Bartok:
Miraculous Mandarin Suite

Holst:
Ballet music from The Perfect Fool

Ravel:
La Valse

Prokofiev:
Scythian Suite

Schulhoff:
Ogelala excerpts

• After their acclaimed debut recording for ONYX of Respighi, Florent Schmitt and Hindemith, the Borusan Istanbul Philharmonic Orchestra and their charismatic Viennese music director Sascha Goetzel have devised a fascinating programme of ballet music composed during the turbulent inter-war years of the 20th century. • The music reflects the edgy, dangerous and turbulent political and social landscape of the period. This is music of great rhythmic vitality: Ravel’s refracted memories of a vanished Habsburg Vienna destroyed by the 1914–18 War, to the primitive barbarism of Prokofiev’s Scythian Suite, and the lurid violence of Bartok’s Miraculous Mandarin with its themes of lust, criminality, prostitution and murder.

• Schulhoff’s ballet Ogelala like Prokofiev’s score concerns pagan rituals and warring tribes, and a young couple who are meant to kill each other, but end up falling in love.

• Holst’s comic opera, The Perfect Fool, written in 1918–22, begins with a ballet which is danced by Spirits of Earth, Water and Fire. The score is brilliant – and though less concerned with human drama than the other works on this disc, the drive, energy and sheer brilliance of Holst’s score is very much of its time.

• This new CD is another orchestral tour de force from Sascha Goetzel and this outstanding orchestra. Reviews for ONYX 4048

• ‘The Borusan Istanbul Philharmonic Orchestra under conductor Sascha Goetzel make a tremendously exhilarating sound’ Andrew MacGregor BBC Radio 3 CD Review – 07.08.2010

• It’s good to welcome a Turkish orchestra as strong and refined as the Borusan Istanbul Philharmonic ... drawing polished playing from the orchestra, Vienna-born conductor Sascha Goetzel could hardly be more persuasive in all three works, which are treated to a brilliant, well-balanced recording to match. Gramophone – June 2010