Sony Classical News

Sony Classical releases OPERATION FINALE (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack) with original music byAcademy Award winner Alexandre Desplat (The Shape of Water, The Grand Budapest Hotel). The soundtrack will be available for streaming, download and on CD August 24, 2018. Metro Goldwyn Mayer Pictures (MGM) will distribute Operation Finale theatrically on August 29, 2018.

Analogue, digital, acoustic and synthetic sonorities seamlessly intermingle in this luminous collaboration between Atlanta-based duo vocalist/composer Hanna Benn (Son Lux, Boots) and percussionist/composer/producer Deantoni Parks (John Cale, Sade, T Bone Burnett, Flying Lotus). Procession explores the spiritual and emotional core of ceremonial music in the form of a song cycle, with new arrangements by Benn featuring her ethereal vocal textures elevated by electronic flourishes, and anchored by Park's ceaselessly kinetic rhythms alongside an SPCO string quintet of Maureen Nelson, Nick Tavani, David Auerbach, Rebecca Merblum and Zachary Cohen. This world premiere for chamber ensemble marks the Twin Cities debut of Benn and Parks as a duo. Join us to step into this truly numinous sanctum of sound.

Sony Classical honors the great Leonard Bernstein with a celebration of what would have been the cultural icon's 100 th birthday. Bernstein, an American composer, conductor, pianist, writer, humanitarian, and twentieth-century pop-culture icon will be celebrated with a two-month social media and streaming campaign built around a new rollout of his popular legacy of recordings that are part of Sony Classical's library.

The Croatian duo of Luka Sulic and Stjepan Hauser, better known as 2CELLOS, return this Fall with an all-new album, Let There Be Cello, set for release October 19 via Sony Music Masterworks. A follow-up to the 2017 release of Score, Let There Be Cello finds the pair exploring a diverse catalogue with their signature boundary-breaking playing style. Preorder for the album is available everywhere now.

The first ever collection of George Szell's Complete Recordings for Columbia Masterworks on 106 CDs is now available thanks to Sony Classical. The collection features symphonies, overtures and other orchestral works, concertos and chamber music, recorded from 1946 to 1969, 92 recordings remastered from the original analogue tapes using 24 bit / 192 kHz technology.

Mark your concert calendars for an extraordinary weekend at Music Mountain, America's longest running summer chamber music festival! The incomparable pianist, Peter Serkin performs Bach, Mozart, and Beethoven with four guest artists on Sunday, September 2 (3pm) as part of Music Mountain's Labor Day Benefit Concert & Reception. The weekend gets off to a celebratory start on Saturday, September 1 (6:30pm) with Gabriel Alegria Afro-Peruvian Sextet playing the rhythm-saturated sounds of Latin jazz! Concerts are scheduled through September 23.

Sony Classical proudly announces the release of PUZZLE (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack) with original music by Oscar and Golden Globe nominee Dustin O'Halloran. The soundtrack is available July 27. The movie opens in U.S. theaters on the same day.

“In the heyday of George Szell's tenure as its chief conductor,” declared Gramophone, “The Cleveland Orchestra had few if any peers among the world's great orchestras.” Coinciding with the orchestra's Centennial birthday in December 2018, Sony Classical is excited to announce one of the most ambitious reissue projects of recent times, a comprehensive collection of the Clevelanders' recordings made under the baton of their iconic fourth music director. These span the period between 1947 – a year after Szell inherited a rising national ensemble from Erich Leinsdorf and began transforming it into the elite ensemble it remains to this day – and 1969, a year before his sudden death shocked the musical world. Born in Budapest in 1897, Szell's dream was to create an ensemble that combined “the Americans' purity and beauty of sound and their virtuosity of execution with the European sense of tradition, warmth of expression and sense of style,” in the words of his biographer Michael Charry. That he fulfilled that dream is amply documented in the huge discography that fills Sony's new edition of 106 CDs, “recordings that are prized for their stylistic rightness, clarity of structure, rhythmic tension, and transparency of texture” (The New Yorker).

The Original Cast Recording from the hit musical comedy Desperate Measures is available digitally today from Masterworks Broadway, with the CD set for release August 10. With music by David Friedman (Listen to My Heart) and lyrics by Peter Kellogg (Anna Karenina), the album is produced by Robert Sher with liner notes by Peter Filichia. Described by the Huffington Post as 'a good old-fashioned musical comedy... a happy surprise of a show filled with enjoyable songs,' Desperate Measures is currently running at New World Stages in New York City.

