London, UK
13 December - Paris, UK
20 December - Munich, Germany
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Soundtrack news: Road to Perdition |
Road To Perdition is the new summer blockbuster from Oscar-winning "American Beauty" director Sam Mendes. Mendes joins forces again with Academy Award nominee Thomas Newman, who has written the score to the film.
Set in depression-era Chicago, Tom Hanks heads an all-star cast as Michael O'Sullivan (a.k.a. The Angel Of Death), a man who juggles his hit-man lifestyle with that of a devoted family man. When his two worlds collide he loses two members of his family and escapes with the remaining member to embark on a journey of revenge.
Read more about the soundtrack in our new soundtrack feature
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Preview special: Ashkenazy - new recording of Rachmaninov transcriptions |
The world's greatest living interpreter of Rachmaninov, Vladimir Ashkenazy, returns next month with a brand new recording of Rachmaninov transcriptions. This will be the first time in Askenazy's 30 year career with Decca that he has recorded the transcriptions. In this exclusive extract, Tim Parry explains more about the music.
"When Rachmaninov was a child, he - like everyone else - learnt music largely by playing it. For orchestral works and music requiring larger forces this meant playing transcriptions. The piano became an orchestra, a voice with accompaniment, a full ensemble housed in a single instrument at which Rachmaninov was prodigiously gifted. One of his earliest childhood memories was of playing piano duets with his grandfather Arkadi, and as in so many musical homes this was a staple of music-making, the chief means of exploring the symphonic and opera repertoire, and much other music. Piano transcription became a respected art form. Born from necessity, and honed and developed by performers who were also first-rate composers in their own right, transcriptions took on an autonomous life. That the advent of the gramophone and radio did not signal the death of these arrangements illustrates both their intrinsic merit and the niche they carved out quite independently of their source material."
Read more about this new recording in next month's news
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Decca Music Group announces new exclusive contract with Luciano Pavarotti
The DECCA MUSIC GROUP, part of the Universal Music Group, is proud to announce that it has re-signed its exclusive contract with the world's most famous tenor, LUCIANO PAVAROTTI.
2001 marked Luciano Pavarotti's fortieth anniversary as an opera singer, and, throughout an extraordinary career, the tenor's impact on the world of music has been enormous: broadening the horizons of classical music and opera and bringing countless numbers of new fans to the art of the tenor voice, Pavarotti's thrilling voice and unique personality have touched millions of people throughout the world. An exclusive Decca artist since the early years of his career, Luciano Pavarotti is the most popular classical artist in the history of the recording industry and has sold in excess of 65 million DECCA albums and videos. During that period, he has made over 60 original recordings and DECCA has released many more best-selling compilation discs of popular arias and songs.
Pavarotti re-signs with Decca - see the picture!
Luciano Pavarotti has been awarded with many international accolades, most recent of which include a KENNEDY CENTER HONOUR, presented at a White House ceremony by the President of the United States, for his contributions to culture; the IFPI (International Federation of the Phonographic Industry) Special Achievement Award, in recognition of his contribution to the recording industry; and the coveted NANSEN award for his work with the UNHCR (United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees).
Said Luciano Pavarotti, "Decca has been my recording company from the beginning - it has been a big part of my singing career and it has always been a wonderful partnership. We have made many important and beautiful recordings together and I am proud that I will continue to record with this great label. "
Doug Morris, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, Universal Music Group, stated, "As the most popular artist in the history of classical music, Luciano Pavarotti is truly an international treasure. All of us at Universal Music Group are delighted that he has chosen to stay with our company, and we look forward to many more years of successful collaboration."
Jorgen Larsen, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, Universal Music International, commented: "It is very rewarding that an artist with a reputation of such historical importance as Luciano has decided to entrust us with his ongoing recording career. Everyone at Universal Music is proud that we're going to be continuing this singular and mutually rewarding relationship."
Added Chris Roberts, President, Universal Classics, "Beyond being perhaps the world's most recognised person, Luciano Pavarotti's contribution to music is staggering. Not since Caruso has a classical artist reached so many people and he has been the great ambassador of this cause for over 40 years. Decca and Universal have been his home for his entire recording career and we thank him for his loyalty and congratulate him on this and all his many accomplishments."
Costa Pilavachi, President, the DECCA MUSIC GROUP [pictured with Pavarotti at the tenor's holiday villa in Pesaro, Italy], said, "Luciano always looks ahead and all of us at Decca are proud that this fabulous partnership continues well into the future. His recorded legacy is incomparable and unrivalled and
we look forward to adding to this extraordinary heritage both on audio as well as video in the coming years."
Luciano Pavarotti is currently undertaking a worldwide concert tour and is recording an album of popular songs commissioned by DECCA, due for release in 2003. Other recording and release plans, including a televised documentary of his life and career, will be announced shortly.
Luciano Pavarotti and Friends!
From left to Right
Costa Pilavachi, President, Decca Music Group
Luciano Pavarotti
Jean-Hugues Allard, Vice President A& R, Decca Music Group
(pictured at the contract signing at Luciano Pavarotti's holiday villa in
Pesaro, Italy, July 2002)
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