During his short life Don Banks (1923–80) enjoyed a reputation as the leading modernist among Australian composers. Studies with Mátyás Seiber, Milton Babbitt and, especially, Luigi Dallapiccola helped refine his serial technique, but his music never retreated into academic abstraction, as this recital of chamber and vocal works demonstrates: it retained a keen sense of drama, an ear for atmosphere, a rather angular lyricism and, occasionally, a touch of humor. The works are performed by Ole Bohn, Robert Johnson, Geoffrey Gartner, Rowan Phemister, Daniel Herscovitch, Francesco Celata, Jenny Duck-Chong, Alison Pratt, Daryl Pratt, and Joshua Hill.

The award winning Aeolus Quartet offers the second installment in their Many-Sided Music Project, Ariel and Other Poems. This ongoing project collects distinctive voices of American composers, combining the classic with the modern. Ariel and Other Poems takes its name from the original title of Sylvia Plath's last manuscript. The poems contained therein include the work that inspired Christopher Theofanidis' Ariel Ascending, and joined by the rich expansive tones of the Copland, the buzzing electricity of the Mazzoli, and the deep catharsis of the Barber, the album Ariel and Other Poems seeks to offer a small sampling of the multi-faceted collection of American chamber music.

For the first time ever, a glimpse behind the scenes at the birth of a new musical comedy. Before the show could begin, production money for the budget had to be raised. And here is a unique opportunity to hear an actual backers’ audition in a fashionable East Side New York apartment with the actual songwriters performing the score. And as an added bonus, several songs were subsequently cut from the score and appear here for the first time in any medium. The extensive liner notes are written by Coleman biographer Andy Propst. Cy Coleman already could boast of hit Broadway shows such as Little Me, Seesaw, I Love My Wife and On the Twentieth Century. After the great success of Barnum, he would write the scores for the Tony Award-winning Will Rogers Follies, The Life, and others. Michael Stewart is best known for his masterful work on the libretto of Hello, Dolly! He had begun his Broadway lyric-writing career along with Cy Coleman on the hit show I Love My Wife. The two writers teamed up for their greatest success as a team, Barnum. Listening to this rare, historic recording, imagine yourself sitting in a lavish apartment plied with drinks and hors d’oeuvres and entertained by this marvelous score. Would you have invested in the show? Barnum eventually ran at the St. James Theatre for over 800 performances. It spawned a successful London production and countless regional and amateur productions since its opening night on April 30, 1980.

Cameron Greider is a guitarist, producer and composer who has worked with Joan Baez, Chris Cornell, Natalie Merchant, Sean Lennon, Freedy Johnston, Rufus Wainwright, P.M. Dawn and many others. He started on classical guitar at age 12, but soon figured out that by putting a microphone inside the instrument and hooking it up to the family stereo, he could rattle the windows of their Washington D.C. house. In 1988 he moved to New York to study at the New School Jazz and Contemporary Music program, and soon found himself playing gigs with local singer-songwriters. In 1993 he auditioned for his first tour, with alternative hip-hop group P.M. Dawn, and the next week he was playing with them on the Tonight Show. He would go on to play and co-write on their next few records.

Writing for strings led to an interest in classical music, which soon became an obsession. He went back to school at the Mannes conservatory to study music theory, piano, composition, and conducting. He enjoys writing for groups from string quartets to full orchestra and has contributed arrangements to film scores as well as pop songs. He also arranges classical pieces for his electric guitar duo with Jack Petruzzelli, High Low Duo. Jack Petruzzelli is a seasoned touring and recording musician. As a multi-instrumental performer, producer and songwriter, he has had the privilege of working with artists like Patti Smith, Ian Hunter, Joan Osborne, Rufus Wainwright and Sara Bareilles, to name a few. In the studio, Jack has collaborated with everyone from platinum artists to unknown sensations. He co-produced Joan Osborne's album Bring It On Home, which was nominated for Best Blues album of the year at the 2012 Grammy Awards.

Four years after a highly successful Bartok recording with the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra, Edward Gardner here returns to the composer on SACD, with James Ehnes as solo violinist, and his Bergen Philharmonic Orchestra. The central piece in this recording is the Concerto for Orchestra, the largest work that Bartok completed during the last five years of his life and described by the composer, in the program notes for its 1944 premiere, as ‘a gradual transition from the sternness of the first movement and the lugubrious death-song of the third, to the life-assertion of the last one.’ It is joined by the Dance Suite, the immediate predecessor, among Bartok’s few works for full orchestra without a soloist, of the Concerto for Orchestra, though by more than two decades; and by the violin Rhapsodies, the colorful folk influences of which are revealed by James Ehnes, a specialist in the repertoire, who already has recorded the complete sonatas as well as the concertos for violin and for viola to critical acclaim.

