PentaTone

Pentatone continues its "American Opera Series" with the premiere recording of Missy Mazzoli’s opera Proving Up (2018), produced by Opera Omaha, the International Contemporary Ensemble, and conductor Christopher Rountree. Crowned as “Brooklyn’s post-millennial Mozart” by "Time Out New York", Mazzoli is one of today’s most exciting young composers. Her music is state of the art, frequently employing electronics, but simultaneously full of nostalgia and melancholy. Mazzoli has received considerable acclaim for her operatic compositions, including Breaking the Waves (2016) and Song from the Uproar (2012). For Proving Up, she works together with librettist Royce Vavrek. Proving Up is based on a short story by Karen Russell, and offers a surreal and disquieting commentary on the American dream through the story of a Nebraskan family homesteading in the late 19th century. Commissioned by the Washington National Opera, the Miller Theatre at Columbia University, and Opera Omaha, the piece has been receiving rave reviews, and will be presented in several of the biggest US opera houses in the coming years. "The Washington Post" called it “harrowing…powerful…a true opera of our time”. © Pentatone

The Akademie für Alte Musik Berlin's Handel-shaped debut series for Pentatone is very much keeping up the high standards with this third installment, featuring the Opus 3 collection of concerti grossi.Published by John Walsh in 1734, but more likely to have been written during the 1710s when Handel was newly arrived in London and hopping between its opera house and the homes of wealthy patrons, this collection looks on paper like quite the hodgepodge: a two-movement concerto here, five movements there, four somewhere else.... And the reason is that they were in fact assembled from operatic overtures - and indeed the concept of an orchestral concerto was still very much in its early days back then. For instance, No. 4 was first performed as a second overture in the opera Amadigi, on the orchestra's benefit night on 20 June 1716. In fact only the final movement of No. 6 would appear to date from the 1730s, so for all these separate entities to have ended up in orchestral concerto form in the 1730s is likely to have been thanks to business savviness on the part of Walsh, tapping into Britain's huge appetite for Corelli's Concerti grossi (which Handel was influenced by), and also its burgeoning amateur music scene. Unlike Corelli's famous Op. 6 Concerti grossi though, Handel's opera-born Opus 3 collection really shines the spotlight on the woodwind, and you hear that right from the off with No. 1 in B-flat. Most gorgeously so in the central Largo, which opens with duetting recorders supported by bassoon, and which as a whole is delivered with immensely elegant sobriety and a lovely flow. Also to be enjoyed in this concerto is the smooth class and affective shaping with which concertmaster Georg Kallweit dispatches his solos in the joyful opening Allegro; the smoothness of the continuo cello's jumping figures No. 2's Largo; the delicacy of the harpsichord's filigree flourish at the end of No. 2's concluding Vivace; the fabulous neatness and bounce at every turn from the bassoons. Indeed, as with the previous two volumes, nimble neatness, class and polish are the buzzwords across these performances. Plus, in engineering terms, the same satisfying warmth, balance and blend, and pleasing awareness of the Nikodemuskirche acoustic. In short, another success notched up. © Charlotte Gardner/Qobuz

"Eclectic Currents" explores the endless possibility of the string quartet at the beginning of the twenty-first century. During the past decades, the Calder Quartet has commissioned works by many of the most imaginative young composers writing today. From the acoustic sonorities, dramatic rhythms, and unique timbres of Norman, Akiho, and Hearne, to the creaking amplifications of Davis, the glitchy electronic dirges of Wohl, and the primitive electronics of Perich, this album offers a snapshot of this body of work. The time-honored combination of instruments sounds entirely new in the hands of the many composers involved in this project. © Pentatone

A new link in the Shostakovich cycle undertaken by the Russian National Orchestra and the Pentatone label, this Symphony No. 13 is a huge memory work. It put the issue of anti-Semitism in the USSR back in the spotlight during its eventful premiere in 1962 at the Moscow Conservatory in front of the entire cultural elite. Despite immense public success, the new work was showered with insults by a critical, government-funded press, accusing the composer of "dishonour" and "chasing after cheap effects". The Thirteenth Symphony is dedicated to the victims of the Babi Yar massacre where 33,371 Jews were shot dead by the Nazis in 1941. Structured in five movements, all moving away from traditional models, this powerful and dramatic symphony calls upon a bass voice, a male choir and a large symphony orchestra on a text by Yevgeny Yevtushenko evoking Babi Yar as well as other anti-Semitic acts such as the Dreyfus Affair, the Bialystok Pogrom, and the life and death of the young Anne Frank. The work also honours other texts. This monument of humanity was recorded in November, 2017, in Moscow under the direction of Ukrainian conductor Kirill Karabits at the head of the Russian National Orchestra founded in 1990 by Mikhail Pletnev just after the collapse of the Soviet Union. In a few short years, this new group has reached the artistic level of the greatest Russian and international orchestras. Its extensive discography for Pentatone is growing with this current recording of Shostakovich's complete Symphonies with various conductors. © François Hudry/Qobuz

After a proliferation of recordings from Marc Minkowski and The Musicians of the Louvre for several years, they have now become scarcer. Fans will, therefore, be very pleased to find him here in this well-polished version of the Great Mass in C minor, a work that was left unfinished by Mozart. It is difficult to play in its current state and has been reconstructed a dozen times with varying degrees of success. Here, Minkowski set his sights on the version reconstructed by Austrian composer and conductor Helmut Eder, who published it in the New Mozart Edition in 1985. It is well known that this monumental work, which should have been as long as Bach’s Mass in B minor or Beethoven’s Missa Solemnis had it been completed, was never commissioned and was composed as a thanksgiving for the recovery of his fiancé, Konstanze Weber. It is still a mystery why the work was left incomplete but there are probably multiple reasons for this. The original manuscript was found at the end of the 1970s and contains three-quarters of the work. It represents a kind of culmination of Western sacred music with the complete assimilation of earlier styles and a distinct Mozartian sound. Recorded in concert in Grenoble in 2018 following a European tour, this new version is performed using a reduced choir in keeping with its premiere performance in the small St. Peter’s Abbey in Salzburg, 1783. © François Hudry/Qobuz

Marc Albrecht and the Netherlands Philharmonic Orchestra present Zemlinsky’s lush symphonic poem Die Seejungfrau. Zemlinsky was a child of fin-de-siècle Vienna, who for decades has been overshadowed by colleagues such as Gustav Mahler – the man who married Alma, the woman Zemlinsky also loved - and Arnold Schoenberg – the man who would later become his brother-in-law. In recent times, Zemlinsky is finally gaining the recognition he deserves. The same applies to his symphonic poem Die Seejungfrau, based on Andersen’s Little Mermaid story. Zemlinsky withdrew the score after its premiere in 1905; the three movements were first reunited in the 1980s thanks to scholars, after which the piece could start its second life. Die Seejungfrau seems inspired by Zemlinsky’s love in vain for Alma, clothed in cinematic fin-de-siècle music with Debussy-like evocations of the sea. © Pentatone