Leonard Slatkin, Saint Louis Symphony Orchestra – Bizet: Carmen, Grieg: Peer Gynt, Rimsky-Korsakov, Satie, Borodin (2005)
SACD Rip | SACD ISO | DST64 2.0 > 1-bit/2.8224 MHz | 01:18:34 minutes | 1,38 GB
Genre: Classical | Publisher (label): Telarc SACD-60655
This album of orchestral favorites, compiled from a variety of prior releases, showcases Telarc’s celebrated recording technique as much as Leonard Slatkin’s and the St. Louis Symphony’s performance prowess. The 20-plus-year-old recordings originally were made at a 50 kHz sampling rate, the full measure of which is finally available in the home thanks to SACD, bringing with it enhanced clarity and presence, as well as slightly increased dynamic impact. However, it also exposes the acoustic limitations of St. Louis’ Powell Hall, which tends to dampen high frequencies and make strings sound thin-bodied and distant. (This orchestra makes a far bolder impression in Carnegie Hall). Slatkin’s readings are consistently colorful and energetic, with Grieg’s Peer Gynt particularly impressive (highlighted by a rousing Hall of the Mountain King). Although Stokowski and Temirkanov bring more grit and gusto to Russian Easter Overture, and Bizet’s Carmen Suite has been done with more atmosphere by Karajan and López-Cobos, overall this disc makes for a nicely varied, musically enjoyable, and sonically impressive 80-minute program.
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Munich Radio Orchestra, Leonard Slatkin, Lucia Popp – Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart: Opera Arias1983/2023）
SACD Rip | SACD ISO | DST64 2.0 > 1-bit/2.8224 MHz | 56:51 minutes | 2.69 GB
Genre: Classical | Publisher (label): Warner Classics / Esoteric – ESSW-90278
https://www.esoteric.jp/en/product/essw-90278/top
https://youtu.be/cMhN3c97W1U
St. Louis Symphony Orchestra and Leonard Slatkin – Rachmaninoff: Symphony No. 3, Symphony in D Minor “Youth” & The Rock (2023 Remaster) (2023)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/192 kHz | Time – 01:05:21 minutes | 2,33 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Vox
Rachmaninov’s Symphony No. 3 in A minor is a radiant synthesis of the composer’s early and later periods. Poorly received at the time, its lyricism and colour are pervasive and it has duly taken its place in the repertoire, not least because of its warm-hearted voluptuousness, rhythmic vitality and inventive structure. Written in 1891, a single movement is all that exists of the Symphony in D minor ‘Youth’, while The Rock is an early example of Rachmaninov’s powers of descriptive intensity. These acclaimed VOX recordings conducted by Leonard Slatkin were originally issued in 1979 and 1982.
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St. Louis Symphony Orchestra and Leonard Slatkin – Rachmaninoff: Symphony No. 1 & Prince Rostislav (2023)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/192 kHz | Time – 01:02:12 minutes | 2,16 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Vox
The premiere of Rachmaninov’s Symphony No. 1 in D minor was a notorious failure. It took until the 1940s for the work to gain recognition, and it contains much that is recognisable from the composer’s later works – brooding intensity, lyricism and yearning, orchestral colour and grandeur, written in a profoundly Russian manner. Unperformed during his lifetime, Prince Rostislav exudes Rachmaninov’s familiar qualities of melancholy and voluptuousness; and both works feature his pervasive use of the Dies irae theme. These acclaimed VOX recordings conducted by Leonard Slatkin were originally issued in 1977 and 1982.
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Leonard Slatkin, Orchestre National de Lyon – Berlioz: Roméo et Juliette, Op. 17, H 79 (2023)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 01:58:15 minutes | 2,08 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Naxos
Of all Berlioz’s Shakespeare-inspired works, Roméo et Juliette is unquestionably his masterpiece. It is also cast in an innovative new form, a kind of ‘super-symphony’ that incorporates elements of symphony, opera and oratorio. Berlioz composed no singing roles for the central characters, but allowed others to comment or narrate, giving latitude to incarnate the lovers in a musical language of extraordinary delicacy and passion. The vivid Ball Scene and Romeo at the Capulet tomb are intensely dramatic but the heart of the work is the Love Scene, a long symphonic poem which Richard Wagner called ‘the melody of the 19th century’.
