This outstanding new live recording brings together groundbreaking works by Arnold Schoenberg and Dmitri Shostakovich, two of the twentieth century’s most monumental composers. Arnold Schoenberg’s...

This outstanding new live recording brings together groundbreaking works by Arnold Schoenberg and Dmitri Shostakovich, two of the twentieth century’s most monumental composers. Arnold Schoenberg’s Kol Nidre is set to the Jewish prayer which is said on the eve of Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement. The work premiered in Los Angeles in 1938, four years after Schoenberg fled Europe, and one month before the anti-Jewish Kristallnacht took place across Nazi-occupied Germany. Philip Huscher described the work as a “stark, strong modernist statement.” Shostakovich’s Suite on Versees of Michelangelo Buona explores themes just as weighty, including love, morality, death, and the resilience of the human spirit, all shown through the poetry of Renaissance great, Michelangelo. The work was originally conceived to honor Michelangelo’s 500th birthday. The Chicago Tribune commented on these performances, “Such was his textual penetration that [Abdrazakov] was able to extract the full emotional weight of the words and music, abetted by Muti’s finely detailed exposition of the spare orchestral fabric.”