Vladimir Jurowski

January 28, 2013 at PST

Beethoven: Concerto No. 5 & Piano Sonata No. 28

Beethoven’s colossal contribution to music resulted in every form he tackled being extended, developed, and re-invented—and these two works are proof. His most famous piano concerto, No. 5, the Emperor Concerto, crowns his so-called Middle Period, and his Piano Sonata No. 28 (of 32) belongs to a group that transformed the piano sonata into something epic and exploratory. French pianist Hélène Grimaud offers performances marked by delicacy, power, drive, and a sense of inevitability: a very modern-sounding Beethoven.

7 Tracks

September 30, 2010 at PDT

Holst: The Planets

This epic Planets suite gains extra power in thrilling Spatial Audio.

7 Tracks

May 14, 2020 at PDT

Elgar

Nicola Benedetti joins that small group of violinists who have given us really special recordings of Elgar’s concerto. Accompanied by an orchestra with this music flowing in its veins—it played for Nigel Kennedy’s now-classic version— and a conductor whose attention to the score’s myriad details never stands in the way of the work’s vast panoramas, Benedetti rises magnificently to the challenge. She achieves moments of great inwardness when needed, but sings out like a lark when the music demands it. It’s a very considerable achievement, and shows what a superb, mature musician she has blossomed into. Delightful encores too!

6 Tracks

December 31, 1962 at GMT-8

Mahler: Symphony No. 4

4 Tracks

August 31, 2012 at PDT

Tchaikovsky: Symphonies Nos. 4 & 5

8 Tracks

December 31, 2011 at PST

Prokofiev: Violin Sonata No. 1, Violin Concerto No. 2 & Sonata for 2 Violins

The Sonata for Two Violins in C Major was composed during a 1932 holiday on the French Riviera. Janine Jansen and Boris Brovtsyn find glorious colors in the writing, bringing a rich expressiveness to this rarely heard work. In the Violin Concerto No. 2, Jansen proves herself yet again a terrific Prokofiev interpreter, her strong, individual performance supported by Jurowski and the LPO in coruscating form. Perhaps the highlight of this album, however, is Jansen and Itamar Golan’s performance of the Violin Sonata No. 1, a work of bittersweet beauty, parts of which were performed at the composer’s funeral in 1953. The two players are perfectly attuned to its strange, quirky atmosphere and inhabit every bar with total commitment—right up to the finale’s manic closing pages.

11 Tracks

October 31, 2019 at PDT

Tchaikovsky: The Nutcracker

23 Tracks

November 14, 2019 at PST

Jurowski Conducts Mozart Wind Concertos

9 Tracks

August 29, 2024 at PDT

Bruckner: Symphony No. 7

Anton Bruckner had to wait an age before bagging his first and greatest success. The Austrian composer’s Seventh Symphony, first performed in Leipzig in 1884 shortly after his sixtieth birthday, proved an immediate hit. Vladimir Jurowski’s visionary interpretation of the work with the Berlin Radio Symphony Orchestra, recorded live at the Berlin Philharmonie, stands as the utterly compelling outcome of the conductor’s profound study and long experience of performing Bruckner’s music. He’s backed to the hilt by superlative playing, remarkable for its intense focus, lyrical warmth, and jaw-dropping beauty.

Although the score escaped the byzantine process of revision that Bruckner habitually applied to his works, its first edition included changes made after the symphony’s premiere. Jurowski decided to use the subsequent edition made by Robert Haas in the 1940s, to which he added elements from later scholarly editions, the cymbal crash and percussion at the climax of the work’s slow movement among them.

The business of Bruckner editions, he tells Apple Music Classical, sets a minefield for conductors. “And it’s also a minefield, particularly with this symphony, to establish your own handwriting in interpreting it or not over-interpreting it, allowing the music to speak with its own voice. What helps in my relationship with Bruckner is the fact that I’ve been marching along a self-chosen route by performing his symphonies chronologically, doing them version by version, in the order in which they were written.”

The Seventh Symphony, notes Jurowski, is less experimental, certainly less radical in style than its predecessors, at least until the work’s finale where Bruckner the organist takes center stage. “The solo organist in him suddenly starts speaking out. And he becomes a master improviser, but instead of an organ, he has the full symphony orchestra at his disposal.

“It struck me as remarkable, and also strange, that of the many wonderful interpretations of this symphony on record very few, if any, take his tempo indications in the final movement seriously. They are the opposite of decoration; they’re form building. The finale is the least predictable and the most inventive, the most interesting movement, without which the whole building of Bruckner’s symphonic thought is impossible to comprehend.”

Bruckner began work on his Seventh Symphony following a visit to Bayreuth to hear the premiere of Wagner’s opera Parsifal. His reverence for the man he called “the Master” surfaces in the Seventh’s solemn slow movement, which opens with a quartet of Wagner tubas and was completed as a memorial composition after Bruckner received news of Wagner’s death.

