September 20, 2019

Newly released on Naxos Records: Leonard Slatkin’s recordings of works by Maurice Ravel and Aaron Jay Kernis.

Maurice Ravel Orchestral Works, Volume 6 with the Orchestre National de Lyon includes the Piano Concerto for the Left Hand and the Piano Concerto in G Major with soloist François Dumont, as well as Tzigane with violinist Jennifer Gilbert. As critic David Denton averred in his favorable review of the album, “The inner orchestral detail [in Ravel’s Piano Concerto in G Major]—even in moments only just audible—does owe something to the recording engineers, but more so to the conductor, Leonard Slatkin, and his outstanding orchestral soloists. More gorgeous sonorities in the following Adagio are a prelude to a display of Dumont’s agility in the finale.”

 

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The world premiere recording of composer Aaron Jay Kernis’s Flute Concerto with soloist Marina Piccinini, for whom it was written, features Slatkin leading the Peabody Symphony Orchestra. The album also includes Slatkin conducting Kernis’s Air (version for flute and orchestra), which the composer describes as a “love letter to the flute,” and Marin Alsop conducting Kernis’s Second Symphony.