Michael Collins – Michael Collins Plays British Clarinet Sonatas, Vol. 1 (2012/2022) [Official Digital Download 24bit/96kHz]

Michael Collins - Michael Collins Plays British Clarinet Sonatas, Vol. 1 (2012/2022) [Official Digital Download 24bit/96kHz] Download

Michael Collins – Michael Collins Plays British Clarinet Sonatas, Vol. 1 (2012/2022)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 01:12:52 minutes | 1,14 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Digital Booklet, Front Cover | © Chandos

This is Volume 1 in a new series of British Clarinet Sonatas, featuring the exclusive Chandos artist Michael Collins in works by Bax, Bliss, Howells, Ireland, and Stanford. He is accompanied by the pianist Michael McHale. Their ‘Lyrical Clarinet’ disc received much praise, among others from BBC Music which noted: ‘It’s hard to imagine this programme better played than it is here by Collins and McHale… technically impeccable.’
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Michael Collins, BBC Philharmonic, Rumon Gamba – Arnold: Clarinet concerto and Orchestral works (2023) [Official Digital Download 24bit/96kHz]

Michael Collins, BBC Philharmonic, Rumon Gamba - Arnold: Clarinet concerto and Orchestral works (2023) [Official Digital Download 24bit/96kHz] Download

Michael Collins, BBC Philharmonic, Rumon Gamba – Arnold: Clarinet concerto and Orchestral works (2023)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 01:08:50 minutes | 1,17 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Digital Booklet, Front Cover | © Chandos

Rumon Gamba leads the BBC Philharmonic in this collection of lesser-known pieces by the British composer Sir Malcolm Arnold. Born in 1921, he was inspired by Louis Armstrong to take up the trumpet at the age of twelve. Following study at the Royal College of Music, in London, he became Principal Trumpet of the London Philharmonic, in 1943 – a post he held (bar one season at the BBC Symphony Orchestra) until he moved to composing full time, in 1948. Arnold was active in many genres, writing nine symphonies, two operas, five ballets, and more than 100 film scores, including The Bridge on the River Kwai for which he won an Oscar. This album features music from across his compositional career, from Larch Trees (1943) to the Philharmonic Concerto (1976) – both works written for the London Philharmonic. His Divertimento was written for the newly formed National Youth Orchestra, whilst the BBC commissioned the Commonwealth Christmas Overture for the twenty-fifth anniversary of King George VI’s first Christmas Broadcast, in 1932. The Clarinet Concerto No. 1, expertly performed here by Michael Collins, was written for Frederick (‘Jack’) Thurston who gave the premiere, in 1949, at the Edinburgh Festival. The album concludes with Philip Lane’s o rchestration of The Padstow Lifeboat, originally composed for brass band to celebrate the launch of a new lifeboat in Padstow in 1968.
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Michael Collins – Michael Collins Plays British Clarinet Sonatas, Vol. 2 (2013/2022) [Official Digital Download 24bit/96kHz]

Michael Collins - Michael Collins Plays British Clarinet Sonatas, Vol. 2 (2013/2022) [Official Digital Download 24bit/96kHz] Download

Michael Collins – Michael Collins Plays British Clarinet Sonatas, Vol. 2 (2013/2022)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 01:09:51 minutes | 1,04 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Digital Booklet, Front Cover | © Chandos

This is Volume 2 in the series ‘British Clarinet Sonatas’, in which Michael Collins is joined by the pianist Michael McHale. BBC Music awarded five stars to Volume 1, and wrote: ‘Collin’s clarinet-playing mesmerises the ear: the closing phrase of Stanford’s ‘Caoine’ movement shows what a player in this league can convey in just two quiet notes. Without snatching the limelight, Michael McHale’s accompanying finds a range of keyboard colours in, above all, the works by Ireland and Howells, making their individual sound-worlds seem unexpectedly subtle and rich.’ On this disc the pair turns to works for clarinet and piano by Arthur Benjamin, Edward Gregson, Joseph Horovitz, Sir Malcolm Arnold, and Arnold Cook.
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Michael Collins, Philharmonia Orchestra, Wigmore Soloists, Robin O’Neill – Mozart & Birchall: Clarinet Concertos (2022) [Official Digital Download 24bit/96kHz]

