Three Jewish Poems; Symphony in E flat major; etc

Bloch is one of those composers who is a household name among people interested in music yet whose œuvre is largely unknown to most of us. We all know that he wrote Schelomo - but what else? This disc contains three scores from three different periods of Bloch's life. The earliest, dating back to before the First World War, belongs to the same group as Schelomo, the so-called Hebrew cycle. The "Three Jewish Poems" for large orchestra was the first major work that Bloch conducted after emigrating from his native Switzerland to the USA in 1916. On his own admission, Bloch was seeking to express his understanding of Jewishness in a musical context in his cycle of Jewish works. But this is only one aspect of his musical style. In the symphonic suite Evocations, for example, he was inspired by Chinese art and other manifestations of Oriental cultures. And the symphony included on this disc, Bloch's last major composition, is strictly neo-classical in style. The up-and-coming Russian conductor Andrey Boreyko, who has been described as "one of the most exciting and dynamic conductors to emerge from Eastern Europe in recent years", appears on the BIS label for the first time.