Karina Canellakis offers the first fruit of her exclusive Pentatone collaboration with a recording of Bartók’s 4 Orchestral Pieces and Concerto for Orchestra, together with the Netherlands Radio Philharmonic Orchestra, of which she is the Chief Conductor. The 4 Orchestral Pieces have a strong affinity with the stage works Duke Bluebeard’s Castle and The Wooden Prince, conceived in the same period. The Concerto for Orchestra is one of Bartóks final works, full of folk tunes, and utterly colourful and virtuosic for all the instruments. As such, it’s an ideal piece to showcase the congeniality between the Netherlands Radio Philharmonic Orchestra and its star Chief Conductor.

After 2021’s critically acclaimed Echoes of Life, pianist Alice Sara Ott has now recorded a selection of works by Beethoven for her latest album. At the heart of Beethoven is Piano Concerto No. 1, Op. 15, in which she is joined by the Netherlands Radio Philharmonic Orchestra and its Chief Conductor Karina Canellakis. Ott and Canellakis were in fact approached by Apple Music to record this particular concerto, with the result that they and the orchestra became the stars of the Apple Music Classical app launch video earlier this year. The pianist then selected a series of solo works to complement the concerto performance, including “Für Elise” and the “Moonlight” Sonata. Beethoven is released digitally on 28 July – together with a “Für Elise” video – and physically on 29 September.

De Leeuw may have started out as a composer, but that aspect receded into the background in the 1970s. He became more and more a performer of music of the major composers our own era. In 1974, he seemed to give up composing altogether: the title of his compact, stormy orchestral work Abschied, from that year, says what needs to be said on that front.

How is it that music that is so precise and obviously well organised can at the same time move with unforced, almost improvisational fluidity? And how can it be that atonal music sounds so natural and accessible? It's because De Raaff's music is nature itself; geometrically and architecturally stylised music it may be, but no different to the way a tree puts out its branches or how a leaf forms its veins. No different to the cosmologic nature of constellations, wave patterns on water, the pictorial architecture of a murmuration of starlings or a shoal of fish. In De Raaff's work calculation and spontaneity merge into a single, monumental but never massive whole.

Fréderick Franssen: From among the enormous choice of horn repertoire available in the early stages of my study of the instrument, my interest was piqued by the very earliest horn music. The music from that era did and still does exert its magic on me due to the pure beauty of its clear and transparent sound world. One of my first finds on this quest of discovery through the Baroque period was a concerto by an unknown hand, which appears on this album and comes from a very special collection – the ‘Wenster’. The library at the University of Lund in Sweden contains one of the largest collections of horn music from the first half of the 18th century, under the name of ‘Wenster’. The manuscript contains 18 works, with virtually all of the composers having some sort of connection to the city of Dresden, and it may have been transcribed by a travelling horn player during a visit to that city. The six works on this recording are all taken from this collection.

Bernard Haitink was born and educated in Amsterdam. His conducting career began at the Netherlands Radio where in 1957 he became the Chief Conductor of the Radio Philharmonic Orchestra. The links between Bernard Haitink and the Radio Philharmonic Orchestra have withstood the test of time, even when his career was taking him all over the world. One fine example of this was Berlioz’s Damnation of Faust in 1998, later issued on CD (CC 72517). He returned on 15 June 2019, when he gave his very last concert in Amsterdam, with Bruckner Symphony no. 7, a work that has always been especilly dear to him.

All recordings featured on this album are live studio recordings made in 1971 and 1972 for radio broadcast in Holland. Written for the great cellist Rostropovich and considered one of the most difficult cello concertos, Prokofiev's Cello Concerto, Op. 58 is not often recorded and thus this FHR album is a welcome issue.