Michael Collins, Philharmonia Orchestra, Wigmore Soloists, Robin O'Neill - Mozart & Birchall: Clarinet Concertos (2022) [Official Digital Download 24bit/96kHz] Download

Michael Collins, Philharmonia Orchestra, Wigmore Soloists, Robin O’Neill – Mozart & Birchall: Clarinet Concertos (2022)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 01:21:16 minutes | 1,42 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Digital Booklet, Front Cover | © BIS

The two concertos performed here by Michael Collins and the Philharmonia Orchestra were both intended for a specific player – Mozart composed his for Anton Stadler and Richard Birchall for Michael Collins himself. Both works – as well as Mozart’s Clarinet Quintet – were also written for a particular instrument: the basset clarinet, a slightly larger and deeper clarinet than the one in A which soon after Mozart had written his concerto became the standard. At the very core of the clarinet repertoire, the two works by Mozart have until recently been played on the A clarinet, with necessary adjustments being made to the solo part. Nowadays, however, they are more and more often performed on the instrument they were intended for.
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Michael Collins & Stephen Hough – Brahms: 3 Sonatas (2021) [Official Digital Download 24bit/96kHz]

Michael Collins & Stephen Hough – Brahms: 3 Sonatas (2021)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 01:03:22 minutes | 1,03 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © BIS

Friends of long standing as well as regular partners in chamber music, Michael Collins and Stephen Hough bring their combined musical insights and expertise to bear on Johannes Brahms’s sonatas for clarinet and piano. Together with the composer’s trio for clarinet, cello and piano and clarinet quintet, the sonatas are among the most treasured works in the repertoire of the instrument – but it is partly down to good luck that we have them at all. When Brahms in 1891 heard the clarinettist Richard Mühlfeld, principal clarinet of the Meiningen Court Orchestra, he had already announced his retirement. He was enraptured by Mühlfeld’s playing and its vocal qualities, however, and made a ‘comeback’: during the following couple of years he composed all four of his clarinet works.

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Michael Collins & Noriko Ogawa – La clarinette parisienne (2021) [Official Digital Download 24bit/96kHz]

Michael Collins & Noriko Ogawa – La clarinette parisienne (2021)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 01:01:38 minutes | 1,08 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © BIS

Up until around 1900 the clarinet repertoire was dominated by music from the German-speaking lands, largely due to the influence of three outstanding clarinettists. Inspired by Anton Stadler, Heinrich Bärmann and Richard Mühlfeld respectively, Mozart, Weber and Brahms composed some of the finest clarinet works ever written. But especially after the defeat in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–71, the French cultural establishment became increasingly concerned with cultivating a national voice of its own, and Michael Collins’s new release is a reminder of this.

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Michael Collins & Michael McHale – The Lyrical Clarinet, Vol. 3 (2020) [Official Digital Download 24bit/96kHz]

Michael Collins & Michael McHale – The Lyrical Clarinet, Vol. 3 (2020)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 01:10:06 minutes | 1,13 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Chandos

Michael Collins MBE is one of the most complete musicians of his generation. Continuing his distinguished career as a soloist, he has in recent years also become highly regarded as a conductor and in 2010 took up the position as Principal Conductor of City of London Sinfonia; he works with leading orchestras around the world both as a soloist and as a conductor.
Committed for many years to expanding the repertoire of the clarinet, he has premiered works by some of today’s most highly regarded composers, including John Adams, Elliott Carter, Brett Dean, and Mark-Anthony Turnage. In addition to commissioning and supporting new compositions, he is also a champion of well-crafted arrangements for the clarinet of works originally for other instruments. It is this area of his work that is so vividly demonstrated in the Chandos series “The Lyrical Clarinet”, of which this is the third volume. Most of the arrangements on this album were made by the pianist Michael McHale, who accompanies Michael Collins on the recording.

