Everything the conductor Sir Simon Rattle touches "turns to gold". Everything except for the music dramas of Richard Wagner, that is! It has often been asserted, albeit without good reason, that Rattle and Wagner do not go together. This has now been conclusively disproved by the third collaboration between Rattle and the Symphonieorchester des Bayerischen Rundfunks, together with a team of the very best Wagner singers. This concert performance of "Das Rheingold", the first opera in Wagner's mighty tetralogy "The Ring of the Nibelung", was performed in the Herkulessaal of the Munich Residenz on April 24 and 25, 2015, and has now been brought out by BR KLASSIK on two CDs just a few months after the live event.

The BR-KLASSIK label is now taking the 75th anniversary of the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra (BRSO) in 2024 as an opportunity to make previously unreleased recordings of concerts that are worth listening to available on CD and as a stream for the first time. Hector Berlioz's passionate "Symphonie fantastique", the almost revolutionary symphonic masterpiece by the great French composer, was performed by Colin Davis with the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra at Munich’s Philharmonie im Gasteig on January 15 and 16, 1987.

After Berg, Schoenberg, Bartók and Stravinsky, Isabelle Faust now tackles Britten with Jakub Hrůša and the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra, revealing a little-known facet of the British composer. This concerto, highly personal in its language, combines drama with humour, seriousness with satire, in music of overwhelming emotional depth. The programme is completed by early chamber works.

To mark the 75th anniversary of the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra (BRSO) in 2024, the BR-KLASSIK label is now making previously unreleased recordings of concerts worth listening to available for the first time on CD and as a stream. Excerpts from Richard Strauss's comic opera "Die schweigsame Frau" (“The Silent Woman”) were pre-produced as studio recordings for a television programme in November 1960. The impressive cast was almost identical to that of the opera production at the Salzburg Festival in 1959 under the premiere conductor Karl Böhm: Hans Hotter (Sir Morosus), Hermann Prey (Barber), Fritz Wunderlich (Henry) as well as Ingeborg Hallstein (Aminta) and many others sang.

To mark the 75th anniversary of the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra (BRSO) in 2024, the BR-KLASSIK label is now making previously unreleased recordings of concerts worth listening to available on CD and as a stream. The six-part composition My Melodies for eight horns and orchestra was composed between 2016 and 2018, revised for the first time in 2019, and then again in 2023 as the musica viva Munich version. It was commissioned by Bavarian Radio’s musica viva with the support of the Friends of the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra e.V.

"Among Simon Rattle's first concert programmes as the new chief conductor of the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra was Gustav Mahler's Sixth Symphony. The performances marked the beginning of a new chapter in Mahler interpretation, for Rattle, like his predecessors Jansons, Maazel and Kubelík, is an ardent admirer of the composer. BR-KLASSIK has now released the live recording of the concerts. Gustav Mahler's Sixth Symphony is perhaps the darkest work he ever wrote – its nickname is “The Tragic”."

Superlatives should be used sparingly. Nevertheless, there is probably no work in the centuries-old genre of programme music that is easier for listeners to understand than An Alpine Symphony by Richard Strauss. Moreover, no composition in the long series of sonorous descriptions of nature, including bird calls, pastoral sounds and storm effects was probably ever scored for as many instruments as this highly eventful hike through the Werdenfelser Land in Bavaria. No orchestra in the world can, with its salaried musicians alone, present this piece the way Strauss ideally envisioned it and as he proposes in the score: the composer calls for some 130 instrumentalists, including at least 12 horn players and, ideally, even more.

The Te Deum in C major, WAB 45, is a setting of the Te Deum hymn, composed by Anton Bruckner for SATB choir and soloists, orchestra, and organ ad libitum.

The Dutch conductor Bernard Haitink and the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra were linked by a long and intensive artistic collaboration, brought to an abrupt end by his death in October 2021. BR-KLASSIK now presents outstanding and as yet unreleased live recordings of concerts from the past years. This recording of Bruckner's "Te Deum" and his Eighth Symphony (version by Robert Haas, 1939) documents concerts performed in the Philharmonie im Gasteig in November 2010, and in the Herkulessaal of the Munich Residenz in December 1993.

Following the 2015 release of "The Rhinegold" – the Vorabend or „preliminary evening“ of Richard Wagner's "The Ring of the Nibelung" – and of "The Valkyrie" in 2019, BR-KLASSIK is now releasing "Siegfried" as the second day of the enthusiastically received tetralogy under Sir Simon Rattle - recorded live on February 3 and 5, 2023 at Munich's Isarphilharmonie im Gasteig. With "The Rheingold", Rattle had already decisively refuted the longstanding claim that he and Wagner were not a good match, and with "The Valkyrie", he dispelled any remaining doubts.

The Dutch conductor Bernard Haitink and the Symphonieorchester des Bayerischen Rundfunks were linked by a long and intensive artistic collaboration, brought to an abrupt end by his death in October 2021. BR-KLASSIK now presents outstanding and as yet unreleased live recordings of concerts from the past years. This recording of Bruckner's Fourth Symphony documents concerts from January 2012 in Munich‘s Philharmonie im Gasteig.

The Dutch conductor Bernard Haitink and the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra were linked by a long and intensive artistic collaboration, brought to an abrupt end by his death in October 2021. BR-KLASSIK now presents outstanding and as yet unreleased live recordings of concerts from the past years. This recording of Mahler's Seventh Symphony documents concerts from February 2011 in Munich’s Philharmonie im Gasteig. Haitink first conducted a Munich subscription concert in 1958, and from then on he repeatedly stood on the podium of the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra – either in the Herkulessaal of the Residenz or in the Philharmonie im Gasteig.

The Indian conductor Zubin Mehta is closely associated with the city of Munich and the orchestras based there. From 1998 to 2006, he was General Music Director of the Bavarian State Opera in Munich, and has similarly close ties with the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra. The orchestra's 2018 Asian tour with Zubin Mehta was voted No. 1 in the "10 Top Concerts 2018" by Japanese critics. In January 2020, he conducted the memorial concert of the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra and Chorus for their late chief conductor Mariss Jansons. – This BR-KLASSIK CD features recordings of concerts on February 28 and March 1, 2013 in the Philharmonie im Gasteig.

For the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra, the performances on November 26 and 27, 2021 in the Isarphilharmonie marked the beginning of a new chapter in its Mahler interpretation: with its designated new principal conductor Simon Rattle, the orchestra is now headed by a Mahler admirer every bit as ardent as his predecessors Jansons, Maazel and Kubelík. The musicians dedicated the benefit concert on November 26 to the memory of conductor Bernard Haitink, who died in October 2021 and was associated with the renowned orchestra for 61 years. The very long silence after the final chord was one of those “goosebump moments” that one goes to concerts for – and for which music is made in the first place.