The Philharmonie Südwestfalen and its chief conductor, Nabil Shehata, offer us repertoire rarities of the highest artistic quality and one of the milestones of the repertoire. On the orchestra's second recording with GENUIN, the agile North Rhine-Westphalian state orchestra presents works by Antonín Dvořák on a double CD. In addition to the “Symphony
From the New World”, the album includes the early, lush 3rd Symphony of the Bohemian master and two of his late symphonic poems: “The Noon Witch” and “The Water Goblin”. A fascinating cross-section of Dvořák's work, from his Richard Wagner-influenced beginnings to maturity.

In its new GENUIN CD "Die Weihe des Hauses" (The Consecration of the House), the Philharmonie Südwestfalen / Landesorchester NRW presents the entire diversity of a modern symphony orchestra. The occasion for this CD is the orchestra's move to its new domicile, the Haus der Musik in Siegen. Chief conductor Nabil Shehata chose orchestral music from the beginning of the 19th century to the present day for this production, making full use of his orchestra's strengths: Beethoven's overture to "The Consecration of the House", with its almost baroque sonority, Tchaikovsky's passionate and virtuosic 5th Symphony, and Andres Reukauf's lively and playful "Südwestfalen-Fanfare" (South Westphalia Fanfare) span a wide range of the repertoire that the powerful state orchestra offers its audience.

The music of Mieczys?aw Weinberg continues to be issued, and continues to impress. Like his British counterpart, York Bowen, Weinberg was a composer trapped in time and place, and it is good that their very different musics are now coming to the fore with such regularity. One of the wonderful things about this disc, aside from the committed, intense playing of the instrumentalists, is the sound: crisp and clear, with only a very little reverb, which brings the sound of the instruments into sharp focus and makes the listener pay attention to the music.

The year 2021 marks the centenary of the death of Camille Saint-Saëns, the French pianist, organist, critic and great Romantic composer. The cellist Astrig Siranossian, whose tribute album to Nadia Boulanger (Dear Mademoiselle, ALPHA635) recently attracted considerable attention, plays the first of his two cello concertos, composed in 1872, notable for the fact that it comprises a single movement in three sections, and for the thunderous irruption of the cello right at the start. She is accompanied by the Philharmonie Südwestfalen and its conductor Nabil Shehata, who is also an eminent double bass player – the principal of the Berlin Philharmonic in the 2000s – and deeply committed to Daniel Barenboim’s West-Eastern Divan Orchestra, of which Astrig is also a member. The tribute continues with Saint-Saëns’s Symphony no.1 (one of five he wrote), composed when he was only eighteen. The famous Bacchanale, an oriental-flavoured dance from Act Three of his opera Samson et Dalila, completes the programme.