Exclusively Available in Stereo and 5 Channel Surround Sound DSD 256, DSD 128 & DSD 64 plus Stereo DSD 512 at NativeDSD!

Award-winning Baroque violinist Rachel Podger takes the resurgence of the Arts in England post-1660 as the compelling inspiration for her new album, The Muses Restor’d . Geoff Brown from The Times has called this album one of The Best Classical Albums of 2024.

Adopting its title as its theme, Rachel and her vivacious Brecon Baroque take the listener on a journey of captivating violin-led chamber music from Jacobean to Early Georgian England. Ranging from the gentle intimacy of consort idioms to the full-blown instrumental virtuosity of the evolving Baroque period, this album uncovers little known glories of English instrumental music and its influences.

This refined and intimately chiseled chamber music celebrates a rich tradition where the violin joins a plethora of keyboards, lutes, viol and continuo cello reinstating these sonatas, fantasies, suites, grounds and popular tunes to the mainstream of English cultural life of the time. Together with four musicians from Brecon Baroque, Rachel Podger performs works by Handel, Lawes, Blow, Locke, Purcell, Schop, Jenkins, Baltzar and Jones.

Rachel Podger plays a violin made in Genoa in 1739 by Pesarinius and bow by René Groppe. Rachel
Podger is grateful for the loan of a short Baroque violin bow by Philip Brown from The Royal Academy of
Music, which she used in some of the works on this recording.

“This oeuvre provides a deeply satisfying kaleidoscope of musical expression over a century of British musical life.”
– Rachel Podger

Rachel Podger, Violin
Brecon Baroque

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Listening to these works, you can imagine J.S. Bach glancing over Emanuel’s shoulders while he wrote them as a teenager at home in Leipzig. The later sonatas, written 30 to 50 years later, reveal an emancipated composer whose developed musical language embodies the ‘Empfindsamer Stil’, the directly emotional and rhetorical style characteristic of northern-german music of the time.

Rachel Podger says “It was wonderful to delve into the specific musical world that belongs to C.P.E. Bach for this recording with Kris. These violin sonatas are (quite unfortunately!) largely overshadowed by the classical Viennese sonatas of Mozart and Beethoven. Part of his genius is that he is full of surprises and unpredictable turns, and this was hugely enjoyable for me during the musical partnership with the wonderful Kristian Bezuidenhout.”

Rachel Podger, Violin
Kristian Bezuidenhout, Harpsichord & Piano

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David Robinson was one of the first audio experts to discover and write about the virtues of the Direct Stream Digital (DSD) format.  His knowledge of DSD and the available DSD recordings on the market made him the perfect guide to DSD music for our listeners.

You can read more about him, Positive Feedback and his reasoning to select the DSD tracks in the booklet PDF. You can read the booklet with the button below the cover. It is also included in the .zip file with the DSD tracks.

NativeDSD Bundles are a mini collection of DSD albums created by the NativeDSD team that brings the works of a special artist, music label or musical genre to your personal library. Better yet, when you buy all of the albums in this bundle (in this case 3 sampler albums), NativeDSD gives you a special 40% OFF discounted price on the full bundle. Expanding your musical horizons and collection while saving money at the same time. Each DSD Bundle is a music opportunity and adventure we urge you to explore!

Positive Feedback DSD Sampler Volume 1

To create this sampler, NativeDSD invited Positive Feedback Editor In Chief Dr. David W. Robinson to select 10 DSD tracks from our catalog to celebrate the 1,000 album mark that we reached in September 2016.

David Robinson was one of the first audio experts to discover and write about the virtues of the Direct Stream Digital (DSD) format.  His knowledge of DSD and the available DSD recordings on the market made him the perfect guide to DSD for new listeners.

1. Opening Piece From Glassworks – Philip Glass (composer), Lavinia Meijer
2. Grave, Metamorphoses for Cello and Piano – Lutoslawski (composer), Elinor Frey & David Fung
3. Two Yuletide Pieces for Piano Solo – Hanson (composer), David Craighead
4. Symphony No 2: Allegro Maestoso – Mahler (composer), Iván Fischer, Budapest Festival Orchestra
5. Baubles, Bangles and Beads – Forrest (composer), Wright (composer), Bill Evans
6. Invention (from Album for Children) – Khachaturian (composer), Olga Martynova
7. Rhapsody in Blue (version for piano) – Gershwin (composer), Hyperion Knight
8. String Quartet: Quick, breathless – Matheson (composer), Color Field Quartet
9. Earth Wisdom (396 Hz) – Calderwood (comoser) Anima
10. Cantique de Noel – Adam (composer), Oscars’ Motet Choir

