Thursday, February 14, 2008

New Choros Series

Here's an exciting new series coming on CD, from BIS: it will include all of the Choros series, and will feature musicians from Brazil.



The first disc, due to be released March 3rd, includes a great selection from this amazing series: #5 for piano (with Cristina Ortiz), #7 for winds, violin & cello, and #11 for piano (Ortiz) and orchestra (the São Paulo Symphony Orchestra, conducted by John Neschling). The CD # is BIS CD440. This CD hasn't showed up on Amazon.com yet (I'll add a link here when it does), but you can pre-order it at Presto Classical in the UK.

The recently completed BIS Bachianas Brasileiras series also features Brazilian artists: #1+#4+#5+#6, #7+#8+#9, and #2+#3+#4. The São Paulo Symphony Orchestra (OSESP) plays the orchestral works in this series as well, though the conductor in this series is Roberto Minczuk.

This is an encouraging trend in the world of classical music CDs: complete series (and often with a choice of more than one series) of Villa-Lobos's greatest works (Choros, BB, the piano music, the string quartets) and the not-so-great but still interesting (Symphonies), with excellent performers on enterprising labels (Naxos, BIS, cpo).

Explore on Amazon.com: Villa-Lobos Choros

Thanks to Affonso Risi in São Paulo for the heads-up on this.

2 comments:

  1. I'm a little worried. This recording of Choros 11 has 65'52 according to São Paulo Symphony Orchestra's site. It sounds too much. I have another recording with 66 minutes (by Marco Antônio de Almeida and David Machado) and it seems that the orchestra is going to stop...

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  2. In the end, the orchestra's site was wrong. The recording has just 63'07. But there are many problem of synchronization between the piano and orchestra. Indeed, Ortiz is amazing playing it, there are many elements I've never seen before, but the orchestra often fails in attacks. It's very bizarre.

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