Geneva production of Saint-Saëns' "Ascanio" honored

On October 4, the The German Record Critics' Award 2019 annual prizes has been announced. He writes in his press release: "134 titles were proposed by the overall jury, 129 of which made it onto the longlist, 11 of which were selected for an award by the annual committee. The spectrum of styles and genres ranges from symphonic music, pop, soul, jazz, opera and contemporary electronic music to choral and world music."

One of the awards goes to the Geneva Ascanio-production. Michael Stegemann, jury member, explains the selection as follows: "Camille Saint-Saëns composed thirteen operas, but for a long time only Samson et Dalila. There are now six more on CD. The conductor Guillaume Tourniaire had already presented himself in 2008 with the one-act opera Hélène has distinguished himself as a committed and competent Saint-Saëns interpreter. With this recording of the five-act opera premiered in Paris in 1890 Ascanio he has now succeeded in rediscovering a masterpiece in a rousing, source-accurate manner. The ensemble's young soloists are excellent, and the choir and orchestra of the Geneva Conservatoire are superb. The entire range of Saint-Saëns' operatic composition can be experienced: tableaux in the style of the Grand Opéra are juxtaposed with arias and scenes, some lyrical, some dramatic, which are just as vocally diverse as the refined colorfulness of the orchestra. In the ballet music, which lasts for almost half an hour, Saint-Saëns repeatedly echoes original music from the 16th century: Ascanio - based on a novel by Alexandre Dumas - is more or less the sequel to the Benvenuto Cellini by Berlioz.

The awards (the qualitative assessments come from the annual prize jury) were given to

• the conductor Mirga Gražinytė-Tyla, her City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra and the Kremerata Baltica for the highly expressive interpretation of the symphonies op. 30 and 152 by Mieczysław Weinberg (Deutsche Grammophon)
• the composer and pianist Reinbert de Leeuw and the Collegium Vocale Gent for the beguilingly radical second recording of the Via Crucis by Franz Liszt (Alpha Classics)
• the GrauSchumacher Piano Duo and the Experimentalstudio of the SWR for the realization of the composition Le temps, mode d'emploi by Philippe Manoury, commissioned by the Wittener Tage für neue Kammermusik (Neos)
• Martin Elste and Carsten Schmidt for the Edition 2000 years of music on record. Early music anno 1930. A discological documentation of the history of interpretation (Vienna Society for Historical Recordings)
• Émile Parisien and his Émile Parisien Quartet for the captivating album Double screening (Act)
• percussionist Marilyn Mazur and her band Shamania for the extraordinarily cosmopolitan and boundary-pushing joint production Shamania (RareNoise)
• Adrian Quesada and Eric Burton aka the soul band Black Pumas for their addictive debut album Black Pumas (Ato Records)
• the Austrian band Bilderbuch for the best gift of the year: Vernissage My Heart (Maschin Records)
• Bruce Springsteen for the lilting thirteen songs of Western Stars (Sony)
• BaoBao Chen and Tim Cole and the fifty or so musicians from the Pacific islands threatened by rising sea levels, who together created the unique album Small Island Big Song have produced (CDBaby)