Sequenza21/The Contemporary Classical Music Weekly

Naxos to Launch Robert Craft Collection

News of the much-publicized death of classical music recording has apparently escaped the attention of the nice folks at Naxos. Hot on the heels of the first release in its landmark collaboration with Peter Maxwell Davies on a series of 10 string quartets, everybody's favorite high-quality, low-budget label is launching next week another exciting new relationship with the release of the first four recordings in its new Robert Craft Collection. The recordings include re-issues of Igor Stravinsky�s Oedipus Rex and Les Noces and Arnold Schoenberg�s Gurre-Lieder as well as brand new recordings of Schoenberg�s Concerto for String Quartet and music by Anton Webern.

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Craft is best known for his close personal and professional relationship with Stravinsky. The Naxos re-issues bring together on one disc Craft�s seminal recordings of Oedipus Rex and Les Noces, previously released on separate volumes.

Craft has been a consistent champion of Schoenberg and Webern as well, and he has recorded Schoenberg�s Concerto for String Quartet and Orchestra with the Twentieth Century Classics Ensemble and the Fred Sherry String Quartet specifically for Naxos� Collection.

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The Concerto for String Quartet is a freely orchestrated version of Handel�s Concerto Grosso Opus 6, No. 7 that Schoenberg completed in 1933 during a period in his career when he ambivalently reconciled his intuitive aesthetic of free atonal writing with the larger canon of musical tradition. The CD also includes the song cycle The Book of the Hanging Gardens with mezzo-soprano Jennifer Lane and pianist Christopher Oldfather, as well as a 1949 recording of Arnold Schoenberg in conversation with Halsey Stevens of the University of Southern California Music Department.

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Craft has also recorded a new CD of music by Webern, including the Symphony, Opus 21, the Concerto for Nine Instruments, performed by the Twentieth Century Classics Ensemble, and the Six Pieces for Orchestra, Opus 6 with the Philharmonia Orchestra. The 2-CD re-issue of Schoenberg�s Gurre-Lieder (1899-1911), an orchestral song cycle based on poems by Danish writer Jens Peter Jacobsen (1847-1885), earned an Editor�s Choice distinction from Gramophone as Re-issue of the Month in December.

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The Robert Craft Collection, when complete, will be a comprehensive survey of works by Stravinsky, Schoenberg, and Webern, conducted and compiled by one of the most astute authorities on twentieth century music. Naxos will release over thirty CDs in this series, four to five new volumes annually over the next five to six years. The next release in the Robert Craft Collection is a re-issue of Stravinsky�s Firebird (complete Urtext edition) and Petrushka with the Philharmonia Orchestra, scheduled for March 2005.

posted by Jerry Bowles 1/13/2005