The most comprehensive Bruckner Symphonies cycle, including all available versions. “Since Beethoven, nothing has been written that even comes close!” The great conductor Arthur Nikisch made this remark to Bruckner’s former student, Joseph Schalk, while fellow conductor Hermann Levi described the piece as “the most significant symphonic work since Beethoven’s death.” Arthur Nikisch conducted the first performance in the Stadttheater, Leipzig, on 30 December 1884, with Bruckner in the audience. While the performance was not a total triumph, it brought a new and significant international recognition for the sixty-year-old composer. During Bruckner’s lifetime the Seventh, especially its Adagio, was his most popular symphony, and it remains among his most beloved and frequently performed works.

John Adams’ music has long since captured the admiration of listeners for its inimitable American qualities. City Noir was inspired by the cultural and social history of Los Angeles, with Adams calling it ‘an imaginary film score’ in its evocation of a terse, melodramatic and menace-drenched sound world. Fearful Symmetries exemplifies Adams’ steamroller motor rhythms, endlessly inventive in their shifts of timbre, texture and color. The album ends with a work dedicated to Marin Alsop, a capricious “Spider Dance” of memorable rhythmic drive.

It took Frank Martin a long time to heed his deep-seated inner calling to write a Requiem: 'What I have tried to express here is the clear will to accept death; to make peace with it.' The Requiem was composed in 1971/72, Martin utilizes the whole bandwidth of orchestral sound and explores all opportunities for interplay among the vocalists, as well. Leoš Janácek's setting of the Otcenáš, the Lord's Prayer, is not a conventionally religious work. The Czech composer was more interested in it's social aspects than any theological musings.

The story of the discovery and resurrection of Britten’s Double Concerto for Violin and Viola is one of those rare musicological moments that can capture the interest of even the casual music lover. Britten had started composing it as a very young man but never quite finished it, even though the work had progressed quite far. So, it was only after his death that the premiere took place, in 1997. Unlike that work, the Violin Concerto, Op. 15 found itself immediately thrust onto the world’s musical stage, its genesis having been rather straightforward, if hardly smooth. Britten had left Great Britain before the outbreak of World War II in Europe and so he composed it in Canada and the US.

The most comprehensive Bruckner Symphonies cycle, including all available versions. Capriccio’s Complete Bruckner Symphonies Edition includes all versions of the symphonies either published or to be published under the auspices of the Austrian National Library and the International Bruckner Society in the Neue Anton Bruckner Gesamtausgabe (The New Anton Bruckner Complete Edition). Bruckner’s Second Symphony is rarely heard in its 1877 version, and it has remained virtually unperformed in the 1872 original version. This is not because of any deficiency in Bruckner's earlier ideas compared with the later alterations. It’s mainly down to habit and convenience, since acquiring new parts and re-learning a score with many detailed differences requires significant extra effort and resources. That’s a pity, because it is well worth discovering the original rawness of Bruckner’s early masterpiece, something rarely heard since its creation, until now.

“I just heard your wonderful Sinfonietta: hope this is the beginning of your American success,” wrote Arnold Schönberg to Zemlinsky. But Zemlinsky was already suffering from the effects of a stroke and died alone in New York just a few days later. In his Sinfonietta, Op. 24 (1934) he reused a short theme from the last of his Maeterlinck-Songs, Op. 13 (1913), “Wohin gehst Du?” (Where are you going?), a theme of “self-doubts” and “farewell” from a time when Zemlinsky was beginning to observe growing anti-Jewish sentiments in Vienna. The Maeterlinck-Songs were praised as “the center of his output” by Theodor Adorno, and transport the listener to a mystic world concerned with life, evanescence and death.

The Brussels-based British composer Nigel Clarke is renowned for his virtuosic style, and an uncompromising contemporary musical language that speaks with an authentic voice to today’s audiences. This world premiere recording of his symphony for violin and orchestra The Prophecies of Merlin is inspired by the 12th-century text De gestis Britonum by Geoffrey of Monmouth, and it casts the soloist as the maddened Merlin, either raging alone or caught up in the wild tumult of the orchestra. This score brims with rhythmic drive and bravura orchestration, juxtaposing savage musical outbursts with moments of sheer transcendental beauty.

Soprano Natalie Dessay leaves the dizzy heights of Bellini’s Amina, Donizetti’s Marie and Massenet’s Manon to inhabit the more discreet emotional and vocal world of Debussy’s Pelléas et Mélisande with a cast of fellow francophones.
“There’s more to life than top notes,” Natalie Dessay has said. She has, of course, made her reputation with the florid, stratospheric heroines of Romantic French and Italian opera, but in this new DVD from Vienna she portrays a heroine who presents few opportunities for vocal display, but many for subtle characterisation – Debussy’s Mélisande. Dessay had sung the role just once before, in concert in Edinburgh in 2005. Pelléas et Mélisande is full of ambiguity and its vocal lines closely reflect Maurice Maeterlink’s often enigmatic text. A few unaccompanied, ballad-like phrases are the closest Mélisande gets to an aria.

Despite all the differences in the musical language of the works by the Polish composers Karol Szymanowski and Krzysztof Penderecki included on this recording, they are united by their quality as a lament: Szymanowski's Stabat mater, completed in 1926 and based on a Polish translation rather than the original Latin text of the medieval poem, is still considered one of the most important contributions to 20th-century music.

Hans Werner Henze’s uncompromising individualism and remarkable compositional legacy has ensured him a permanent place in the Western musical landscape. The works in this programme represent his abandonment of avant-garde extremes, and are very much part of this quality of durability in his music. Chief conductor of the ORF Vienna Radio Symphony Orchestra, Marin Alsop is an inspiring and powerful voice in the international music scene whose many Naxos recordings include a complete cycle of Brahms’ symphonies as well as the ‘outstanding achievement’ (BBC Music Magazine) of an acclaimed cycle of the symphonies of Prokofiev.

Alexander Zemlinsky composed his Lyric Symphony, Op. 18 for soprano, baritone and orchestra during his time as musical director of the New German Theatre in Prague, where he had moved in 1911 from Vienna. It was generally regarded as his corresponding equivalent to Mahler’s Lied von der Erde and is based on Nobel Prize laureate and most important representative of modern Indian literature Rabindranath Tagore. The work is combined with the befriended and three years older "phantasmogorist" Franz Schreker’s Prelude to a Drama, which is a version of the overture of his Die Gezeichneten. It might be considered symptomatic for the most notable characteristic of Schreker’s music: the dominance of chordal sounds over the melodic element.

In Voyages, prolific American composer James Lee III takes the listener on a colourful journey through his endlessly creative orchestral music with ORF Vienna Radio Symphony Orchestra conducted by Marin Alsop.