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As early as the 17th century in the days of Fleet Admiral Michiel de Ruyter, one of the initiators of the Netherlands Marine Corps, music has played an important role in the navy. Transforming from ships’ bands and ensembles into a land-based full sized orchestra ashore, the Marine Band turned into the all-round musical ambassador of the Royal Netherlands Navy. From military marching formation, intimate accompanying ensemble, extended big band and classic symphonic wind band to a stunning cover band; no music style is absent from the enormous repertoire. The Marine Band of the Royal Netherlands Navy developed an appreciation for Russia and the music of her great composers. As part of the celebrations of 300 years Peter the Great and the jubilee of the city, concert tours to St. Petersburg were made in 1997 and 2003. In 2009 the branch of the Hermitage in Amsterdam was opened with a concert and attended by Queen Beatrix and President Medvedev. In 2013 the Marine Band and the Drums & Fifes of the Netherlands Marine Corps participated in the famous International Military Music Festival "Spasskaya Tower” on the Red Square in Moscow. © Channel Classics

The Second Symphony by Leonard Bernstein, The Age of Anxiety, based on a poem of the same name by W. H. Auden, is a work of the composer-conductor's relative youth, dating from 1948-1949, when he was just turning thirty. The symphony is presented as a series of variations, but not variations around an initial theme. No: each variation takes on elements of the previous variation, varies in turn, and so on. It brings to mind an unbroken metamorphosis. As one might imagine, Bernstein mixes classical symphonic elements with jazz, in particular in the solo piano passage – tackled here by Krystian Zimerman, who had the good fortune to perform with Bernstein several times. In its own way, it is a kind of homage to the centenary of the composer's birth: as Zimerman mentions in the liner notes, Bernstein asked him if he wanted to play this symphony with him for his hundredth birthday. And he almost keeps the promise, although the orchestra is the Berlin Philharmonic, under Sir Simon Rattle. © SM/Qobuz

This new LSO recording only available in digital format marks the start of a new recorded cycle by the London Symphony Orchestra with their current principal guest conductor, Gianandrea Noseda. Recorded at a public concert on 22 September 2016, this Fifth by Shostakovich fulfils the promise of the score. Under a venomous barrage from Pravda on the orders of the dread you-know-who, which brought down his 1936 opera Lady Macbeth, the luckless composer withdrew the work from the programme of the orchestra which was set to perform it, and the symphony was only brought back out in 1962. By way of response to accusations of bourgeois opacity, anti-Soviet deviation and all manner of other bullsh– er, communist epithets, Shostakovich threw himself into his Fifth, which he finished in July 1937. The creation of the work took place in the wake under the baton of Evgeni Mravinski and met with great success, not only in the USSR, but right across the music world, which lapped up the work. Yes, the language is clearer, and less esoteric than the Fourth, but anyone looking for optimism and good cheer is barking up the wrong tree. The Scherzo is a sinister flight forward by a tortured clown, and the Largo is what it is – anguished. As for the final movement, it alternates between Rossinian farce and Mahlerian snarling, ending with two minutes of the kind of joy that one feels after having been run over by a division of Soviet tanks. Conductor Gianandrea Noseda and the members of the London Symphony Orchestra knew how to project this dual atmosphere and really capture the enigmatic feel of the final two minutes. This symphony is the response of the composer to the Stalinist murderers, all the while declaring in Pravda that the piece was "a Soviet artist's practical response to well-deserved criticism". Comments that some musicologists recuse, considering that they would have been commissionned from the high places of politics. Whatever it is, what a mockery by the composer through his symphony! © SM/Qobuz   

Clocking in at over an hour for the Fourth, and almost an hour for the Eleventh or "1911", these are the two longest and fullest of Shostakovich's symphonies. What's remarkable is that the Fourth, finished in 1936, was only performed in 1961 – eleven years after the performance of the Eleventh in 1957! It was in 1936 that the poor composer felt a bullet whistle by him, following an infamous article in Pravda, dictated by Stalin: "Chaos in Place of Music", which torpedoed the opera Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk: the work was carefully locked away, only to be brought back out once the dictator was dead, buried and comprehensively decomposed. You can see where the composer was coming from! The tone of this Fourth hasn't the slightest hint of optimism, We hear dark Mahlerian accents, desperate flights and tortured harmonies: not exactly the music of a bright tomorrow. The Eleventh, structured according to a "political" programme, celebrating the revolutionaries of 1905 and the tragic events of Bloody Sunday – when the Russian army fired on a crowd, killing 96 according to official sources and several thousand according to others – with a much more optimistic tone, although we know what optimism means in the world of Shostakovich. The two symphonies were recorded at public concerts, in autumn 2017 and spring 2018 respectively by the Boston Symphony Orchestra and their conductor Andris Nelsons. © SM/Qobuz

Pärt's four symphonies stretch across a period of 45 years, from 1964 and 1966 respectively for the first two, 1971 for the third, and 2008 for the fourth. His first steps into the works of the symphony were still marked by dodecaphonism, although Pärt would not resist the gradual appearance of tonal poles in his work and "accidental" encounters between consonant notes and the harmonies that resulted; but the discourse remains very much linked to modernist principles, while exploring older forms of prelude and fugue, or indeed polyphony. With the Second, Pärt's avant-gardist period came to an end. From the 1970s, Pärt would completely revise his language, and come to concentrate on religious and medieval music, in such a way that his Third Symphony throws out dodecaphonism and all its theories, developing in their place a tonal, melodic, modal idiom (the old ecclesiastical styles, in fact). And within this personal revolution, Pärt would take a step into "tintinnabulum", which formed the basis of the Fourth Symphony, written for strings, harp and percussion: a wide world of meditation, stunning, unreal, intangible, and fundamentally tonal, in which the movements from one phenomenon to another move immensely slowly, allowing the listener to savour every moment. © SM/Qobuz

What utter happiness to find probably one of the greatest performances (ranking alongside Barbirolli, Bernstein, Tennstedt) of the complex Sixth by Mahler, which came out a few years ago on Hännsler: the performance by Kirill Kondrashin at the head of the Baden-Baden Südwestfunk. In 1981, Kirill Kondrashin had been regularly directing the Amsterdam Concertgebouw for several years, tackling material from the most varied repertoires, and several times performed the works of Gustav Mahler, of which he was one of the USSR's most ardent partisans, having made the first-ever complete recording of the symphonies with the Moscow Symphonic Orchestra (Melodiya). Benefiting from some of the most captivating orchestras of the West, he never gave up on his fluid, rapid visions, his strident polyphonies, or his implacable rhythms. For Kirill Kondrashin, Mahler wasn't the post-romantic composer that he is often taken for: he didn't look for song at any cost, or even any particular lyrical virtues. The formal balances accompany a drive for minute precision in the most up-to-date sonic alloys. As a vision, it is sometimes abstract: it fits into the more experimental branch of Haydn's descendants. And it gives us cause to regret not having a "Western" version of a 9th Symphony conducted by Kondrashin! © Pierre-Yves Lascar

The 2018-2019 season marks Jaap van Zweden's debut as musical director of the New York Philharmonic Orchestra, which, under the leadership of their Dutch conductor (the 26th in the illustrious lineage of those who have preceded him since 1842), has recently signed a new contract with Universal Music. His 2007 recording of the same symphonies with the Dallas Symphony was marked by its intensity and rapid tempi. With the New York Orchestra, here very fit, Jaap van Zweden maintains the same ardor (except for the beginning of the 5th on the reserve), but without excess, always in the respect of music, while rebalancing the beat of his metronome. A promising future sequel.