This album by violinist Christian Tetzlaff and cellist Tanja Tetzlaff together with the Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester Berlin conducted by Paavo Järvi, is dedicated in the memory of their longtime artistic partner, pianist Lars Vogt (1970–2022). At the heart of this album is Brahms, one of Lars Vogt’s favourite composers, and his late orchestral masterpiece, the Double Concerto. Brahms himself had admired one of Viotti’s violin concertos so much that he included material from the Violin Concerto no.22 into his work. With Christian Tetzlaff’s recording of the Violin Concerto, this album finally brings these two works together. Also included is Dvořák’s beautiful Silent Woods for cello and orchestra, a work by another composer that was very close to Lars Vogt’s heart.

This CD contains selected themes from five of Chaplins brilliant films. The Kid (1921), The Gold Rush (1925), The Circus (1928), City Lights (1931) and Modern Times (1936). If you love the music from these films then you will love this album. Carl Davis has been very sensitive when rerecording the original scores. The music sounds amazing and he has remained true to Chaplins own styles and tempo's. The thing that will strike you more than anything is how amazing these scores really are in Stereo! They really do sound very good indeed. It also fully demonstrates just how good a composer Chaplin really was, and his talent for marrying music to film. As music it is beautiful from the harshness of "Gold Rush" to the haunting "Modern Times" and not forgetting the swinging "City Lights". Magical stuff! 5 out of 5, 10 out of 10 etc… But if you are planning on listening to this 80 minute album from beginning to end, you'd better make sure you have some Chaplin films close to hand because you WILL want to watch them all again. Nostalgia at its very best.

In this new concerto album one of the greatest violinist of his generation, Christian Tetzlaff, offers profound interpretations of two deeply dramatic and lyrical concertos - those of Brahms and Berg - together with the Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester Berlin conducted by Robin Ticciati.

This marks the first release with Robin Ticciati leading the Deutsches Symphonie Orchester Berlin, and it makes the requisite splash. There's a world premiere: even if you're not on board with the trend of enlarging the repertory through arrangements of works that are perfectly good in their original form, you will likely be seduced by mezzo-soprano Magdalena Kozená's ravishing reading of Debussy's voice-and-piano Ariettes oubliées, inventively arranged by Brett Dean. There's a little-known work: the opening one, Fauré's Prelude to Pénélope (a sparsely performed opera, with a slightly less sparsely performed prelude) is a lush and beautifully controlled arc. Controlled and detailed are two words that come to mind for Ticciati's interpretation of La mer, the warhorse work on the program; it may seem a bit deliberate, but there are many hues in his performance. The two Debussy works are balanced by two of Fauré's: the fourth work is the suite from Fauré's incidental music to Pélleas et Mélisande (in Charles Koechlin's version), also deliberate and lush. Linn recorded the performance in Berlin's Jesus Christus Kirche, which allows the full spectrum of orchestral colors to come through. Worth the money for Kozená fans for her turn alone, and a fine French program for all.

I am not an automatic fan of composer-led recordings, even when the composer is as great a conductor as Leonard Bernstein. However, after living with this newcomer for a while, I have to confess that it doesn’t quite match that classic version, even though it does a few things even better. On the plus side, there’s Kent Nagano’s swift and perky direction of some of the music-theater numbers, such as “God Said”, “World Without End”, and in general all of the music in and around the Gloria. But this can be a two-edged sword: The mechanized Credo has less impact than it could; a very quick tempo at the opening of the Agnus Dei prevents the chorus from ever sounding really angry and demanding; and the calamitous Dona Nobis Pacem simply lacks the bluesy sleaze that Bernstein himself wrings out of it. A slower tempo also would have allowed the music’s many layers to register with greater clarity.

In this new concerto album one of the greatest violinist of his generation, Christian Tetzlaff, offers profound interpretations of two deeply dramatic and lyrical concertos – those of Brahms and Berg – together with the Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester Berlin conducted by Robin Ticciati.

Having won acclaim for his recent recordings of French repertoire, Robin Ticciati now turns to the music of Anton Bruckner. Ticciati is well suited to conducting Bruckner with an approach that is both "expansive and revelatory" (The Guardian). Having already performed this work with the Bergen Philharmonic and Vienna Symphony Orchestras, Ticciati returned to Berlin to continue his recording series with the Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester.