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Michael Collins & Michael McHale – Reger: Clarinet Sonatas (2017) [Official Digital Download 24bit/96kHz]

Michael Collins & Michael McHale – Reger: Clarinet Sonatas (2017)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 01:11:43 minutes | 1,13 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Chandos

Michael Collins and Michael McHale here present a new volume in their exploration of the lyrical clarinet repertoire. Their journey through works that encapsulate the variety of nuance and colour of which the instrument is capable, inevitably led them to another great composer for the medium: Max Reger. The Brahms-influenced (see CHAN 10844), essentially lyrical and tender works recorded here contrast particularly with the more familiar, contrapuntally rich – and loud – organ music usually associated with Reger. The three clarinet sonatas are among fourteen such duo works in his published output, composed between 1890 and 1915: effectively his entire compositional career. Although his continuing adherence to sonata-form principles is clearly evident in the two Op. 49 sonatas, the greater formal clarity of Op. 107 suggests that the lightness and geniality, even plainness, which Reger ascribed to it form part of an underlying ‘classical’ simplicity of conception, for all the music’s ‘modernistic’ surface. On top of his conducting career (City of London Sinfonia, Philharmonia Orchestra) and various recitals around the world, Michael Collins will hold a four- concert residency at LSO St Luke’s in the 2017 – 18 season, dedicated to chamber music and including recitals with Michael McHale.

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Michael Collins – Vaughan Williams: Symphony No. 5 in D Major – Finzi: Clarinet Concerto, Op. 31 (2020) [Official Digital Download 24bit/96kHz]

Michael Collins – Vaughan Williams: Symphony No. 5 in D Major – Finzi: Clarinet Concerto, Op. 31 (2020)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 01:08:30 minutes | 1,11 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © BIS

The distinguished clarinettist Michael Collins has in recent years also gained recognition as a conductor, appearing with eminent orchestras across the world. The present disc sees his recording debut as a conductor of symphonic repertoire, from which he has chosen Vaughan Williams’s Fifth Symphony – one of the composer’s best-loved works. Written during the Second World War and with its symphonic predecessor displaying a convulsive fury and desolation, the Fifth is surprisingly serene and pastoral. Vaughan Williams dedicated it ‘without permission’ to Jean Sibelius – who in his diary described his impression on first hearing the work as ‘a caress from a summer world.’ On the present release, Vaughan Williams is followed by his younger colleague and friend Gerald Finzi, who he once advised to write a symphony: ‘They’re ever so easy’. Finzi was not convinced, and remains known as a composer of primarily vocal music, but among his few instrumental works is a Concerto for Clarinet, the instrument widely regarded as the most voice-like of all. For this, Michael Collins reverts to his customary role as soloist, conducting the strings of the Philharmonia Orchestra from the clarinet.

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Swedish Chamber Orchestra & Thomas Dausgaard, Michael Collins – Synergy (2022) [Official Digital Download 24bit/96kHz]

Swedish Chamber Orchestra & Thomas Dausgaard, Michael Collins – Synergy (2022)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 01:07:40 minutes | 1,19 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © BIS

On Synergy, flautist Sharon Bezaly and her musician friends demonstrate that one plus one can be much greater than two. Featuring works that celebrate the coming together of like-minded musicians, this project is a reminder, after more than two years of a pandemic that has affected all of us, that true musical synergy can only be achieved ‘face-to-face’, rather than ‘remotely’.

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BBC Symphony Orchestra, Michael Collins – Strauss: Concertante Works (2019) [Official Digital Download 24bit/48kHz]

BBC Symphony Orchestra, Michael Collins - Strauss: Concertante Works (2019) [Official Digital Download 24bit/48kHz] Download

BBC Symphony Orchestra, Michael Collins – Strauss: Concertante Works (2019)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/48 kHz | Time – 01:16:53 minutes | 743 MB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Digital Booklet, Front Cover | © Chandos

