Rafael Payare’s first recording with the Orchester symphonique de Montréal (OSM), a CD by Nézet-Séguin and Beatrice Rana, unreleased tracks by Jessye Norman, a new CD by Hélène Grimaud: this is what awaits classical music lovers in the coming weeks, and this is major!
On March 3, Pentatone will publish the 5e Symphony by Rafael Payare and the OSM, a few days before the duo’s first concert at Carnegie Hall on March 8. The recording took place last August at the Maison symphonique in the wake of the Classical Spree. The work had been run at the Festival de Lanaudière, then on tour in Korea at the turn of July.
The record label is not surprising in itself, since the artistic director is Quebecer Renaud Loranger. It is all the same a bit, since Pentatone’s flagship symphonic project, launched with great fanfare in 2022, is a complete Mahler in Prague with the Czech Philharmonic and Semyon Bychkov and that the Fifth just published three months ago. Generating your own competition is not without risks: if that of the OSM were better, which is not improbable, it would be a bit messy…
New releases by Jessye
At the end of next week, February 3, Warner will publish the coupling of piano concertos by Clara and Robert Schumann by Beatrice Rana, the Chamber Orchestra of Europe and Yannick Nézet-Séguin. The recordings were made last summer at the Baden-Baden Festival. Watch out these days with Warner reorganizing in Canada: digital release will likely significantly precede physical availability here. As nothing is lost, the microphones in Baden-Baden were also set up for Deutsche Grammophon (DG), which recorded with Yannick Nézet-Séguin a future complete Brahms symphonies, to be completed in 2023 by the Symphonies nbone 3 and 4.
One of the great editorial surprises will be the publication, on March 24, of Jessye Norman – The Unreleased Masters, a box of three Decca CDs with very substantial works. The basis is an unreleased studio recording of excerpts from Tristan and Isolda under the direction of Kurt Masur in Leipzig in 1998, with Thomas Moser as Tristan and Hanna Schwarz as Brangäne. The other two CDs are concerts: the Last Four Lieder of Strauss in 1989 and the Wesendonck-Lieder by Wagner in 1992, both with James Levine in Berlin, and a program of cantatas in Boston with Seiji Ozawa in 1994 (Scene from Berenice by Haydn, Cleopatra of Berlioz and Phaedra of Britton).
DG will release a new CD by Hélène Grimaud, a pianist who was becoming rare, the Silent Songs by Silvestrov on March 3, and will release the new Yuja Wang the following week: a piano concerto by American composer Teddy Abrams. We will have to wait another week for the new Benjamin Grosvenor at Decca: a coupling of Kreisleriana of Schumann and the 3e Sonata of Brahms.
Riccardo Chailly’s 70th birthday will be celebrated with the publication of a CD of choirs by Verdi on February 17, the day when Warner will bet on the explosive encounter between Philippe Jaroussky and L’Arpeggiata by Christina Pluhar in Passacalle de la Follie. At Warner, we will now watch for the announcement of the publication of summer nights of Berlioz by Marie-Nicole Lemieux. But it’s a safe bet that it will be for the fall, because the publisher has just published this work by Michael Spyres, who approaches it with his chameleon range. Between now and then, the continuation of Yannick Nézet-Séguin’s Rachmaninov cycle should arrive at DG with the 2e Symphony coupled to Isle of the Dead. The publication, scheduled for 2022, is already late. But the 1er April 2023 will mark the 150e anniversary of the composer’s birth and, within four days, the 80e of his death.