Welcome to the Decca Music Group news for October 2001. Select one of the headlines below to take a look at what's going on this month. If you want to get all this delivered to your email inbox, then don't forget to signup for our newsletters. And if you have any questions to ask us, you can write to us by using our Contact form. See you next month!

Andrea Bocelli and Reneé Fleming perform at World Trade Centre memorial service
Decca Music Group Artists up for Gramophone awards
The Pavarotti Edition - more on Puccini
Jean-Yves Thibaudet plays Mendelssohn
Eternal Echoes from soundtrack maestro John Barry
Vienna New Year's Day Concert on Philip
Meret Becker - Fragiles
Russell Watson's UK Encore


Andrea Bocelli and Reneé Fleming perform at World Trade Centre memorial service
Andrea Bocelli and Reneé Fleming performed at a memorial service to remember those who were lost in the September 11 tragedy in the US. The service took place at Ground Zero (the site of the World Trade Center) at 2pm on Sunday 28 October. Andrea Bocelli performed Schubert's Ave Maria and Stradella's Pieta Signore, and Reneé Fleming performed Amazing Grace before leading the congregation in a stirring rendition of God Bless America.
See the CNN website for more information about this story.



Decca Music Group Artists up for Gramophone awards
Several Decca Music Group artists have been nominated for this year's prestigious Gramophone Awards. Both Philips and Decca have four nominations each

Philips
Instrumental Category::
Schubert: Piano Sonatas 9, 18, 20 & 21 - Brendel
Schubert: Piano Sonatas 14 & 17 - Brendel
Opera Category::
Verdi: Falstaff - John Eliot Gardiner
Concerto Category::
Schoenberg: Piano Concerto - Uchida, Boulez

Decca
Vocal Category:: 
Kosma: Songs - Le Roux
Opera Category::
Massenet: Thais - Abel
Albeniz: Merin - De Eusebio
Choral Category::
Verdi: Sacred Works - Chailly

The Pavarotti Edition - Puccini

The Pavarotti Edition is finally released this month. As part of our ongoing series, read John Steane's notes about the Puccini disc below.
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Jean-Yves Thibaudet plays Mendelssohn

Leipzig’s current Music Director, Herbert Blomstedt, conducts the recording made in the acoustically superb Gewandhaus Concert Hall.
Jean-Yves Thibaudet has played the music of Mendelssohn since he was a child and brings his phenomenal technique and poetry to bear on the ever-popular G minor concerto and it’s lesser known successor the moody and brilliant Concerto in D minor. Filling out the recording are two of Mendelssohn’s best loved solo piano works, the Rondo Capriccioso and the Variations Sérieuses.

Thibaudet has said that ‘Mendelssohn is at his greatest in these four pieces we have recorded. His music has a magical effect on me. Like Mozart, there is not one note too many in these phenomenal works (and there are many notes!). Every phrase is full of meaning and emotion. This is true in both the slower music and the bravura passages. The music is sometimes so light and full of quicksilver energy it reminds me of champagne bubbles!’

Mendelssohn wrote the G minor concerto in 1831 when he was twenty-two and played the premiere performance that same year in Munich. The second concerto in D minor was written for the Birmingham Music Festival in England and once again the composer was the soloist at its premiere in 1837 when he was a mature twenty-eight! The two solo pieces are also from the opposite ends of this short, but amazing career. The Rondo Capriccioso was composed in a day when Mendelssohn was sixteen and the Variations Sérieuses in 1841 when he was thirty-two.

This latest release from Decca’s exclusive pianist brings yet another facet of his varied talents to the public. Jean-Yves Thibaudet is recognized as the foremost interpreter of the music of his French countrymen Ravel and Debussy (his recording of the complete works of Ravel has won many awards including the Grammy). He has championed the music of jazz greats Bill Evans and Duke Ellington and his classical repertoire extends to the virtuoso music of Liszt and Rachmaninoff . He has recorded the complete concertos of Rachmaninoff for Decca with the Cleveland Orchestra and Vladimir Ashkenazy. He loves working with singers and has recorded for Decca both with Cecilia Bartoli and Renée Fleming.

His love of Mendelssohn is tied to his love of singing and he has said that the slow melodies in the concertos seem to be written for a human voice to sing. He is passionate about this music from a man who lived at an important transitional time in musical history. He says: ‘Mendelssohn’s music is the perfect amalgam of the waning Classical era and the new Romantic century, but you must play it with simplicity and directness. Too emotional and it sounds saccharine. Too dry and it sounds like mindless note-spinning. It is important to find that special ‘middle ground’ where this music comes alive with passion and beauty.’

John Barry - Eternal Echoes

Eternal Echoes’, a new collection of original compositions by five-time Academy Award-winning composer John Barry, is released this month. Like its best-selling Decca predecessor, ‘The Beyondness of Things’, ‘Eternal Echoes’ consists of entirely original music and is not based on a movie soundtrack or music for another medium. The composer conducts the English Chamber Orchestra in a richly orchestrated tapestry of compositions that range from haunting to melancholy, from lighthearted to powerful.

‘Eternal Echoes’ draws its title from Irish poet and philosopher John O'Donohue's best-selling book. Barry's longstanding friendship with the author, and deep respect for his writings, was part of the inspiration for the album. According to the composer, it is a collection of "songs without words" that represent "dreams, memories and reflections" of moments throughout his life. Track titles suggest the nature of these musical vignettes: ‘Elegy’, ‘Blessed Illusion’, ‘Lullabying’, ‘Slow Day’ and others.

