The Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra, San Francisco Symphony, and West-Eastern Divan Orchestra are among the orchestras with recording news. The Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra has received a three-year, $200,000 grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to preserve 400 recordings of live concerts made by the SPCO for Minnesota Public Radio since 1969. Several of the recordings are considered historically important but vulnerable because of the materials used for audio recordings at the time. The San Francisco Symphony will release a limited-edition vinyl 22-LP box set of their Mahler Recording Project on SFS Media. The $749 set will include a hardbound book with liner notes, bios, and texts in three languages, and a bonus 45rpm recording of a previously unreleased performance of the piano version of the Rückert-Lieder, with mezzo-soprano Susan Graham and Michael Tilson Thomas on piano. Daniel Barenboim has signed a recording agreement with Deutsche Grammophon and Decca Classics. Among the planned recordings are an all-Chopin recording in early 2011 featuring Barenboim on piano with the Berlin Staatskapelle, led by Andris Nelsons; and later in 2011 a recording with the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra, featuring Tchaikovsky’s “Pathétique” Symphony and Schoenberg’s Variations for Orchestra. Barenboim co-founded the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra in 1999 with Palestinian-born writer and Columbia University professor Edward Said; the orchestra’s young musicians are from Egypt, Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, Tunisia, and Israel.
Posted November 12, 2010
