Orange Mountain Music presents this new limited edition 11 disc boxed set - The Symphonies by Philip Glass. This collection features conductor Dennis Russell Davies who has arranged the commission of nine of ten Glass symphonies, leading the orchestras over which he has presided during the past 15 years including the Bruckner Orchester Linz, Vienna Radio Symphony Orchestra, Sinfonieorchester Basel, and the Stuttgart Chamber Orchestra. This collection is the fruit of a 20 year collaboration between Glass and Davies and showcases a wide variety within this surprising body of work by Glass.

This is an enchanting CD, every item a sheer delight. Margaret Leng Tan worked with Cage in the last decade of his life and her earlier recordings (1/92; 7/95) show a special sympathy for the magical world of Cage's keyboard music. The second of her New Albion CDs included the piano solo version of The Seasons, and Cage was honest enough to admit to her that he had help from Virgil Thomson and Lou Harrison in making the orchestral version recorded here. The result is recognisably Cage at his most poetic, evoking each of the four seasons in lovely changing colours. There are two realisations of one of the last of what are called Cage's 'Number Pieces', Seventy-Four, written specially for the American Composers Orchestra a few months before his death in 1992. Several hearings have confirmed for me that this seamless garment of sustained sound in two overlapping parts is an immensely moving document from a unique human being at the very end of his life.

This beautifully programmed CD presents three settings for viola and orchestra and a more eloquent statement about the beauty of the viola as an instrument would be hard to imagine (except for perhaps including Vaughan Williams' 'Flos Campi'). The viola finds that middle voice between violin and cello, a rich tone with a built in quality of mournfulness. That quality has inspired the works on this recording and the result is some of the more wistful music ever written. Dennis Russell Davies conducts the Stuttgart Chamber Orchestra with the superb violist Kim Kashkashian.

This powerful record brings together two of the most seminal works for viola and orchestra of the twentieth century. Although these pieces are as different as they are similar, together they form a distinct balance of sentiment and execution.

The third in the Glass’ trilogy of operas about men who changed the world in which they lived through the power of their ideas, “Akhnaten”‘s subject is religion. The Pharaoh Akhnaten was the first monotheist in recorded story, and his substitution of a one-god religion for the multi-god worship in use when he came to power was responsible for his violent overthrow. The opera describes the rise, reign, and fall of Akhnaten in a series of tableaus. Libretto (Egyptian, Arcadian, Hebrew, and language of the audience) by the composer in association with Shalom Goldman, Robert Israel and Richard Riddell. Vocal text drawn from original sources by Shalom Goldman.

Georgian composer Giya Kancheli's music ranges from brash to deeply personal. His scores explore dynamic and rhythmic extremes, and almost seem to be a soundtrack for angular, rhapsodic dreams. At times the orchestra swells to a heavy Russian march complete with bells and drums, and at other times there is near silence. The two works presented on this CD are enigmatic, yet one can sense that the materials are steeped in history, memory and drama.

Cellist Matt Haimovitz, the MDR Leipzig Radio Symphony Orchestra and its chief conductor Dennis Russell Davies present the first commercial recording of Ukrainian unsung composer Thomas de Hartmann’s cello concerto. De Hartmann was an important compositional voice in his own time, connected to the greatest musicians and artists of his era, but has sunk into oblivion after his death in 1956.

Symphony No.12 "Lodger" represents the conclusion of a thirty year artistic collaboration for Philip Glass using elements of music and texts by David Bowie and Brian Eno. It premiered in January 2019 with vocalist Angélique Kidjo, organist James McVinnie and John Adams conducting the Los Angeles Philharmonic. Philip Glass began his path as a composer of symphonies in 1992 at age of 55 with "Low Symphony" based on music by Bowie and Eno. It was followed in 1995 by Symphony No.4 "Heroes" also based solely on the music of Bowie and Eno. Over two decades later, after Bowie's death in 2016, Glass returned to the idea of concluding the trilogy by approaching the album Lodger as a symphonic subject. This world-premiere recording from Filharmonie Brno and conductor Dennis Russell Davies features Angélique Kidjo and organist Christian Schmitt.

If one considers that this 2005 CD presents music written in the early to middle twentieth century, and the latest of these is a "recomposition" of three Renaissance madrigals, then it seems a most peculiar offering in ECM's New Series line – certainly important for anyone interested in modern music but decidedly not the cutting-edge fare this label usually delivers.

Philip Glass' 1987 album Songs from the Trilogy is made up of brief selections from his three portrait operas, Einstein on the Beach (1976), Satyagraha (1980), and Akhnaten (1983). It gives a good idea of what the music from the operas sounds like, but at the same time it misrepresents what the music is actually about. In developing his "music with repetitive structures" (the description he preferred over "minimalism"), Glass was creating a new kind of experience, one in which the traditional temporal expectations of a piece of music are overturned, where changes happen incrementally and very slowly over a long (sometimes a very long) span of time.

After his immigration to the west in 1991, Giya Kancheli abandoned the expansive, symphonic approach he had cultivated during his years in Georgia, and opted instead to compose music for smaller, more manageable ensembles. The works on this ECM New Series disc reflect Kancheli's changed course and his simplified, if still wide-ranging, palette. Diplipito is a cryptic term, coined by poet Joseph Brodsky to mean "my work of silence, my mute creation," and Kancheli uses it to suggest a neutral state between expression and meaninglessness, implied in the singer's indistinguishable words and the cello's vaguely articulated lines.

Ritual is something of an anomaly in the Keith Jarrett archive. It’s a solo album, as many of his best are, only this time it is pianist, conductor, and frequent collaborator Dennis Russell Davies at the keys playing a work penned entirely by Jarrett. The hallmarks of a Jarrett piano recital are all there—the rolling ostinatos, dense arpeggios, and profound doublings—yet are valenced differently under the rubric of “composition.” In this context, we get a sense of “once removed-ness” that might not present itself under improvisational circumstances. The piece’s modest 32 minutes are divided into two immodest parts. From the opening groundswell we get not only dense pockets of energy, but also nodes of emptiness.