Positive Feedback DSD Sampler Volume 2

1. Contrapunctus 1 – Bach (composer), Rachel Podger, Brecon Baroque
2. Sym. #7 in A major, op. 92 – II. Allegretto – Lutoslawski (composer), Manfred Honeck, Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra
3. Daphnis et Chloe Part I – Ravel (composer), Gustavo Gimeno, Orchestre Philharmonique du Luxembourg
4. Debussy: Clair de Lune – Debussy (composer), Peter Halstead
5. Tchaikovsky: 1812 Festival Overture – Forrest (composer), Wright (composer), Valery Gergiev, Mariinsky Orchestra Soloists
6. Mack The Knife – Weill (composer), Louis Armstrong
7. Korppoo Trio Mov. III Finale vivace – Sibelius (composer), Sibelius Piano Trio
8. Prelude to a Kiss – Ellington (composer), Stan Getz
9. La Cathedrale engloutie – Debussy (composer), Ilya Itin

Positive Feedback DSD Sampler Volume 3 – DSD 512 Sampler

1. Italian Concerto in F Maj., BWV 971 Allegro – J.S. Bach (composer), Jory Vinikour
2. All Blues – Miles Davis (composer), Yuki Mabuchi Trio
3. Song of Alexander Nevsky – Prokofiev (composer), Thierry Fischer, Utah Symphony Orchestra
4. Light Is Calling – Michael Gordon (composer), Maya Fridman
5. Sonata F Maj. – original E-Maj. – Allegro – J.S. Bach (composer), Michala Petri, Hille Perl & Mahan Esfahani
6. C Min. Op. 67: I. Allegro con brio – Beethoven (composer), Iván Fischer, Budapest Festival Orchestra
7. Hell I – Giovanni Sollima (composer), Maya Fridman

Big thanks to Dr. David Robinson at Positive Feedback for carefully creating the third volume of the Positive Feedback DSD Sampler that highlights Stereo DSD 512 tracks.

With Volume 3, we focus attention on the even higher resolution format of Stereo DSD 512…8x DSD! We are sure that this selection of DSD 512 tracks will give you a sense of the possibilities that ultra-resolution DSD offers to the discriminating and demanding music lover and audiophile. Every effort has been made to be reasonably eclectic, but the significantly increased file size of DSD 512 tracks has limited the number of selections that Dr. Robinson could select for this new DSD 512 sampler.

Positive Feedback was the first audiophile journal to come out in support of DSD and SACD, in the fall of 1998, after visiting Mobile Fidelity’s demonstration of the new DSD technology in Sebastopol, California. (See the republication of David Robinson’s original article on DSD in Issue 1 of PF Online at https://www.positive-feedback.com/Issue1/MoFiDSD.htm)

The magazine’s support for DSD and SACD has never wavered since then and has been confirmed by developments in the audio arts and in the marketplace. Positive Feedback is a high-end audio journal that has been in publication since January of 1990. It was published with paper and ink for the first thirteen years of its existence, and then merged with Dave and Carol Clark’s magazine, Audio Musings in Southern California, and converted to fully online publication under the Positive Feedback brand by June of 2002.

With a subtitle of “A Creative Forum for the Audio Arts,” PF has been a very dynamic and wide-ranging magazine, with a large community of over 80 associated editors and writers, located online at https://www.positive-feedback.com. It currently verifies 370,000 – 400,000 readers worldwide per month and is generally recognized as a major and influential voice in the global audiophile community. It maintains a social networking presence on both Facebook and Twitter. There is no charge for visiting and reading PF, and all back issues are maintained in our online archives (https://positive-feedback.com/archive/) for easy public access.” — Dr. David Robinson, Editor In Chief, Positive Feedback

Read David’s personal notes about each track in the booklet!

Anima
Bill Evans
Brecon Baroque
Budapest Festival Orchestra
Color Field Quartet
David Craighead
David Fung
Elinor Frey
Gustavo Gimeno
Hille Perl
Hyperion Knight
Ilya Itin
Ivan Fischer
Jory Vinikour
Lavinia Meijer
Louis Armstrong
Mahan Esfahani
Manfred Honeck
Mariinsky Orchestra Soloists
Maya Fridman
Michala Petri
Olga Martynova
Orchestre Philharmonique du Luxembourg
Oscar’s Motet Choir
Peter Halstead
Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra
Rachel Podger
Sibelius Piano Trio
Stan Getz
Thierry Fischer
Utah Symphony Orchestra
Valery Gergiev
Yuko Mabuchi Trio

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Vivaldi penned more than 500 concertos. At least 214 of these are for solo violin and orchestra, but as Michael Talbot remarks, ‘scarcely a year passes without the announcement of some fresh discovery’. So, what was the ‘concerto’ to Vivaldi? What about it did he love so much to have composed so many? In the decade before Vivaldi composed Le Quattro Stagioni.

Despite what this recorded collection suggests, few of Vivaldi’s instrumental works have programmatic titles. On the whole, titles gesture towards a general mood. Il Riposo and L’amoroso are examples of this indication of Affekt – indeed, both are united in their key of gleaming E major. The case of Il Grosso Mogul is stranger. There seems to be no known link between Vivaldi and the Indian court of the Grand Mughal, Akbar. The extreme virtuosity required by the soloist in the outer movements, as well as the long, fully written-out cadenzas, suggest a theatrical function. Perhaps Vivaldi performed it as a ‘theatre concerto’ as part of an opera plot set in India. French royalty, however, did play a huge role in the reception of Le Quattro Stagioni.