One of the most acclaimed and distinctive film composers of his generation, four-time Academy Award nominee Danny Elfman collaborates once again with director Gus Van Sant with his original score for Van Sant's new Amazon Studios film Don't Worry, He Won't Get Far on Foot. Opening nationwide July 13, the film is a based on John Callahan, one of the most iconic American cartoonists, and his one-of-a-kind story of struggle and redemption. Sony Classical releases the film's original soundtrack recording on July 13.

On a sweltering night in June 2017, this was unquestionably the hottest ticket in town. Opera lovers thronged to the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden to hear tenor Jonas Kaufmann, recently acclaimed by The Daily Telegraph as “the world's greatest tenor,” make his eagerly anticipated role debut as Otello – Verdi's greatest and most demanding role for tenor voice.

Sony Music Entertainment CEO Rob Stringer today announced the relaunch of Arista Records under the leadership of highly regarded music industry executive David Massey.

Next month, FEINSTEIN'S/54 BELOW, Broadway's Supper Club & Private Event Destination, presents some of the brightest stars from Broadway, cabaret, jazz, and beyond.

FEINSTEIN'S/54 BELOW, Broadway's Supper Club, presents The Igor Butman Quintet straight out of Moscow for the beginning of their US summer tour. Igor Butman leads the Igor Butman Quintet, with five of Russia's top jazz soloists. Since 1999, the band has become Russia's hottest jazz unit.

Yo-Yo Ma will release Six Evolutions - Bach: Cello Suites (Sony Classical), his third and final recording of these works, on August 17, 2018. The album is available now for preorder, including a 3-LP 180-gram vinyl set, and the Bourrées from Suite No. 3 can be heard now on all digital service providers.

Advance tickets go on sale today for the Richard Tucker Music Foundation's annual gala concert, one of the most highly anticipated operatic events of the season. Coming to Carnegie Hall's Stern Auditorium / Perelman Stage on Sunday, October 21 at 6pm, the concert features bass-baritone Christian Van Horn, winner of the 2018 Richard Tucker Award, with a host of opera luminaries from around the world: soprano Anna Netrebko, tenors Javier Camarena and Yusif Eyvazov, and five past Tucker Award-winners: sopranos Christine Goerke, Angela Meade, and Nadine Sierra; mezzo-soprano Stephanie Blythe; and tenor Michael Fabiano. This starry lineup will join forces for an evening of favorite arias and ensembles under the baton of Marco Armiliato, with the support of the New York Choral Society and members of the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra. The gala concert is presented by the Richard Tucker Music Foundation.

The Chicago Gargoyle Brass and Organ Ensemble will celebrate French music of the late-19th and early 20th centuries at 3 p.m. on Sunday, June 24, 2018, at St. John Cantius Church, 825 N. Carpenter St., Chicago, featuring, as guest artists, the church's resident organists on a historic instrument ideally suited to the repertoire.

Sony Classical celebrates the 2018 centenary of Leonard Bernstein – one of the 20th century's most celebrated, multi-faceted and influential musicians – with a box set devoted to his complete RCA Victor and Columbia Masterworks recordings as pianist in a limited original jacket collection. Leonard Bernstein – The Pianist, 11 CDs in a clamshell box with booklet, is a fitting tribute to the man whom Arthur Rubinstein called “the greatest pianist among conductors, the greatest conductor among composers, and the greatest composer among pianists.”

Electro-folk band, Tall Heights release their latest single, 'The Deep End'. After only finishing their 40-date US Winter/Spring tour with Judah & the Lion and Colony House last month, Tall Heights kicks off their summer with 30+ new tour dates and festival stops beginning June 2; sharing the stage with acts like Magic Giant, Ben Folds, and CAKE. Beginning today, the band is offering fans a chance to win a free pair of tickets to their North American tour dates via contest app, Tunespeak.

National Endowment for the Arts Chairman Jane Chu has approved more than $80 million in grants as part of the NEA's second major funding announcement for fiscal year 2018.  Included in this announcement is an Art Works grant of $40,000 to Orpheus Chamber Orchestra to launch a 2019 nationwide tour and further their education and community initiatives. The Art Works category is the NEA's largest funding category and supports projects that focus on the creation of art that meets the highest standards of excellence, public engagement with diverse and excellent art, lifelong learning in the arts, and/or the strengthening of communities through the arts.