![Rebecca Nelsen, Marlene Gassner, Matthias Stier, Markus Eiche, Nuremberg Symphony Orchestra, Paul Mann - Flury: Der schlimm-heilige Vitalis (2022) [Official Digital Download 24bit/96kHz] Download](https://i0.wp.com/imghd.xyz/images/2022/12/18/wfawuvydffyua_600.jpg?resize=500%2C500&ssl=1)
Rebecca Nelsen, Marlene Gassner, Matthias Stier, Markus Eiche, Nuremberg Symphony Orchestra, Paul Mann – Flury: Der schlimm-heilige Vitalis (2022)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 02:00:38 minutes | 1,92 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Digital Booklet, Front Cover | © Toccata Classics
The bad-saintly Vitalis is the last of the four operas by Swiss composer Richard Flury (1896-1967). It was premiered in 1963, a year after its completion, and then went unheard until this recording. The plot, based on a novella by Flury’s Swiss compatriot Gottfried Keller, pits cheerful village life against religious intolerance and sexual politics in a disturbing blend of sentimentality and cynicism – though, of course, love triumphs in the end. Flury’s late-Romantic music makes up for the libretto with a steady flow of memorable melodies, engaging solo and choral numbers, and colorful orchestration – and a sense of fun that is never far from the surface.
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![Liepāja Symphony Orchestra, Paul Mann - Derek B. Scott: Orchestral Music, Vol. 2 (2022) [Official Digital Download 24bit/96kHz] Download](https://i0.wp.com/imghd.xyz/images/2022/08/08/iwfadhovl5bfc_600.jpg?resize=500%2C500&ssl=1)
Liepāja Symphony Orchestra, Paul Mann – Derek B. Scott: Orchestral Music, Vol. 2 (2022)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 57:53 minutes | 950 MB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Digital Booklet, Front Cover | © Toccata Classics
Derek Scott, born in Birmingham in 1950, has an international reputation as an historian of the British music hall and other forms of light entertainment. But he is an outstanding composer in his own right, his music treading a fine line between a very English whimsy and a profoundly felt and natural response to his (often Celtic) subject matter. These works reveal a master craftsman and natural tunesmith, who manages to unite good humour, unerring technique and deep feeling in music of immediate appeal. His two symphonies – originally written for brass band – embody a return to the formal, Classical clarity of Haydn, though expressed with the satisfyingly beefy textures of the modern orchestra. He lists among his influences Shostakovich and Sibelius and, less predictably, The Beatles and The Kinks.
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Sherban Lupu, Henri Bonamy, Liepaja Symphony Orchestra & Paul Mann – Eugene Ysaye: Violin Discoveries (2021)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/88,2 kHz | Time – 01:07:17 minutes | 1,15 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Divine Art
Belgian violinist, conductor and composer Eugène Ysaÿe (1858–1931) has been recognized as one of the greatest violin virtuosos of the 19th and early 20th centuries; regarded as the ‘King of the Violin’ by Nathan Milstein, his legacy has inspired generations of musicians. Ysaÿe was also a true avant-garde composer whose works feature revolutionary modern violin technique, unique expressive devices, profound musicality and harmonic originality, which eventually served as the bridge between the era of the Romantic virtuoso and contemporary music. It is odd, then, to realise that many of his works remain unknown, unpublished and unrecorded. This album presents for the first time several works for violin and piano ranging from 1885 to 1924, and a previously unknown Violin Concerto in G minor from 1910, which was orchestrated by Sabin Pautza. Romanian violinist Sherban Lupu is internationally known; he studied in London with Yehudi Menuhin and other leading teachers and has a very busy career, being best known for his discovery, publication and performance of the music of Enescu, but also has held prestigious posts in Italy and Romania and as concertmaster of San Francisco Opera, USA. He is accompanied here by the bright young pianist Henri Bonamy (who was Professor of Piano in Seoul, Korea and now teaches in Munich) and the fine orchestra of Liepāja, Latvia. The conductor is Paul Mann who has made a name recently with many recordings for Toccata Classics.
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Nuremberg Symphony Orchestra & Paul Mann – Flury: The Magic Mirror & Little Ballet Music (2020)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 01:05:21 minutes | 1,16 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Toccata Classics
Der magische Spiegel (‘The Magic Mirror’), a 1954 ballet by the Swiss composer Richard Flury (1896–1967), tells a pantomime tale of flirtation, cuckoldery, magical spells and perdition – but this is no puritanical morality play: using the limited resources of a chamber orchestra to surprisingly full-bodied effect, Flury conjures up a delightful sequence of dances – a generous number of waltzes, with a czardas, a bolero and more – that skip past in good-humoured succession. And behind its innocent title, the Little Ballet Music of thirty years earlier hides a buoyant dance-suite, scored with a feeling for colour that would have gone down well in Hollywood. This recording was made by the team – Paul Mann and the Nuremberg Symphony Orchestra – responsible for a ‘pulsating’ recording of Richard Flury’s one-act opera Eine florentinische Tragödie.