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Vincent Warnier, Orchestre National de Lyon, Leonard Slatkin – Saint-Saëns: Symphony No. 3 ‘Organ’; Danse macabre; Cyprès et Lauriers (2015)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 57:47 minutes | 969 MB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Naxos
Camille Saint-Saëns was a frequent performer on the Cavaillé-Coll organ of the Palais de Trocadéro, which was installed in 1878 for the Paris Expo. This famous instrument was relocated in 1939 to the Palais de Chaillot, and finally moved to the Lyon Auditorium in 1977, where it received a complete restoration in 2013. To mark this historic instrument’s renovation, Vincent Warnier and the Orchestre National de Lyon, under the direction of Leonard Slatkin, present an all-Saint-Saëns program, showcasing the organ in three works. The 1919 arrangement by Edwin Lemaire of Saint-Saëns’ orchestral Danse macabre, in a 2004 revision by Warnier, is an entertaining display of the organ’s Romantic-era stops and uncanny capacity for imitating orchestral effects. The organ is prominently featured in the two works with orchestra, Cyprès et lauriers, and the Symphony No. 3 in C minor, “Organ,” though the writing in both works is less splashy than in the opening selection. Indeed, the solo in Cyprès is quite knotty and somber, compared to the fireworks in Danse macabre and the relatively simple chordal part in the symphony is far from a virtuosic solo. Still, the organ’s rich tone colors give the symphony much of its appeal, and the recording by Radio France captures its majestic presence with full volume.
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Lyon National Orchestra, Leonard Slatkin – Ravel: Orchestral Works, Vol. 2 (2015)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/192 kHz | Time – 01:06:32 minutes | 2,25 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © 2xHD – Naxos
This is the second volume of works by Maurice Ravel from Leonard Slatkin and the Lyon National Orchestra, featuring the composer’s Valses nobles et sentimentales, a vivid mixture of atmospheric impressionism, intense expression and modernist wit. Ravel’s fascination with the waltz is further explored in La valse, a mysterious evocation of a vanished imperial epoch.
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Lyon National Orchestra, Leonard Slatkin – Ravel: Orchestral Works, Vol. 1 (2015)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/192 kHz | Time – 01:07:03 minutes | 2,22 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © 2xHD – Naxos
This album is the first volume in a series of the complete orchestral works of Maurice Ravel, featuring acclaimed American conductor Leonard Slatkin leading the Orchestre National de Lyons. Includes Slatkin’s interpretation of one of the most popular works in all of classical music, Bolero, which Ravel himself called an “orchestrated crescendo.”
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Lyon National Orchestra, Leonard Slatkin – Berlioz: Symphonie fantastique (2015)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/192 kHz | Time – 01:10:06 minutes | 2,33 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © 2xHD – Naxos
Leonard Slatkin conducts the Lyon National Orchestra on Berlioz’s remarkable and immensely influential Symphonie fantastique, an autobiographical tale describing a young musician’s opium-poisoned nightmares of jealous despair and fatal justice following the murder of his beloved. Berlioz added a second movement cornet obbligato in a subsequent revision of the score, included here as an optional extra.
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Leonard Slatkin, Detroit Symphony Orchestra – Tchaikovsky: The Six Symphonies (Live) (2015)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 04:33:52 minutes | 4,55 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Live from Orchestra Hall
The symphonies of Tchaikovsky are richly scored and very demanding technically, as well as displaying a remarkable and highly individual amalgam of Russian characteristics and Western symphonic structure. In the case of his first three symphonies, we find many unusual features, a desire on his part for affirmation from his teachers and mentors, and an unease on their part due to what they expected him to compose and what he actually did. There is, of course, the question of an influence of native folk music in his output. About this, he once wrote: “…as far as the Russian element in my music is concerned, i.e. the relationship between the national songs and my melodies and harmonies, this is because I grew up in the backwoods, from earliest childhood saturated with the indescribable beauty of the characteristic traits of Russian folk music.”
