Warner Classics & Erato releases: January 2025
Highlights:
- Orchestre Philharmonique de France on live world premiere of Rufus Wainwright‘s Dream Requiem, narrated by Meryl Streep
- Mezzo-soprano Malena Ernman joins Christina Pluhar and L’Arpeggiata
- CD releases of Vivaldi’s “Lost Concerto,” as reconstructed by Giovanni Sollima, and Maria soundtrack album, featuring Maria Callas herself
- Bertrand Chamayou‘s Ravel and Jacqueline du Pré‘s Saint-Saëns and Delius, now on LP
- Dresden Philharmonic performs Shostakovich 15 on Bluray
New titles
Dream Requiem
Rufus Wainwright, composer
Meryl Streep, narrator
Anna Prohaska, soprano
Choeur et Maîtrise de Radio France
Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio France / Mikko Franck
CD / LP / digital
Release date: Jan 17
Audio (download) – Assets – Linkfire
Warner Classics releases the live recording from the world premiere of Dream Requiem, an epic new work for orchestra, chorus, soprano, and narrator by musical polymath Rufus Wainwright. Co-commissioned by major cultural institutions in the U.S., UK, and Europe, the work premiered in Paris in June 2024 with multi-award-winning actor Meryl Streep as narrator. Dream Requiem was written during the pandemic and is, in Wainwright’s own words, a requiem “for the people we have lost in this crisis, for the past from which we are cut off and for the future to which we do not yet know how to connect, a Requiem for human contact, solidarity, and the human voice that have all become dangerous and contagious.” Dream Requiem will receive its U.S. premiere on May 4, 2025 at Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles in a performance featuring the Los Angeles Master Chorale, narrator Jane Fonda, soprano Liv Redpath, and the Los Angeles Children’s Chorus.
Terra Mater
L’Arpeggiata / Christina Pluhar
Malena Ernman, mezzo-soprano
CD / digital
Release date: Jan 31
Audio (streaming) – Assets
The newest album from Christina Pluhar and L’Arpeggiata is a hymn to nature featuring the Swedish mezzo-soprano Malena Ernman, mother of climate activist Greta Thunberg. The program spans Baroque repertoire, traditional music, and improvisations, ranging from “Crude furie degli orridi abissi” from Handel’s Serse to a traditional folk song: “The Taylor and the Mouse.” The release marks L’Arpeggiata’s 25th anniversary.
Maria – Original Motion Picture Soundtrack
Maria Callas, soprano
Angelina Jolie, actor
CD / LP / digital
Release date: Jan 17 (physical)
Audio – Assets – Images – Linkfire
Following its digital release in November 2024, Warner Classics issues the original motion picture soundtrack album of Maria, directed by Pablo Larraín and starring Academy Award winner Angelina Jolie, on CD and vinyl. Maria was released on Nov 27 in the U.S., streams on U.S. Netflix from Dec 11, and comes to UK cinemas on Jan 10.
In the film, to intensify the sense of audio-visual verisimilitude, Angelina Jolie’s singing voice is “blended” with that of Maria Callas. However, on the original soundtrack album, produced by John Warhurst, the voice heard is pure Callas. In addition to the soprano’s original audio recordings, the soundtrack also features select spoken dialogue and scenes taken directly from the film.
[NB: This album was first released digitally on Nov 29.]
Al-Bunduqiyya – The Lost Concerto
Giovanni Sollima, composer and cellist
Federico Guglielmo, violinist
Il Pomo d’Oro
CD
Release date: Jan 10
Audio – Assets – Linkfire
Al-Bunduqiyya: The Lost Concerto sets Vivaldi in the context of his native city’s historic relationship with the eastern Mediterranean and Asia. Al-Bunduqiyya is the Arabic name for Venice and “The Lost Concerto” (Il Concerto Perduto) is a work composed by Giovanni Sollima in 2021, inspired by the only surviving fragment – the orchestral viola part – of a Vivaldi cello concerto in E minor. The album also features complete concertos by Vivaldi, solo improvisations by Sollima, a piece by Vivaldi’s long-lived contemporary Tartini, and music of the Cypriot and Albanian traditions.
[NB: This album was first released digitally in March.]
Catalogue vinyl
Ravel: The Complete Works
Bertrand Chamayou, piano
3 LPs (re-release)
Release date: Jan 24
Artwork
The 150th anniversary of Ravel’s birth falls in 2025. To mark the sesquicentennial, Bertrand Chamayou’s 2016 recording of Ravel’s complete piano works – hailed as “revelatory performances of breathtaking beauty and incomparable power” (Gramophone) – will be re-released as a special three-LP set.
Saint-Saёns / Delius Cello Concertos
Jacqueline du Pré, cello
LP (re-release)
Release date: Jan 24
Artwork
To commemorate what would have been Jacqueline du Pré’s 80th birthday on Jan 26, Warner Classics releases her recordings of Camille Saint-Saëns’s first Cello Concerto – led by her husband, Daniel Barenboim – and Frederick Delius’s less familiar Cello Concerto, conducted by Sir Malcolm Sargent.
Warner Classics re-released du Pré’s 1968 EMI studio recording of the Saint-Saëns Concerto on LP a few years ago, but the live recording heard here was made three years later, in 1971, with the Philadelphia Orchestra in its home city. This marks the first time this recording has been released on vinyl.
Partner labels: EuroArts
Shostakovich: Symphony No. 15
Dresdner Philharmonie / Michael Sanderling
Bluray
Release date: Nov 15
Artwork
Recorded in 2019, this performance of Shostakovich’s 15th Symphony by the Dresden Philharmonic also includes a 14-minute interview with conductor Michael Sanderling. This release marks the first time this performance has been made available on Bluray.