This Beethoven recording conducted by Daniel Harding is marked out mostly by its bristling, scintillating energy. Despite the brisk (but marvellous) "tempi", the interpretation here shows a great musical clarity alongside a subtlety of detail and beauty of sound. The fiery, apollonian character of these overtures is clearly stressed by this young conductor, and it is simply perfect! Take the "Leonore I" as an example… It (definitely) is the most thrilling recording I ever heard of this exciting work. Harding's personal choices of tempo and rubato seemed a natural part of the music onward flow. The entire set of overtures is remarkable for its consistency of interpretation! Forget Abbado, Barenboim or Gardiner - this is the definitive recording of Beethoven Overtures!

The Vienna Philharmonic Summer Night Concert 2021, conducted by Daniel Harding with Igor Levit as soloist, was recorded again this year by Sony Classical. The Summer Night Concert, which took place on June 18, 2021, is an outdoor concert held annually since 2008, following the "Concert for Europe" held from 2004 to 2007. The baroque park of Schönbrunn Palace provides an enchanting backdrop for the concert. Among the illustrious conductors who have conducted the Vienna Philharmonic's Summer Night Concert in recent years are Georges Prêtre, Daniel Barenboim, Franz Welser-Möst, Valery Gergiev, Lorin Maazel, Christoph Eschenbach, Zubin Mehta, Semyon Bychkov and Gustavo Dudamel.

The Summer Night Concert of the Vienna Philharmonic is the world's biggest annual classical open-air concert and will take place in the magical setting of the Schönbrunn Palace Baroque park in Vienna on June 18, 2021. The theme for this year is Fernweh and includes musical favorites from Bernstein, Verdi, Rachmaninov, Sibelius, Elgar, Debussy and Holst. It will also include many fantastic Summer Night Concert debuts: SNC debut by pianist Igor Levit & British conductor Daniel Harding.

Almost forty years separate Verklärte Nacht (Transfigured Night) from the Violin Concerto - the former still influenced by the idiom of Brahms and Wagner, the latter deriving from the richness of that later period when Schoenberg managed to combine a multiplicity of approaches within his twelve-note system. Between post-Romantic twilight and 'classical' rigor, Isabelle Faust and company offer us an extraordinarily lively interpretation of some of the most remarkable pages in twentieth-century musical literature.

Petibon has established herself as one of the most interesting and versatile sopranos of our day and has been widely acclaimed for her outstanding acting abilities that make her merge completely with whatever role she sings and represents on stage.

A violinist in a class of his own, Renaud Capuçon shows why he is 'Le Violon Roi'; (The Violin King) in this 3-CD collection. As the leading French violinist of his generation, Capucon records exclusively for Virgin Classics and has a rich discography. The set brings together not only some of his best and most popular performances as a soloist but as a collaborator.

Hyperion is delighted to present the world’s best-loved cello concerto performed by one of the world’s best-loved cellists: national treasure Steven Isserlis. Isserlis has waited 40 years to record this pinnacle of the repertoire, and here with his regular collaborators, the Mahler Chamber Orchestra and Daniel Harding, this long gestation has proved to be overwhelmingly fruitful. Isserlis writes of the concerto that ‘the power of its emotional journey, expressed with Dvorák’s characteristically folk-like simplicity and directness, offers an irresistible mix of the epic and the touchingly confessional’. The combination of emotional power and simplicity is also a feature of Isserlis’s playing, and part of what makes him such a consummate performer of this work.

For the second installment in his Mahler cycle for harmonia mundi, Daniel Harding revisits a symphony which clearly represents a turning point in the composer’s output. The years following Mahler’s early period (marked by Des Knaben Wunderhorn) saw the production of works of ever greater complexity and sardonicism, which show no trace of naïveté. Within a framework of utmost intricacy, the themes, musical gestures, and building blocks (for instance, the interval of a minor third which opens the Fifth Symphony’s famous Adagietto) trace a journey from darkness to light which culminates in the striking modernity of the finale.

This release on the Onyx Classics label has no right to be as good as it is. Pianist Maria-João Pires, 70 years old when the album appeared in 2014, has never been known as a Beethoven specialist. The Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra under Daniel Harding is a competent group, surely, but hardly on Europe's or even Scandinavia's A-list. The Beethoven Piano Concerto No. 3 in C minor, Op. 37, and Piano Concerto No. 4 in G major, Op. 58, hardly lack for varied and incisive interpretations. Yet there it is: this one delivers ideas that nobody else has offered before. In a nutshell, Pires makes the piano the quiet partner to a rather martial orchestra in these works.