This marks only the third time in the Barry's forty-year career in popular music that the composer has penned an entire album of original compositions. The last, Decca's 1998 ‘The Beyondness of Things’, went on to become one of the most acclaimed instrumental albums of recent years. Decca has also released two of Barry's film soundtracks - ‘Swept From the Sea’ and ‘Playing by Heart’ - and release his latest film score, for the Michael Apted wartime thriller "Enigma," this month.

Decca Music Group is delighted to announce the signing of one of the most famous annual musical events from around the world – the Vienna New Year’s Day Concert – which will be recorded live on 1 January 2002 and released by Philips in just under a week after the event.

The conductor who has been invited to lead the Vienna Philharmonic is none other than Philips’ time-honoured artist, Maestro Seiji Ozawa. His long association with Vienna through guest appearances at the Musikverein and at the Opera house, as well as his recent appointment as the new music director of the Vienna State Opera, makes him an exciting and appropriate choice for this major event in the calendar of the "capital of classical music".

Set in the spectacular Golden Hall of the Musikverein, Seiji Ozawa and the Vienna Philharmonic will bring the traditional music of the Strauss dynasty to life as they perform the Waltzes, Polkas, Marches and Gallops from Vienna’s most beloved family. Although the final concert repertoire is always a well kept secret, it will certainly be the usual mix of familiar favourites such as The Blue Danube, the overture to Die Fledermaus and the Waltz Kunstlerleben (Artists life), as well as a few surprises. Indeed, the lasting musical partnership between Maestro Ozawa and Vienna Philharmonic promises to result in a uniquely fresh interpretation of the traditional and much loved repertoire.

When Clemens Krauss decided to hold a concert in honour of Johann Strauss in 1939, little did he know then that it would soon become a famous annual feature of the holiday season and an important aspect of Austria’s cultural identity. Since then, the first day of each year has been heralded by the glorious sound of the Vienna Philharmonic (apart from 1945 when it was cancelled due to the final upheavals of World War II), lead by a legacy of conductor greats such as Willi Boskovsky, Lorin Maazal, Carlos Kleiber, Herbert Von Karajan, Claudio Abbado, Riccardo Muti and Zubin Mehta.

As a concert that is steeped in tradition, tickets to the event are notoriously difficult to obtain as most seats are kept tightly within Austrian family circles, passed down from generation to generation. However, in more recent times, this has not stopped the music being enjoyed by others around the world - the New Year’s Day concert has become the largest live event broadcast, reaching over 65 countries to an audience of over 1.2billion people. For those who cannot get tickets, the annual recordings of the Neujahrskonzert have always been enormously popular (last year’s recording reached #1 spot in the Austrian Pop charts). The Golden Hall of the Musikverein is renowned for its outstanding acoustics which have been admired and copied throughout the world. Built in 1870, the architectural innovation of the hollow space beneath the hall acts like a violin’s soundboard, giving the perfect acoustic for the award winning orchestra, whose distinctive period sound has become internationally recognised.

Philips recording engineers will work night and day in order to have the recording of the New Year’s Day Concert 2002 ready for release on January 7^th. A first for Seiji Ozawa, this new recording, joins the Decca Music Group catalogue alongside the legendary Decca release of Willy Boskovsky’s New Year’s Day Concert of 1979 – Decca’s first digital recording – and Riccardo Muti’s 1993 New Year’s Day Concert on Philips.

Meret Becker - Fragiles

To Meret, endearingly eccentric behaviour like this is no cause for the usual feelings of pity. Rather, she sees in it the power of the imagination, the childlike spirit that lives on inside an ageing body and the way in which people are so serious in the pursuit of their personal fantasies. Her capacity for empathy allows her to get inside the person who acts and feels in unusual ways. The first question Meret always asks herself is "How does it feel?" The song Unreal is a brief but poetic visit to a world of illusion normally inaccessible to the outside world.

Fragiles is released in Germany and Austria this month. For more information about this album, see our new album feature here

Russell Watson - Encore * UK only

And that is a concise definition. When you consider that one and a half million people in the world have already bought his first album (‘The Voice’), the fastest-selling classical debut album of all time and he has been number one in four countries, gone double platinum in his own and been invited to play before the Queen, Pope John Paul II and the Chinese government this year (having already played in front of George W. Bush and, famously, at Wembley more times than even his beloved Manchester United).

For Encore he has chosen his trademark blend of operatic arias such as Puccini’s Che Gelida Manina and Verdi’s Celeste Aida and spectacular duets with artists as diverse as Spice Girl Melanie C and MC Harvey (on a dramatic reworking of Bohemian Rhapsody) Lionel Ritchie (Magic of Love) and Lulu (The Prayer). Elsewhere in the mix are Volare, O Sole Mio and Pelagia’s Song from the Hollywood blockbuster Captain Corelli’s Mandolin. There is also Where My Heart Will Take Me which is the new Star Trek soundtrack and the first one to ever feature a vocalist.

"I’m so proud of this album," explains Russell. "It shows my development as an artist and has permitted me to work with the most fabulous artists. We have tried to be a little bit different but there is something for everybody in here, I just hope people like it." There’s not much doubt about that. Encore indeed.

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