During the year-end holidays, physical music carriers are in the spotlight thanks to the marketing of box sets often designed with special care for the occasion. Classical and contemporary music, jazz, pop, rock, song, so-called “world” music are on the program for these releases with promising content: complete works, special moments in a career, anthologies, evocations of a genre, an era, new editions of reference recordings unreleased bonuses, rarities and concert recordings.
Rinaldo Alessandrini
Complete Madrigals by Monteverdi
CLASSIC Forty years of collaboration between the Italian conductor and harpsichordist Rinaldo Alessandrini and Monteverdi are evidenced in this complete madrigal recording with the Ensemble Concerto Italiano. That is, twelve hours of music in the form of an existential quest that began in 1993 with Book IV, was regularly added to Books I and IX, and was engraved in 2021. An art “from humanity, the striving for the sublime and the joyful resolution of the sadness of life through love, the healing power of song and the energetic increase of dance”said the man who is now one of the masters of this vocal heritage, at the center of which is the famous Battle of Tancrede and Clorinde, Lamentation of the nymph or the extraordinary Well, there is heaven and earth. Complemented by two unpublished books, this box completes a unanimously celebrated monumental work. Marie Aude Roux
Nicholas Angelich
tribute
CLASSIC On April 18, 2022, the great pianist Nicholas Angelich died at the age of 51. A huge gap for music lovers who appreciated the delicacy and power of subtle and passionate playing, skin-deep sensitivity and crazy technique. Amid a well-known discography that ranges from Bach to Baptiste Trotignon, these seven unreleased albums trace a concert path from 1995 to 2009. Absolutely worth discovering, masterful Variations Goldbergtimeless Ravel, a Liszt that is constantly reinterpreted, without forgetting pearls of chamber music (with Martha Argerich, the Ebène Quartet) and the concert repertoire (Rachmaninoff with Myung-Whun Chung and Tugan Sokhiev). M.-AR
Leonard Bernstein
10 album classics
CLASSIC The biopic maestro, by and starring Bradley Cooper, streaming on Netflix from December 20th, will undoubtedly encourage music lovers to listen again to the legendary and charismatic Leonard Bernstein. Ten original recordings for American Columbia from the 1950s and 1960s contain some of the conductor’s most famous performances. So the famous one Spring ritual from 1958 (Stravinsky), which catapulted the youngest music director of the New York Philharmonic to the top, a Third Symphony (the same orchestra) that sealed Mahler’s “renaissance” in the 1960s, as well as an impressive one Symphony of the New World, by Dvorak. “Lenny” is also a pianist and conducts and plays Rhapsody in Blue by Gershwin. But as a composer he creates the originals Candide and from West Side Storyin the 1956 and 1957 Broadway versions. M.-AR
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