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Málaga Philharmonic Orchestra, Liepāja Symphony Orchestra & Paul Mann – Rob Keeley: Orchestral Music (2020)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 01:18:09 minutes | 1,35 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Toccata Classics
The music of Rob Keeley – born in south Wales in 1960 but immersed in London musical life since boyhood – embraces a wide range of influences. Stravinsky’s angular melodies and Tippett’s buoyant rhythms can be heard in the spiky but bucolic Second Symphony. Keeley readily confesses to an allegiance to Gallic Neo-Classicism in his Flute Concerto and, more surprisingly, reveals a taste for Telemann as the inspiration behind his Triple Concerto, with the ‘Enigma’ Variations of ‘my beloved Elgar’ acting as a model for Keeley’s own recent set of orchestral variations. Among the factors unifying these eclectic stimuli into an individual musical language are a concern for textural clarity and lightness of touch, a fondness for dance and a hint of good humour.
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Liepāja Symphony Orchestra, Paul Mann – Spoliansky: Orchestral Music (2022)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 01:13:40 minutes | 1,26 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Digital Booklet, Front Cover | © Toccata Classics
The Russian-born Mischa Spoliansky (1898-1985) became one of the major names in cabaret in 1920s Berlin and then, as a refugee from Nazi Germany, in London, he became one of the best-known composers of film scores. He also wrote a handful of orchestral works, which have remained unknown until now. His Boogie is a witty, tongue-in-cheek piece of orchestral jazz, and the Overture to My Husband and I, one of his stage shows, has a Mozartian sparkle and wit.
But it is his only Symphony, an epic statement composed over a period of nearly three decades, that constitutes his real achievement as an orchestral composer – the fourth of its five movements apparently offering Spoliansky’s own musical commentary on the Holocaust.
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Kamila Bydlowska, Matilda Lloyd, Liepaja Symphony Orchestra & Paul Mann – Arnold Griller: Orchestral Music, Vol. 3 (2021)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 01:16:48 minutes | 1,29 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Toccata Classics
Three recent works by the English composer Arnold Griller (born 1937) are joined here by the earliest music he still acknowledges, the gentle and touching Concerto Grosso for String Orchestra (1955), which is informed by a serenity and wisdom uncommon in such a young composer. Like Berg’s Violin Concerto, Griller’s (2017) was born of his response to the loss of a young life, and shares Berg’s elegiac awareness of dying beauty; the Trumpet Concerto (2018), by way of deliberate contrast, accumulates energy and vivacity as it proceeds. Dances under an Autumn Sky (2017), subtitled ‘Orchestral Music in Six Scenes’, is a balletic blend of joie de vivre and intense instrumental drama, which shares Stravinsky’s fondness for rhythmic surprises and Tippett’s for angular, primal energy.
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Ukrainian Festival Orchestra & Paul Mann – Music for My Love, Vol. 3 (2020)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 01:10:42 minutes | 1,15 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Toccata Classics
When Yodit Tekle was diagnosed with stomach cancer in late 2014, her partner, Martin Anderson, who runs Toccata Classics, asked a few composer friends to write some music for strings to bring her comfort in her illness. As her life slipped away, he had the idea that she might be remembered in music and so he began to commission other pieces for string orchestra in her memory. To his surprise, almost everyone he asked generously agreed, and so the project snowballed: there are now over 100 composers who have written or agreed to write for it – in an undertaking that is probably unique in the history of music. This third volume presents eleven more pieces in an initiative which, in effect, transforms love into something you can hear.
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Paul Mann, Ukrainian Festival Orchestra – Music for My Love, Vol. 2 (2019)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 01:11:30 minutes | 1,17 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Toccata Classics
When Yodit Tekle was diagnosed with stomach cancer in late 2014, her partner, Martin Anderson, who runs Toccata Classics, asked a few composer friends to write some music for strings to bring her comfort in her illness. As her life slipped away, he had the idea that she might be remembered in music and so he began to commission other pieces for string orchestra in her memory. To his surprise, almost everyone he asked generously agreed, and so the project snowballed: there are now over 100 composers who have written or agreed to write for it – in an undertaking that is probably unique in the history of music. This second volume presents twelve more pieces in an initiative which, in effect, transforms love into something you can hear.
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Alexandre Dubach, Liepāja Symphony Orchestra & Paul Mann – Richard Flury: Orchestral Music, Vol. 2 (2021)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 01:05:18 minutes | 1,11 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Toccata Classics
This second volume of orchestral music by the Swiss composer Richard Flury (1896–1967) brings works from across his career. A suite drawn from an early Festspiel – a community pageant – opens with a march of Elgarian swagger and continues with a mix of charm and substance. Flury was a gifted violinist, and his Third Violin Concerto, written at the height of the Second World War, is virtuosic and lyrical in equal measure, its unashamed Romanticism perhaps an escape from troubled times. The four late Caprices for Violin and Orchestra form a concertante serenade in all but name; and one of his very last pieces was a dark and moving tribute to a musician friend, the slow movement of a suite he did not live to finish.
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