In this recital, Véronique Gens and Hervé Niquet bring back to life a neglected aspect of France’s Romantic heritage: songs with orchestral accompaniment. Aside from a few pieces by Debussy and Duparc, and Berlioz’s famous Nuits d’été, orchestral mélodies form a virtually forgotten continent. In collaboration with the specialists of the Palazzetto Bru Zane, Alpha Classics now revisits these musical landscapes, taking us from Brittany (Hahn) to Persia, whose beauties Fauré and Saint-Saëns exalt in very different ways. Mélodies by Chausson, Gounod and Dubois and rarely heard instrumental pieces by Massenet, Fauré and Fernand de La Tombelle round out the journey with their musical reveries.

Puccini’s purely instrumental compositions, whether for orchestra or in the field of chamber music, were almost all written while he was still a student at the Milan Conservatory from 1880 to 1883. These works reflect the musical spirit of the time that shaped the young composer: the melodic influences of his teacher Amilcare Ponchielli and also the impressions left on him by the music of Richard Wagner. At the same time, however, these pieces already point ahead to Puccini the opera composer. It seems only logical, therefore, that many of the themes echoed in them subsequently reappeared in his stage works and became much more famous there than in their original form.

When the Berliner “Funk-Stunde” (“Radio Hour”) went out on the air on October 29, 1923, heralding the start of German radio, the first piece of music to be broadcast live was Fritz Kreisler’s Andantino in the Style of Martini. The fact that the era of the new mass medium began with an imitation of an old musical style is not without a certain irony – and reveals how little attention had been paid to the problem of music on the radio. It was indeed to be a further five years before the radio stations commissioned the first compositions for the medium. Here, under the heading of “generic radio music”, the following genres were defined: “radio suite, musical radio play, radio cantata, radio opera and symphonic light music”. Modern composers such as Paul Hindemith, Ernst Toch and Kurt Weill were all commissioned, along with light entertainment composers such as Edmund Nick, Mischa Spoliansky and Eduard Künneke.

Ivan Repušić made his debut as principal conductor of the Munich Radio Orchestra in September 2017 with Giuseppe Verdi's "Luisa Miller". It was followed by "I due Foscari" in October 2018 and "Attila" in October 2019 (the complete recordings have already been released by BR-KLASSIK on CD 900323, 900328 and 900330). His successful cycle of early masterpieces by the Italian opera composer continues with the recent concert performance on April 23, 2023 of Verdi's stage work "I Lombardi" – also at the Prinzregententheater in Munich.

29 October 1923 was a date steeped in history. In the middle of a year of political and economic crises, the age of public radio in Germany was ushered in with the first broadcast of the "Berliner Funkstunde" (Berlin Radio Hour) from the attic of an office building on Potsdamer Platz. Radio offered entirely new possibilities for the production and reception of music. The two compositions on this CD not only benefited from these developments but also played an active role in shaping them.

Time and again, composers – well-known and lesser-known – have arranged Franz Schubert's piano songs for orchestra. These versions are not in any way intended to cast doubt upon the powerful quality of the originals, they merely place them in a different light, and/or attempt to make them easier to perform on a larger scale – when an art song cannot be performed in an intimate salon or chamber music hall, it can also make an impact in a large concert hall. Baritone Benjamin Appl has compiled nineteen such arrangements from the 19th and 20th centuries for this new CD from BR-KLASSIK. The Münchner Rundfunkorchester, conducted by Oscar Jockel, provides accompaniment that is subtle and in keeping with the work.

'It would be difficult to find a simpler and more poignant subject', Massenet remarked during the composition of Ariane, a vast score in five acts premiered at the Paris Opera in October 1906. The libretto by Catulle Mendes is part ancient drama, part symbolist poem, and sets Phaedra and Ariadne, two sisters in love with Theseus, in violent conflict with each other. This epic work does not shrink from relating the combat against the Minotaur, from showing a ship tossed by the raging billows, nor even from transporting the audience to the Underworld where Persephone reigns.

BR-KLASSIK presents the live recording of a concert performance of Hindemith's opera "Cardillac" from the Prinzregententheater in Munich on October 13, 2013, in memory of the great conductor Stefan Soltész. Soltész died unexpectedly on July 22, 2022 - exactly one year ago - after collapsing while conducting Richard Strauss' "Die schweigsame Frau" at the Munich National Theatre.

Time flows and stands still in this contemplative music that sounds old and new and yet neither old nor new, naive art and higher mathematics, a child‘s game, a glass bead game, like first steps and last words – all rolled into one. The compositions that Arvo Pärt has been writing for almost half a century defy any labelling or ideology. In his anachronistic art, the Estonian composer – who emigrated from the Soviet Union with his family in 1980 and found a refuge in (West) Berlin – chose the path of renunciation, reduction, and voluntary poverty.