Updates from the world's leading classical music label
The Creatures of Prometheus was Beethoven’s only full-length ballet score. The work premiered in March 1801 and the composer’s own version for piano solo was published later the same year. The work relates the story from Greek mythology of Prometheus, a lofty spirit who endeavoured to lift human beings from a state of ignorance into Read More …
Raymond Bisha and composer Derek Bermel discuss the latter’s Migrations, a 3-work programme that observes the universal phenomenon of human transit through an eclectic mix of styles: Migration series depicts the movement of African Americans from the south to the north of the United States in search of a better life during the first half of the 20th Read More …
As Naxos reaches Vol. 19 of its 23-volume edition of the music of John Philip Sousa, Raymond Bisha talks with the musical director of the project, Keith Brion, a world authority on Sousa’s music, who conducts throughout.
For those unfamiliar with the name of Nikolay Yakovlevich Myaskovsky, Raymond Bisha’s podcast presents the composer’s calling card as the ‘father of the Soviet symphony’. Having lived from 1881 to 1950, Myaskovsky spent all his life under the restrictive influence of Joseph Stalin, yet managed to produce 27 symphonies that preserved his individual voice. This Read More …
There are scintillating sounds aplenty in our new release of orchestral works by Dmitry Kabalevsky (1904-1987). Raymond Bisha introduces a programme of two overtures and a pair of symphonies by the Russian composer who endeavoured to position himself as both a progressive and a conservative during his country’s difficult Soviet era. The performances are by Read More …
Complementing the artist line-up of Giancarlo Guerrero and the Nashville Symphony on this recording are the Violins of Hope, a poignant collection of restored instruments that survived the Holocaust. Jonathan Leshnoff wrote his Symphony No. 4 with this unique set of orchestral voices in mind; Raymond Bisha introduces the performance and the background to its Read More …
Manuel de Falla is renowned as the greatest Spanish composer of the early 20th century, whose genius rested in part on his ability to meld diverse stylistic, folk or literary influences into distinctive new musical languages, forging masterworks that would ultimately become cultural emblems of his homeland. Raymond Bisha presents a new release of a Read More …
Yvar-Emilian Mikhashoff (1941–1993) was an American pianist who collaborated with the publishing house Quadrivium Press to commission composers from all over the world to write piano pieces based on the tango dance form. An intriguing selection of those 100-plus commissions are performed on this Grand Piano release by Hanna Shybayeva, the works’ eclecticism reflected in Read More …
Berlioz left us a number of Shakespeare-inspired works, chief among them his masterpiece Roméo et Juliette. The work took a decade to complete and is cast in an innovative form, a kind of ‘super-symphony’ that incorporates elements of symphony, opera and oratorio. Raymond Bisha introduces this new recording by Leonard Slatkin and the Orchestre National Read More …
Raymond Bisha presents a pair of vividly contrasting ballet scores by Aaron Copland, superbly performed by Leonard Slatkin and the Detroit Symphony Orchestra. Grohg immediately suggested itself as the basis for a ballet after Copland attended a screening of Nosferatu, the popular German silent horror film, in 1922; the story-line of a vampire magician able Read More …
