The Waldbühne in Berlin, one of the most appealing outdoor amphitheatres on the European continent, is the home of the Berliner Philharmoniker’s summer concerts. With over 20.000 in attendance, they are some of the most popular classical music concerts in the world. In 2015 the Berliner Philharmoniker surrounded themselves with plenty of celebrities, including not only conductor Sir Simon Rattle, but also many figures from film history: Indiana Jones, Robin Hood, Ben Hur and many more. They were all brought to life musically when the orchestra performed some of Hollywood’s most famous film music. With film music from Star Wars, Indiana Jones, E.T. composed by John Williams. Live from the Waldbühne Berlin, 2015.

Edgar Moreau salutes his family heritage and highlights landmarks in his artistic development with Transmission – music by Bloch, Korngold, Bruch and Ravel, recorded with the Lucerne Symphony Orchestra and its chief conductor Michael Sanderling. Moreau’s mother is of Polish-Jewish extraction and all five works on the album have a connection with Jewish culture. The largest work on the programme is Bloch’s Schelomo, which Moreau describes as “a majestic meeting of concerto and symphony, rich and colourful in its orchestration and full of contrasts”.

This album of popular short pieces provides a memento of the first French lockdown in 2020: Renaud Capuçon and pianist Guillaume Bellom performed on social media each day, raising the spirits of their fans. Ideal for streaming, the collection includes music by Enrico Morricone, Charlie Chaplin, Carlos Gardel, Tchaikovsky, Rachmaninov and Schumann.

Hot on the heels of their acclaimed recording of Britten’s Peter Grimes, Stuart Skelton and Edward Gardner join forces with Christine Rice and the BBC Symphony Orchestra for this fascinating programme of early twentieth-century works. Schoenberg’s Verklärte Nacht needs no introduction, but far rarer is Oscar Fried’s contemporaneous setting of the same poem. Composed in 1901 for soloists and orchestra, Fried’s version is a true setting of (as opposed to Schoenberg’s reflection on) the text by Richard Dehmel. Lehár wrote Fieber in 1915 as the closing part of his song cycle Aus eiserner Zeit – he then made the orchestral setting a year later. Korngold’s Lieder des Abschieds (Songs of Farewell) date from the early 1920s, whilst he was still in Vienna, and shortly after he had completed the opera Die tote Stadt. Setting poetry by Christina Rossetti, Edith Ronsperger, and Ernst Lothar, the cycle is a poignant reflection on the Great War.

Youthful piano quintets from Korngold the arch-Romantic and Bartók in his pre-modernist vein make a fascinating comparison. This album offers a snapshot of early twentieth-century Austro-Hungarian chamber music as represented by two of its most individual voices.

Although Korngold’s ‘complete works for violin and piano’ make up a reasonably full disc, it is only fair to point out that the Violin Sonata is the single work that is not an arrangement from one of his other pieces. Yet this Sonata, written at the age of 15 for Carl Flesch and Artur Schnabel no less, is a fine example of his early style, with its echoes of Zemlinsky and early Schoenberg. The young Dutch violinist Sonja van Beek and German pianist Andreas Frölich negotiate its challenges with ease: as in Rachmaninoff’s Cello Sonata, the pianist has as tough a role as the melody instrument. Much Ado about Nothing is one of several arrangements of a suite of four movements derived from incidental music to Shakespeare’s play written in 1918, performed here with affection and a silken suavity. The remainder of the repertoire is made up of arrangements of Korngold lollipops, hit numbers from his operas, such as the unforgettable ‘Marietta’s Lied’ from Die tote Stadt, arranged by the composer as salon pieces and popularised by Kreisler and his ilk. Here, the almost vocal qualities of van Beek’s tone come into their own. An essential disc for the Korngold addict.

This sparkling suite for violin and piano came into being when the composer had to adapt his incidental score for a production of Shakespeare's play to the impending absence of the chamber orchestral. The result is a brilliant piece for violin and piano, which the composer quickly released in a four-movement version. There are other recordings of the chamber orchestra suite in five-movements that duplicate only three of the movements of this version. Violinist Gil Shaham and pianist André Previn are ideal partners in this brilliant performance. The four movements allow Shaham to show four sides of his violinist's personality: He skips and plays in carefree fashion in the opening movement, indulges in the grotesquery and parody of the second, gets to play the romantic in the garden scene of the third movement, and dazzles with virtuosity in the final hornpipe. Previn's part is more than mere accompaniment; the piano often has a large part of the mood of the music and his contribution is, to use a word already employed here, ideal.

Andrew Haveron and John Wilson deliver a fresh and intensely idiomatic reading of Korngolds Violin Concerto, coupled with the formidable String Sextet. One of the most sought-after violinists of his generation and a laureate of some of the most prestigious international violin competitions, Andrew Haveron studied in London at the Purcell School and the Royal College of Music. As a soloist, he has collaborated with conductors such as Jií Blohlávek, Sir Colin Davis, Sir Roger Norrington, David Robertson, Stanisaw Skrowaczewski, and John Wilson, performing a broad range of well-known and less familiar concertos with many of the finest orchestras in the UK. In 1999 he was appointed first violinist of the internationally acclaimed Brodsky Quartet.

The star of this consistently first-rate disc of music by Korngold is violinist Philippe Quint, whose focused tone, incisive intonation, athletic technique, and expressive phrasing ideally suit the composer's supremely Romantic Violin Concerto. This strong-willed account is deeply emotional and immensely appealing; Quint's opening Moderato is noble, his central Andante amorous, and his concluding Allegro assai vivace exuberant. Carlos Miguel Prieto leads the Orquesta Sinfónica de Minería in a dynamic reading that sounds less like an accompaniment and more like a partnership of equals. In the purely orchestral Overture to a Drama and Concert Suite from Much Ado About Nothing, Prieto and the Mexican orchestra turn in a pair of tremendous performances.

After a decade of success in Hollywood, Erich Korngold returned to concert music during the last decade of his life. The works he wrote did not fit the heady postwar atmosphere, when the avant-garde, strengthened by its distance from the aesthetics of Hitler, ruled the scene. However, more recently the Symphony in F sharp major has had its champions, Andre Previn among them, and it's showing signs of reaching everyday-repertory status. This is all to the good, for the work is enormously enjoyable. Unlike other composers who adopted a kind of diglossia between their concert works and their film scores, Korngold devises an effective fusion where passages that could have come out of Captain Blood are built into larger structures. Sample the first movement.

The Symphony receives a particularly warm and beautiful interpretation. DePreist has a sympathetic feeling for contrasts of textures; the tempi are excellently judged and atmospheres powerful, with a vigorous sense of energy, tension and release. The Sea Hawk, though, is allowed to wallow. Particular poignancy is added through the presence of Korngold’s granddaughter Kathrin as a violinist member of the orchestra.