This is the biggest piece of music that ever gets performed with any regularity. Anyone who avoids Schönberg because his name is synonymous with that nasty, atonal stuff need have no fear. This is a ripely romantic score with big tunes and cinematic orchestration. The story is simple. King Waldemar of Gurre is fooling around with Tove. The queen finds out and has her poisoned. The king curses God, and is condemned to ride on a ghostly hunt throughout all eternity, until the arrival of dawn signals an end to the nightly horror. This performance–which happily has been reissued at bargain price–has been the choice since the day it was released, both for interpretation and for recording. Magnificent doesn't begin to describe it.

The newest addition to Andris Nelsons and the Boston Symphony Orchestra's award-winning survey of Shostakovich's orchestral works takes on symphonies from the opposite ends of the composer's life. Shostakovich's first symphony, composed when he was only 19, announced his presence to the world, while his 15th seemingly grapples with his impending mortality. The Symphony No. 1 in F minor, Op. 10, was written as a graduation piece for his composition class at the Leningrad Conservatory. The composer's youth and the influences of Stravinsky and Prokofiev are evident in the work, but there are plenty of allusions to his later style. Slightly on the slower side overall, the emotion and forward motion of the music is not lost. The Symphony No. 15 in A major, Op. 141, written a few years before the composer's death, though not programmatic, seems to present a look at the cycle of life.

Tōru Takemitsu’s Quatrain and A Flock Descends into the Pentagonal Garden exemplify his synthesis of Western avant-garde techniques and Japanese aesthetics. In Quatrain, scored for clarinet, violin, cello, piano, and orchestra, Takemitsu evokes the Japanese concept of ma—the space between things—through fluid shifts of timbre and atmosphere. He likened the work to an emaki, a picture scroll unfolding scene by scene, where each musical idea is independent yet interwoven.

Mika Stoltzman is the world’s leading marimba virtuosa whose imaginative, genre-bending collaborations have cemented her unique place in the music world.

“Ozawa’s hell-for-leather élan comes as close to as criminally graphic a representation of ritual murder in music as you are likely to hear.” — MusicWeb International (on Seiji Ozawa’s recording of Le sacre de printemps with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, 1968). The legendary Stravinsky recordings of Seiji Ozawa and the Chicago Symphony Orchestra are brought back to life in this new pressing from RCA.

Andris Nelsons and the Boston Symphony Orchestra announce their upcoming album with star pianist Yuja Wang performing Shostakovich’s two piano concertos. The recordings are part of Nelsons' and the BSO’s award-winning decade-long Shostakovich project to mark the 50th anniversary of the composer’s death.

Celebrated violinist Anne-Sophie Mutter introduces a new concerto by her friend and frequent collaborator John Williams, with the legendary composer himself conducting the Boston Symphony Orchestra. Composed especially for Anne-Sophie Mutter, John Williams's Violin Concerto No. 2 is the culmination of several years of collaboration and friendship between two of the world's most celebrated musical artists.

This well recorded disc from 1985 delivers impressive readings of both of these works. Mullova takes a very individual view of these concertos and has the technical assurance to communicate her view with compelling certainty.
The Tchaikovsky concerto is played in the full uncut version that was written by the composer. This is now becoming more common but in 1985 was still unusual enough to warrant comment. By playing the notes as Tchaikovsky had intended Mullova signals a very serious intent which she carries out throughout these two concertos.

Seiji Ozawa had a fondness for more modern compositions; his efforts on this 1982 release showcase his versatility by recording one of the finest performances of The Four Seasons in history, and the standard by which many future recordings would come to be judged. With over 500,000 albums sold since its release, it’s no wonder that this recording would be chosen as one of the initial four vinyl releases by Craft Recordings. Pressed on 180-gram vinyl and pressed by Optimal in Germany.

Korean pianist Seong-Jin Cho releases the second album from his current Ravel project of the two piano concertos, celebrating the 150th anniversary of the composer’s birth (March 7). The album features the Concerto for the Left Hand, a notoriously difficult work that is notable for its dark sonorities, as well as the more lighthearted Concerto in G major that achieves an exquisite combination of jazz and the Classicism of Mozart and Saint-Saëns.

Andris Nelsons is the Music Director of the Boston Symphony Orchestra and in fall 2015 he was announced as Gewandhauskapellmeister of the Gewandhausorchester Leipzig, commencing in the 2017/18 season. With both appointments, and in leading a pioneering alliance between these two esteemed institutions, Andris Nelsons is firmly underlined as one of the most renowned and innovative conductors on the international scene today. The goal is a complete Shostakovich cycle on Deutsche Grammophon with the Boston Symphony Orchestra. This recording provides a kaleidoscope of Shostakovichs struggle with historical events and political pressures. The pre-war eclectic but accessible and popular 5th, in which he would seem to bow to political pressure, ensured his temporary rehabilitation. The beautiful but dark and gloomy mid-war 8th provoked yet again his fall from favor and instead of providing the political authorities with a triumphant post-war 9th Symphony, Shostakovich wrote a light Haydnesque work which would not be performed until after Stalins death. Selections from the Hamlet Suite, possibly Shostakovichs best film score, rounds out this 2 CD set.

The "Under Stalin's Shadow" subtitle of this release may be confusing inasmuch as the opening Passacaglia from the opera Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District dates from before the period when Stalin made Shostakovich's life a living hell, and the main attraction, the Symphony No. 10 in E minor, Op. 93, was finished ten months after Stalin's death. Actually the album is the first in a set of three; the others will cover the symphonies No. 5 through No. 9, all written during the period of Stalinist cultural control. But even here the theme is relevant: the pieces are linked by a dark mood that carries overtones (of a feminist sort in the case of the opera) of repression. And the Symphony No. 10 is decidedly some kind of turning point, with repeated (and finally triumphant) assertions of the D-S-C-H motif (D, E flat, C, B natural in the German system) that would appear frequently in the composer's later work.

The Boston Symphony Orchestra and their music director Andris Nelsons announce their upcoming album, on which they present their acclaimed Shostakovich symphony cycle to mark the 50th anniversary of the composer’s death in 1975.

There could be no better introduction to the sound of the Boston Symphony, in the repertoire in which it became most famous, than this French collection with Charles Munch. Sometimes wild and unpredictable in concert performances, Munch's conducting here is both visceral yet elegant, full of mystery when called for and unbridled in its passion at other times. 1962 Recordings.

Andris Nelsons and the BSO conclude their award-winning decade-long Shostakovich project by presenting their acclaimed Shostakovich symphony cycle. Benefiting from the superb audio quality achieved in the exceptional acoustic of Boston's symphony hall, Yo-Yo Ma gives inspired performances of the two cello concertos. The inventive first was written for another friend, Mstislav Rostropovich, a famously demanding piece that was an early landmark in Ma's own career. The far more introspective second was the composer's 60th-birthday present to himself.