The Romanze is Strauss’ first attempt at writing for a soloist and orchestra. The influence of Mozart’s piano concertos, which Strauss was studying at the time, is apparent, not least in the writing for solo clarinet and the orchestral bassoon, and re-visited by Strauss in his final instrumental work the Duett-Concertino from 1947. Like other of his late compositions, this work seems to reject the full-blown expressionism for which we know Strauss best, and reflects a more neo-classical sound. Another early work, the Violin Concerto was first performed in 1882, and demonstrates Strauss’ growing technical skill and developing compositional voice. Strauss ultimately came to distance himself from a piece which he presumably regarded as unrepresentative of his mature style. Many commentators on the works of Strauss have felt that the Burleske was a significant turning point in his development, seemingly pointing the way ahead to the technical dexterity and emotional palette of his later tone poems. Originally written for Strauss’s mentor in Dresden Hans von Bülow, the work was premiered by Eugen d’Albert, in 1890 following von Bülow’s rejection of the work.
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James Ehnes, Michael Collins, Amy Schwartz Moretti, Andrew Armstrong – Bartók: Chamber Works for Violin, Vol. 3 (2014) [Official Digital Download 24bit/96kHz]

James Ehnes, Michael Collins, Amy Schwartz Moretti, Andrew Armstrong - Bartók: Chamber Works for Violin, Vol. 3 (2014) [Official Digital Download 24bit/96kHz] Download

James Ehnes, Michael Collins, Amy Schwartz Moretti, Andrew Armstrong – Bartók: Chamber Works for Violin, Vol. 3 (2014)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 01:08:31 minutes | 1,17 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Digital Booklet, Front Cover | © Chandos

James Ehnes presents his third album of chamber works by Bartók. The previous volumes have, along with his outstanding concerto disc, established his formidable reputation as a Bartók interpreter. Here Ehnes is joined by the pianist Andrew Armstrong, violinist Amy Schwartz Moretti, and Michael Collins, one of the world’s leading clarinettists.

The Sonatina, originally composed in 1915 for piano, was based on melodies which Bartók had collected during expeditions in Transylvania. The transcription for violin and piano heard here was produced ten years later by a young student of Bartók’s, Endre Gertler.

Bartók composed Contrasts in 1938 for the jazz clarinettist Benny Goodman and violinist Joseph Szigeti, who originally had requested a work in two movements, each with a cadenza for one of the featured instruments. Fulfilling this request, Bartók added a central slow movement, entitled ‘PihenÅ‘’ (Relaxation). The opening movement, ‘Verbunkos’, alludes to a march-like Hungarian military recruiting dance. The finale, entitled ‘Sebes’ (Quick), is a lively romp at the heart of which lies an unexpected episode of haunting calmness.

Besides writing for such outstanding musicians as Szigeti and Goodman, Bartók composed a lot of music for students, including the Forty-four Duos for two violins recorded here. These short pieces take material from a remarkably wide array of folk traditions and interlink the styles and culture of diverse peoples.
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Brodsky Quartet & Michael Collins – Brahms: String Quartet in A Minor & Clarinet Quintet (2014/2022) [Official Digital Download 24bit/96kHz]

Brodsky Quartet & Michael Collins – Brahms: String Quartet in A Minor & Clarinet Quintet (2014/2022)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 01:15:39 minutes | 1,33 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Chandos Records

The Brodsky Quartet present the first of two albums that will feature Brahms’s complete string quartets. This recording includes the String Quartet Op. 51 No. 2 with the Clarinet Quintet in B minor. The second string quartet was written alongside its contrasting companion, the String Quartet Op. 51 No. 1. They were both finally published in 1873 after being held back for years by a typically self-doubting Brahms until he had brought them to his own standards of perfection. Of the two, the second is warmer, more affirmative and relaxed, with few extremes of tempo or mood. It is a work that often looks backward, incorporating hints of baroque devices in his lyrical writing.

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City Of London Sinfonia & Michael Collins – Weber Clarinet Concertos Nos. 1 & 2, Clarinet Concertino & Horn Concertino (2012/2022) [Official Digital Download 24bit/96kHz]

City Of London Sinfonia & Michael Collins – Weber Clarinet Concertos Nos. 1 & 2, Clarinet Concertino & Horn Concertino (2012/2022)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 01:07:25 minutes | 1,12 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Chandos

On this album, the exclusive Chandos artist, Michael Collins, plays the clarinet in three works for clarinet and orchestra by Weber, as well as conducting the City of London Sinfonia. The disc also includes Weber’s horn concertino, featuring the soloist Stephen Stirling.

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