The Royal Philharmonic Orchestra has partnered with harmonia mundi to release recordings of great symphonic repertoire with our Music Director, Vasily Petrenko.

Our first release, Rachmaninoff's The Bells and Elgar's Falstaff, is now available to stream or purchase. Future planned releases include the music of Strauss, Bartók and Stravinsky.

Rachmaninoff's The Bells and Elgar's Falstaff

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Vasily Petrenko Conductor 
Mirjam Mesak Soprano
Pavel Petrov Tenor
Andrii Kymach Baritone
Philharmonia Chorus
Royal Philharmonic Orchestra

To inaugurate our collaboration with harmonia mundi, Vasily Petrenko and the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra have recorded a programme as subtle as it is unexpected, with two seldom-heard masterpieces of 1913. We think of 1913 as the year that saw the premieres of two monumental and spectacularly disruptive works: Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring and Schoenberg’s Gurrelieder. Yet behind these two giant sequoias, a less attention-seeking tract of woodland can be discerned. Two striking yet very different examples are Elgar’s symphonic poem Falstaff and Rachmaninoff’s cantata The Bells – the one, satirical and ambivalent, the other lyrical and funereal. Yet each in its way extended the life of a dying romanticism by pushing it beyond its boundaries.

Somehow, both composers came to embody the musical spirit of their nations. Contemporary critics occasionally grumbled that Rachmaninoff’s music sounded ‘western’ or ‘cosmopolitan’, and even today it’s often remarked that Elgar’s musical language belongs to the world of Wagner and Richard Strauss, rather than the folk-music collectors who were trying to create a distinctly ‘English’ music at around the same time. And yet, in times of anxiety and emotion, many Russian listeners turn instinctively to Rachmaninoff, just as it is Elgar’s melodies (not all those admittedly lovely folk songs) that British listeners describe as their ‘second national anthem’. ‘I am folk music!’ said Elgar, with pride – and had Rachmaninoff been able to return to Russia and see how much his music was loved, he might have said much the same thing.