Producer Jonathan Freeman-Attwood writes “Working with Rachel Podger and Brecon Baroque has been an object lesson in starting anew and identifying the ingredients which make ‘Le Quattro Stagioni’ great works. Virtuosity is non-negotiable here and Rachel has it in abundance. But it’s the color, poetry, vibrancy and evocative characterization of weather, human warmth, and fragility, captured by the dynamic flux of Rachel interlocking with her colleagues in Brecon Baroque, that deliver near-unimaginable qualities in this music.”

Rachel Podger, Violin
Brecon Baroque

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Despite what this recorded collection suggests, few of Vivaldi’s instrumental works have programmatic titles. On the whole, titles gesture towards a general mood. Il Riposo and L’amoroso are examples of this indication of Affekt – indeed, both are united in their key of gleaming E major. The case of Il Grosso Mogul is stranger. There seems to be no known link between Vivaldi and the Indian court of the Grand Mughal, Akbar. The extreme virtuosity required by the soloist in the outer movements, as well as the long, fully written-out cadenzas, suggest a theatrical function. Perhaps Vivaldi performed it as a ‘theatre concerto’ as part of an opera plot set in India. French royalty, however, did play a huge role in the reception of Le Quattro Stagioni.

Producer Jonathan Freeman-Attwood writes “Working with Rachel Podger and Brecon Baroque has been an object lesson in starting anew and identifying the ingredients which make ‘Le Quattro Stagioni’ great works. Virtuosity is non-negotiable here and Rachel has it in abundance. But it’s the color, poetry, vibrancy and evocative characterization of weather, human warmth, and fragility, captured by the dynamic flux of Rachel interlocking with her colleagues in Brecon Baroque, that deliver near-unimaginable qualities in this music.”

Rachel Podger, Violin
Brecon Baroque

The post Vivaldi: Le Quattro Stagioni (The Four Seasons) (140g Vinyl) appeared first on NativeDSD Music.

On her new recording Tutta Sola (All Alone) Rachel Podger interprets the music of twelve Baroque composers incredibly intimately. The title Tutta Sola means ‘all alone’. J.S. Bach wrote ‘sei solo’ on his title page, which can be interpreted as ‘I am alone’, or ‘all alone’. Baroque violinist Rachel Podger values the concentration that you need to have for a solo recital. She believes that there’s something incredibly intimate about it, nothing quite like it.

For this new album, Rachel Podger put together a program of selected solo violin pieces, preludes, dances and fugal movements from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries of twelve different composers. As per her philosophy that just about everything ‘starts with Bach’, so does this album. It is the world premiere recording of J.S. Bach’s famous organ Toccata and Fugue in a specially commissioned arrangement by Chad Kelly for solo violin in A minor.

Rachel Podger says “When you’re recording a solo album, you’re in a space, with your instrument, the composer, microphones, and there’s no-one else there. It’s really special and hard to describe. It feels like an honor in a way, to fill that space with my violin. During the recording sessions of Tutta Sola it happened to me multiple times that my dear producer Jonathan Freeman-Attwood or recording engineer Jared Sacks of Channel Classics would suddenly say something over the speaker, and I would be slightly shocked – “Oh right! You are here too!” – from having been in such deep concentration. I felt so close to the composers. There’s nothing quite like it, and it’s a privilege.”

Rachel Podger – Violin

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• Fragments composed by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, completed by Timothy Jones.

• First collaboration of Rachel Podger with Grammy Award-winning pianist Christopher Glynn on Channel Classics.

• Each Sonata Fragment comes with two different completions. The Fantasia with one completion.

Baroque violinist Rachel Podger and Grammy Award winning pianist Christopher Glynn have recorded an album of previously unfinished Mozart violin sonatas, completed by Professor Timothy Jones. This album of world premiere recordings features four particularly beautiful fragments for violin and piano that were left incomplete following Mozart’s untimely death. Alongside their careers as celebrated musicians, performers, and educators, all three artists hold senior teaching positions at the Royal Academy of Music.

With the release of Mozart/Jones: Violin Sonatas Fragment Completions, Rachel continues her Mozart Sonatas series that began in 2004. This ninth disc concludes the highly acclaimed project, and it is Rachel’s 27th release for Channel Classics Records produced by Academy Principal, Professor Jonathan Freeman-Attwood.

Describing the completion process, Professor Timothy Jones said:

“(…) At the heart, I wanted to see what would happen if I tried to ‘perform’ the notation in the same way that it seems Mozart did – to write very fast and in a particular hierarchical way; if I paid detailed analytical attention to the immediate stylistic context of each fragment; and, noting that Mozart never repeats himself, if I applied the principle of stylistic models, not their letter. Of course, I have no idea how Mozart might have worked these fragments into finished pieces. So an important part of the project was to undertake multiple completions of each fragment (…)”

Watch the Mini Documentary about this fascinating Mozart project. With Rachel Podger, Christoper Glynn, Timothy Jones and Jonathan Freeman-Attwood.

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