During his lifetime, Hugo Alfvén became known as one of Sweden’s principal composers of his time, with works that struck a chord with a wide audience. As a result of his popularity, a nationwide collection was held in celebration of his 70th birthday in 1942, with the proceeds used to build Alfvéngården, the composer’s home during his final years. Now, 80 years later, Elin Rombo and Peter Friis Johansson are releasing their tribute to Alfvén’s 150th anniversary, recorded at Alfvéngården using the composer’s own piano. Alfvén is primarily known for his orchestral music – including the ubiquitous Swedish Rhapsody No. 1 – and as a composer of choral music. As befits the setting, the focus of the present disc is on more intimate works, however – namely songs and piano pieces. Some of the pieces are closely related to the venue – Fyra låtar från Leksand (Four Tunes from Leksand) is a piano version of folk tunes collected from a local fiddler and Så tag mit hjerte (‘So take my heart’), Alfvén’s most frequently performed song, was composed there in 1946 as a present to his wife.

Verdi was on a war footing with the Catholic Church from a very early age. It is true that he was brought up to believe in God, as was usual in Italy at that time, and it is no less true that his first music teacher, Ferdinando Provesi, was the organist at the Church of San Bartolomeo in Busseto, but when the then sixteen-year-old composer applied for the post of church musician in the town in 1829, his application was rejected – not because his musical abilities were in any way deficient but because he was regarded as a protégé of Antonio Barezzi, a local businessman with a reputation for his anti-clerical views. He fared little better when he submitted his first sacred works – a Laudate pueri, a Qui tollis and two settings of the Tantum ergo – in the early 1830s, when the Church authorities complained that the music sounded “theatrical, lascivious, bellicose and indecorous” . In short, it was hardly calculated to foster a sense of piety and devotion.

It is not by chance that luminous textures and sensual orchestral colors are considered essential features of French music. Its history features great names renowned for their art of instrumentation and sensitive use of timbres, who include the composers of the cello concertos on this recording: Camille Saint-Saëns, whose instrumentation technique always combines color with transparency, Édouard Lalo, who was highly esteemed by Claude Debussy for the wealth of color in his works, and Arthur Honegger, who painted striking soundscapes not only in his Cello Concerto but in his works without a large orchestra as well. Often it is the fine shadings and delicate transitions that characterize the tone colors of French music and are responsible for its delightful charm. Daniel Müller-Schott – Opus Klassik award winner 2019 – appealingly combines five works from the French sound kaleidoscope on his newest album with the DSO Berlin and Alexandre Bloch ‘Four Visions of France’.

Signum Records present an exciting new collaboration and a debut recording with Leeds International Piano Competition Winner (2015), Anna Tsybuleva, of music by Johannes Brahms together with the Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester Berlin, conducted by Ruth Reinhardt.

Ukrainian tenor Dmytro Popov delivers a magnificent recital of operatic arias, including music he has performed to great acclaim in opera houses around the world. Dmytro Popov was the youngest opera artist to be awarded the title of ‘Honoured Artist of Ukraine’ in 2003, and has since dazzled audiences and critics with roles including Rodolfo in Puccini’s La bohème at the Royal Opera House, Cavaradossi in Tosca with Deutsche Oper Berlin, and Vaudémont in Tchaikovsky’s Iolanta with Teatro Real Madrid.

German pianist Martin Helmchen continues his journey through Beethoven’s piano concertos with the Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester and Andrew Manze. In the Third Concerto, published in 1804, Beethoven seems to be moving away from the Mozartian model and inaugurates his ‘middle period’, using the minor mode to depict a distress and heartache that are certainly not unconnected with the famous ‘Heiligenstadt Testament’, which he wrote in 1802 to record his growing deafness. Martin Helmchen is joined by two partners with whom he performs a great deal of chamber music - violinist Antje Weithaas and cellist Marie- Elisabeth Hecker - to record the Triple Concerto, also written during the composer’s so-called ‘heroic’ period.