Johan Svendsen was the one of the leading figures in Norwegian music during the romantic era, both as a composer and a conductor. This podcast introduces you to his Norwegian Rhapsodies, as well as the music he wrote for Romeo and Juliet, and his piece Zorahayda, based on the story Rose of Alhambra by the American author Washington Irving (who also wrote The Legend of Sleepy Hollow). The performers are the South Jutland Symphony Orchestra, and conductor Bjarte Engeset.

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Catalogue No.: Naxos 8.570322

The inspiration for Michael Daugherty‘s Metropolis Symphony can be traced all the way back to his youth, as he watched on television as the caped superhero rescued humanity – as especially Lois Lane – from all kinds of deadly situations. Daugherty’s ability to allow the visual world to inspire the musical is evident in many of his works such as Deux Ex Machina, included on this CD, and Fire and Blood that was inspired by murals by Diego Rivera. The performers on this present CD include the Nashville Symphony Orchestra, pianist Terrence Wilson, and conductor Giancarlo Guerrero.

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Catalogue No.: Naxos American Classics 8.559635

Einojuhani Rautavaara is Finland’s best known composer, especially internationally. Rautavaara’s music has been described as a mixture of modernism and mystic romanticism – an attempt to define a compositional style that is unique, personal, and very hard to define. Among his finest works are 12 concertos, composed over the past four decades, and collected together in this 4-CD box on the Ondine label. Performers include violinist Elmar Oliveira, cellist Marko Ylonen, harpist Marielle Nordmann, organ player Kari Jussila, clarinetist Richard Stoltzman, and pianists Ralf Gothoni and Vladimir Ashkenazy.

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Catalogue No.: Ondine ODE1156-2Q

Fanfares and Overtures, the first CD by the esteemed Rutgers Wind Ensemble on Naxos Wind Band Classics, presents a dizzying range of music that include either fanfares or overtures. The CD includes music by Herbert Owen Reed, Vaclav Nelhybel, WIlliam Schuman and Karel Husa whose “Music for Prague” may be one of the finest pieces of musical protest music ever written.

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Catalogue No.: Naxos 8.572230

Richard Strauss wrote some of the finest operas of the 20th century. Pieces like Elektra, Salome and Der Rosenkavalier helped push the limits of the operatic artform, and also established Strauss as one of the truly great composers for the media. In a few cases, he created orchestral suites from these stage works, and it’s this music that is featured in this podcast, including his suites for Der Rosenkavalier, Die Frau Ohne Shatten and Josephs-Legende. JoAnn Falletta conducts the Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra in in this new Naxos CD.

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Catalogue No.: Naxos 8.572041

Missa Salisburgensis is a mass Heinrich Ignaz von Biber wrote for 53 individual voices and instruments, composed to celebrate the 11-hundreth anniversary of the founding of the archdiocese of Salzburg. I was composed to be performed in the Salzburg Cathedral – 444 feet long, with a ceiling more than 100 feet high. For this piece, Biber placed the audience in the middle, with the musicians divided into 8 groups all around them. You might call it the original Surround Sound.

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Catalogue No.: NCA 60192

Danish music may be one of the finest under-discovered realms in all classical music. This is particularly true of music from the Romantic era, as this podcast and CD show. These violin concertos by Niels Gade, Peter Erasmus Lange-Muller and Rued Langgaard – hardly household names – deserve to be heard more widely on CD, and much more often in concert. These performances were recorded in 2009 with violin soloist Christina Astrand and the Tampere Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by John Storgards.

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Catalogue No.: Dacapo 6.220562

Former horn player Raymond Bisha takes you on a personal tour of this new CD set from Profil celebrating the French Horn, and some of it’s finest players including Wilhelm Bruns, Hermann Baumann, Peter Damm and the legendary Erich Penzel play music by Handel, Telemann, Mozart, Schumann and Strauss.

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Catalogue No.: Profil PH08075

Andy Teirstein is a composer and multi-instrumentalist based in New York. His strong roots in classical music, folk music and dance have helped him create a musical language that crosses all boundaries. Most of the pieces on this CD are chamber pieces, ranging from “3 Movements for String Quartet and Folk Musician” to the chamber melodrama “The Shooting of Dan McGrew”. In this interview, Teirstein talks about composing music for theater, working in a Mexican circus, the poetry of Mahmoud Darwish, and his dream of writing a companion piece to “What is Left of Us”.

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Catalogue No.: Naxos 8.559617

Leonard Bernstein wrote his Mass at the request of Jacqueline Onassis, for the opening of the John F. Kennedy Centre for the Performing Arts in Washington. It is a huge work, almost an hour and three-quarters long, that with bewildering range of musical styles. In this recording, Bernstein’s protege Marin Alsop, music director of the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra, shows convincingly that she may be the best interpreter of his music alive today. This recording also features Jubilant Sykes, the Morgan State University Choir and the Peabody Children’s Chorus.

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Catalogue No.: Naxos 8.559622-23