Among the orchestras and musicians with new recordings are California’s Pacific Symphony and Philharmonia Baroque; the Boston Modern Orchestra Project; the Detroit Symphony Orchestra; the Kansas City Symphony; and Frank Almond, the concertmaster of the Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra. The Pacific Symphony and Music Director Carl St.Clair have released a Naxos CD of music commissioned from Michael Daugherty, including his Mount Rushmore, The Gospel According to Sister Aimee, and Radio City; featured performers include the Pacific Chorale and organist Paul Jacobs. The Philharmonia Baroque has released a recording on its own label of Beethoven Symphony Nos. 4 and 7, recorded live in 2009 and 2012 at the First Congregational Church in Berkeley, California under Music Director Nicholas McGegan. The latest recordings issued by the Boston Modern Orchestra Project are separate CDs of new music on its BMOP/sound label by Reza Vali and by Martin Boykan, led by Artistic Director Gil Rose. Vali’s recording, Toward That Endless Plain, explores Persian folk and Western art music, while Boykan’s Symphony for Orchestra follows “a day in the life” with four movements representing dawn, daylight, dusk, and night. The Detroit Symphony Orchestra has released a download-only set of Beethoven’s nine symphonies, led by Music Director Leonard Slatkin, on its own digital label, Live from Orchestra Hall. The Kansas City Symphony in Missouri has released a CD of Elgar’s Enigma Variations and Vaughan Williams’s The Wasps and Greensleeves, led by Music Director Michael Stern. The CD, on the Reference Recordings label, is the first to be recorded in Helzberg Hall in the new Kauffman Center for the Performing Arts in Kansas City. In Wisconsin, Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra Concertmaster Frank Almond and pianist William Wolfram recently released A Violin’s Life on AVIE Records, featuring works connected to the violin on which Almond performs, the 1715 “Lipinski” Stradivarius. Among the composers on the CD are Giuseppe Tartini, Julius Rüntgen, Karol Lipinski, and Robert Schumann. The recording was financed via a Kickstarter campaign from May to July 2012 that raised more than $33,000.
Posted May 9, 2013