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Vincent Warnier, Orchestre National de Lyon, Leonard Slatkin – Saint-Saëns: Symphony No. 3 ‘Organ’; Danse macabre; Cyprès et Lauriers (2015)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 57:47 minutes | 970 MB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Naxos
Leonard Slatkin conducts the Orchestre National de Lyon and organist-in-residence Vincent Warnier on this recording of two major works for organ and orchestra by Saint-Saëns. The programme is rounded out with an arrangement for solo organ of the composer’s famous Danse macabre.
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Andre Dussollier, Isabelle Druet, Orchestre National de Lyon, Leonard Slatkin – Orchestral Works, Vol. 5 (2017)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 01:10:45 minutes | 1,21 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Naxos
The impact of Russian and Oriental culture on Ravel’s formative years retained a hold on him throughout his life. His colourfully re-orchestrated selections from Rimsky-Korsakov’s symphonic suite ‘Antar’ and opera Mlada, with interpolations of his own music, as the incidental score for a theatre production are heard here in their première recording, revived and reconstructed alongside a new text that symbolizes the romance and chivalric spirit of Antar the warrior-poet and his beloved Abla. Ravel’s fascination with the exotic is brought together with Debussy’s influence in the ravishing and enduringly popular song cycle Shéhérazade
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Leonard Slatkin – Bach: The Conductors’ Transcriptions (2004/2021)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/88,2 kHz | Time – 01:13:07 minutes | 1,34 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Chandos
A few years ago I was pleased to record a selection of works by Bach in transcriptions by other composers (CHAN 9835). Now it is time for the conductors to weigh in on the matter. In a way it can be argued that, since most of these maestri wrote their versions for specific orchestras, there is an even greater coherency in these works.
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Leonard Slatkin – Leonard Slatkin: Orchestral Works (2022)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/48 kHz | Time – 01:10:36 minutes | 730 MB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Digital Booklet, Front Cover | © Naxos
Leonard Slatkin celebrated his 75th birthday in September 2019. Many of the selections in this program come from a concert given in his honor and are also a tribute to his remarkable musical family, both past and present. Historical recordings include Leonard’s cellist mother, Eleanor Aller, being conducted by Korngold in the Haydn concerto and a 1944 broadcast of his father, Felix, as a solo violinist in Brahms. Every piece here has a deeply personal connection for the family. For his composition The Raven, Leonard used Edgar Allan Poe’s poem in a work that is “almost like a concerto for speaker and orchestra.”
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Leonard Slatkin – Rachmaninoff: Symphony No. 2 in E Minor, Op. 27 & Vocalise, Op. 34 No. 14 (Remastered 2023) (2023)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/192 kHz | Time – 01:04:22 minutes | 2,23 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Vox
Sergey Rachmaninov’s orchestral works were composed between 1887 (when he was not yet 14) and 1940 (the beginning of his final years). While composing the Second Symphony he was plagued by self-doubt, but in the end, not only did he complete the work, but also received a Glinka Prize for the symphony that showcases his masterly writing for the orchestra, his subtle and evocative use of colour, and his sure sense of structural proportion. Vocalise was originally composed for soprano or tenor with piano accompaniment. This recording features the better-known arrangement for orchestra, which wonderfully conveys the flowing theme that is characteristic of the composer’s most expressive symphonic slow movements. Internationally acclaimed conductor Leonard Slatkin has received six GRAMMY awards and 35 nominations. He maintains a rigorous schedule of guest conducting throughout the world and is active as a composer, author and educator. Elite Recordings represents the legendary producers and GRAMMY Award winners Marc Aubort and Joanna Nickrenz, who recorded Rachmaninov’s entire symphonic output for VOX in the 1970s. They worked with more than 45 conductors over 32 years and the brilliant sound of their productions made them highly sought-after collector’s items.
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