Vladimir Jurowski cautions against exaggerating the Seventh Symphony’s association with Wagner. “In a way, it’s some kind of anti-Wagner creation,” he says. “He uses certain [Wagnerian] sonorities, but there it ends. And also he uses them extremely sparingly. Look at how he uses the Wagner tubas, which always sound like a voice from another dimension, the voice of eternity. I insisted in our performance that the tubas should sit separately from the horns. That makes their appearance special, particularly in the finale where they’re rarely used.”

Beyond devoting hours in rehearsal to details of balance, blend, and intonation, Jurowski employed vivid imagery to describe how he wanted certain passages to sound. “I was trying to get my violins to perform the opening of the finale in a certain way,” he recalls, “and found there was too much forward-thrusting marching about their playing. ‘Forget about the march,’ I said. ‘It’s not a march.’ Searching for a metaphor, I said, ‘Well, it’s like angels beating their wings. Just imagine the weight of these wings. It would be like a butterfly’s weight, no more than that. Maybe there’s an archangel amongst them, but definitely no archbishop!’ They laughed and that’s when things began going in the right direction.”

Inside the Album Booklet
The booklet liner notes take an in-depth journey into the cultural and musical context of Bruckner’s Symphony No. 7, alongside its Wagnerian influences, plus there are photos of the Berlin Radio Symphony Orchestra during recording sessions.

Album booklets are available in version 2.0 of Apple Music Classical, which you can download now and enjoy as part of your Apple Music subscription. To access booklets, tap on the book icon at the top of your screen.

4 Tracks

January 31, 2016 at PST

Rachmaninoff: Symphony No. 3 & 10 Songs (Live)

13 Tracks

August 31, 2009 at PDT

Tchaikovsky: Symphonies Nos. 1 & 6

8 Tracks

May 28, 2020 at PDT

Shostakovich: Violin Concertos 1 & 2

In the aftermath of Russia’s Great Patriotic War with Nazi Germany, once the rejoicing and relief had subsided, it was inevitable that national and personal trauma would find expression in the arts. Shostakovich channeled his troubles and those of the age into his First Violin Concerto, completed in 1948 but shelved until after the death of the tyrannical Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin in 1953.

Alina Ibragimova probes the work’s unsettling blend of soul-searching, irony, and pathos to uncover its rarely glimpsed, deeply moving poetic essence, mined here from the original score. She’s backed to the hilt by the State Academic Symphony Orchestra and Vladimir Jurowski, who bring out the concerto’s heft. Shostakovich’s introspective Second Violin Concerto also flourishes thanks to the focused eloquence of Ibragimova’s lyrical playing and purity of tone.

7 Tracks

October 13, 2013 at PDT

Stravinsky, Prokofiev: Concertos

8 Tracks

August 10, 2023 at PDT

Strauss: Also sprach Zarathustra

Vladimir Jurowski’s absorbing vision of Richard Strauss’ Also sprach Zarathustra serves notice of nature’s ultimate power, driving the work forward with irresistible dramatic force while preserving its lyrical voice. The conductor, informed by his profound feeling for the work’s unsettling decadence as well as its portrayal of heroic human striving, shapes a compelling performance, superbly played by Berlin’s Rundfunk-Sinfonieorchester and blessed with richly detailed yet warm recorded sound.

While dark emotions run deep and clear throughout this interpretation, there’s no want of romantic bravado or delicious playfulness about the music-making, especially so in the bustling dialogue between solo violin and orchestra in “Das Tanzlied” (“The Dance-Song”). Jurowski and his Berlin players draw out the work’s emotional contrasts with great empathy, expressing heightened states of longing, joy, and grief with edge-of-the-seat conviction.

9 Tracks

August 12, 2021 at PDT

Strauss: Eine Alpensinfonie (Live)

22 Tracks

May 31, 2018 at PDT

Strauss: Alpine Symphony, Die Frau ohne Schatten & Dance of the Seven Veils

31 Tracks

March 31, 2017 at PDT

Beethoven: Overture, Fidelio & Symphony No. 3 (Live)

5 Tracks

March 14, 2019 at PDT

Rachmaninoff: Symphony No. 1 & Isle of the Dead

5 Tracks

December 31, 1962 at GMT-8

Mahler: Symphony No. 2

7 Tracks

October 29, 2018 at PDT

Tchaikovsky: Swan Lake

51 Tracks

September 30, 2018 at PDT

Tchaikovsky: Symphonies Nos. 2 & 3 (Live)

9 Tracks

September 30, 2018 at PDT

Tchaikovsky: Symphonies Nos. 2 & 3 (Live)

9 Tracks

September 2, 2021 at PDT

Jurowski Conducts Mahler's Symphony No. 8 (Live)

26 Tracks

April 27, 2023 at PDT

Jurowski Conducts Stravinsky, Vol. 2 (Live)

15 Tracks