Six years after its launch, the Michael Gielen Edition now concludes with the release of this tenth instalment. It contains more than seven hours of music composed after 1945, including two of Gielen’s own compositions. There are many first releases of live recordings, including the German premiere recording of Breath – Hammer – Lightning and the world premiere recording of Dome Peak, both by Jorge Lopez. Listeners are duly advised about the extreme dynamic contrasts in Lopez’s output.

Nearly all the works on this album are by composers who enjoyed a long, personal association with Gielen, some of them as close friends. Gielen supported them throughout his career, which ensured that he was able to perform their works with great skill and authority; he always went to great lengths to promote works he believed in. The results of his extraordinary skills can be heard on this final instalment of SWR CLASSIC’s monumental project.

Gary Stroutsos honours the Hopi Tribe with solo improvisations on a reincarnated leena. Featuring the plaintive and haunting sounds of the Hopi long flute, these pieces are inspired by the landscapes of the American Southwest, and the people who have lived there since time immemorial.

The Hopi Tribe have maintained their flute tradition for thousands of years. Today, it is still actively cultivated with the help of The Hopi Long Flute Preservation Project, of which Gary is an honourable member. Due to his dedication to the instrument, and long-term friendships with cultural practitioners of the tribe, the Hopi Cultural Preservation Office invited Gary to join the project – an offer never extended to a non-native before. Profits from this album will go towards The Hopi Long Flute Preservation Project.

Leave Your Thoughts Here is Mr Mibbler’s third album following The Long Journey, which was released in January 2021. Mr Mibbler comprises musicians and producers Thom Hell, Jørn Raknes, and Vidar Ersfjord, and this time they have invited an incredible number of first-class Norwegian musicians to play around in their musical world. The guest musicians have been the inspiration behind the tracks, and Mr Mibbler has built the songs around their contributions. Among the guest artists, we find very exciting names such as Knut Reiersrud, Lindstrøm, Andreas Ulvo, Mathias Eick, Jan Bang, Bjørn Klakegg, Jørgen Munkeby, Sigmund Groven, and Nils Petter Molvær, all experienced and acclaimed within their genres in Norway and internationally. This makes Leave Your Thoughts Here a musical journey of different moods, exciting instrumentation and a wonderful mix of genres. You will hear folk, jazz, ambient and electronica performed by the very best musicians in Norway.

Dark Spring is an opera about four young people under extreme pressures: to overachieve academically, to score high in the popularity contests at school or at college, and to perform romantically or sexually. The pressure has become entirely internalised as parents or teachers are absent and the protagonists are left alone with late capitalism’s demands of permanent self-optimisation. The conflict between the expectation to succeed on the one hand, and the sense of powerlessness and unattainable self-determination in an era of constant stagnation on the other, grows increasingly acute until it eventually flips into violence: into Melchior’s sexual aggression and Moritz’s suicide.

The four protagonists of Dark Spring sing songs. They articulate their feelings through the mask of the distancing formalisation of rhyme, meter, stanza and refrain. Under the surface of the objectified schemata of song, however, an almost raw and undomesticated sound-world simmers that breaks through at crucial points of the plot – a sound-world of noise, screams and silence.

Le nozze in villa (The Wedding in the Villa) tells the story of Sabina and the young Claudio. They are in love, but this match goes against the will of her father, who wants her to marry the Schoolmaster Trifoglio. Misunderstandings and tensions between city emancipation and provincial narrow-mindedness are resolved, and romance ultimately triumphs thanks to the alliance of ‘gracefulness, faith and youth’. This early and virtually unknown opera buffa by Donizetti is full of Rossini-influenced lyrical inventiveness and beautiful arias. Specially restored for the 2020 Bergamo Festival, this revival brings out all of the opera’s ‘sparkling spirit and melodiousness’ (bachtrack.com).

‘With a superb cast of principals… the evening turned out a resounding success’
– The Daily Telegraph

This opulent production by Oscar-winning film director John Schlesinger, filmed in 1985, marked the 25th anniversary of Sir Georg Solti’s spectacular debut at Covent Garden, conducting this very opera. It also features Kiri Te Kanawa as The Marschallin, a performance of which The Financial Times said, ‘This deserves to be ranked…among her finest achievements.’

Anne Howells gives a sensitive performance as the ‘Knight of the Rose’; Aage Haugland is the roguish Baron Ochs, and the International Herald Tribune described American soprano Barbara Bonney as ‘…an enchantingly vulnerable Sophie, as lovely to hear…as she is to behold.’

‘Ančerl delivers the required amount of bombast in the opening movement, balanced by a sympathetic handling of the quieter music. The Andante is somber and reflective with a nice forward momentum. The inverted pedal point in the trumpets creates an eerie, other-worldly atmosphere.’ – Fanfare