Conductor Robert Craft Releases Four Recordings On The Naxos Label

Stravinsky and Schoenberg Recordings To be Reissued In a New Series on the Naxos Budget Label

New York, NY (PRWEB) April 9, 2005 -- The first four recordings in its new Robert Craft Collection. The recordings include re-issues of Igor Stravinskys Oedipus Rex and Les Noces and Arnold Schoenbergs Gurre-Lieder as well as brand new recordings of Schoenbergs Concerto for String Quartet and music by Anton Webern. Craft is best known for his close personal and professional relationship with Stravinsky. The Naxos re-issues bring together on one disc Crafts 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 Schoenbergs Concerto for String Quartet and Orchestra with the Twentieth Century Classics Ensemble and the Fred Sherry String Quartet specifically for Naxos Collection. The Concerto for String Quartet is a freely orchestrated version of Handels 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.

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 Schoenbergs Gurre-Lieder (1899-1911), an orchestral song cycle based on poems by Danish writer Jens Peter Jacobsen (1847-1885), earned an Editors Choice distinction from Gramophone as Re-issue of the Month in December.

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 Stravinskys Firebird (complete Urtext edition) and Petrushka with the Philharmonia Orchestra, scheduled for March 2005.

More information on these recordings can be obtained at www.robertcraft.net and by visiting the www.naxos.com or reach Tony Scafide at Generation Media; 631 846-6231/ tony@generation-media.com.

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