Béla Bartók’s Concerto for Orchestra, one of his greatest works, was written in the United States after the composer was forced to flee Hungary during World War II. It is not only a brilliant display vehicle for each instrumental section but a work of considerable structural ingenuity that unites classical forms and sonorities with the pungency of folk rhythms and harmonies. Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta explores darker moods through a score of marvellously poised symmetry. This release follows Marin Alsop’s ‘riveting’ (Gramophone) Baltimore Symphony recordings of Dvorák’s symphonies.

REVIEW:

Marin Alsop leads a splendid performance of the oft-recorded Concerto for Orchestra, full of character, whether in the jocular “games of pairs” second movement, the ensuing spooky elegy, or the finale that begins (seemingly) a touch reserved but takes off like a shot in the coda. It’s a memorable and wholly successful effort, excellently engineered to boot.

– ClassicsToday.com (D. Hurwitz)

All three of the works in this program reveal a young composer on the threshold of greatness, serving as his passport to the vast new world of orchestral music prevailing at the beginning of the 20th century. Inspired by the tone poems of Richard Strauss, Bartók’s Kossuth dramatically commemorates the struggle for Hungarian independence in 1848 with an alluring and provocative orchestration. The Two Portraits set moods of love and painful heartbreak into stark contrast, while the First Suite is a showcase of symphonic effects which caused a sensation in Vienna at its première in 1905.

Bela Bartok, while most widely known for his orchestral works, was also an established composer of chamber music. His music for violin has become some of the most important in the instrument’s repertoire. The three works featured on this recording have been transcribed for viola by Vidor Nagy. Vidor Nagy, accompanied by Peter Nagy and Divertimento Budapest, brilliantly performs these technically challenging works.

REVIEW:

This release...offers an excellent musical programming concept, with all three works captured live in performances that are absolutely stunning and fully competitive with the best available. Both the Bartók and Martinů pieces were composed during their respective composers’ exile in America, while Gideon Klein’s Partita (an arrangement for string orchestra of his String Trio), is the result of “internal exile” in the Terezín concentration camp. All three men found ways to continue making music despite displacement, personal misfortune, and against the background of the rise of Nazism and the onset of war. More to the point, the program works because it offers plenty of purely musical contrast and variety.

Martinů’s Memorial to Lidice, a town wiped out by the Nazis as an act of retaliation for the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich, is a harrowing but ultimately hopeful orchestral elegy that receives the most gut-wrenching performance yet recorded. Eschenbach is about 50 percent slower than Ancerl (or anyone else), but he uses the extra time to excellent effect, revealing every luminous detail of Martinů’s orchestration and building the music to a shattering climax, with Beethoven’s Fifth balefully intoned by the horns. Klein’s Partita has much in common with Bartók’s Divertimento, with its folk-inflected thematic material. Its central movement is a very attractive set of variations on a Moravian theme, and it’s clear from this performance that the Philadelphia tradition of great string playing is very much alive and well. Eschenbach leads a performance both warm and incisive, revealing a major work in the process.

The Philadelphia Orchestra already has at least two recordings of Bartók’s Concerto for Orchestra to its credit, both with Eugene Ormandy--a fine early stereo version on Sony, and a mediocre early digital remake on RCA. This newcomer clearly is finer than either of those, as exciting a rendition as any available. Eschenbach thankfully eschews the excessive slowness that has marred his recent Mahler performances and lets the various sections of the orchestra display their considerable prowess in what remains one of the repertoire’s great showpieces. Listen to the rush of excitement in the transition to the first-movement allegro, or to the beautiful balance between woodwinds and harps in the second subject; notice the brilliant brass fugato that initiates the recapitulation, and the driving coda. It’s the real deal, from the very first note.

The sonics are markedly superior to what Sony, RCA, and EMI used to get in any of the various venues that they used, at least in stereo. The microphones are close to the players, the better to reduce the occasional noise from the audience (the occasional light cough isn’t at all bothersome), but the orchestra can take the exposure, and the sonic impact is pretty thrilling. I’m pleased (and honestly relieved) to be able to recommend it to you in the strongest possible terms.

-- ClassicsToday.com (David Hurwitz)

On two highly praised albums, Susanna Mälkki and her players in the Helsinki Philharmonic Orchestra have released recordings of Béla Bartók’s three scores for the stage – The Miraculous Mandarin, The Wooden Prince and Bluebeard’s Castle, all written before 1918. The team now takes on two of his late orchestral masterpieces. Composed in 1936 for the Basel Chamber Orchestra, Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta is one of the purest examples of Bartók’s mature style, with its synthesis of folk music, classicism and modernism. One immediately striking feature is the unusual instrumentation: two string orchestras seated on opposite sides of the stage, with percussion and keyboard instruments in the middle and towards the back. In 1940, during the Second World War, Bartók emigrated to the U.S.A., where he initially found it difficult to compose. In 1943 he received a prestigious commission from the Boston Symphony Orchestra, however, and in less than eight weeks he composed the Concerto for Orchestra. In it he worked with contrasts between different sections of the orchestra, and the soloistic treatment of these groupings was his reason for calling the work a concerto rather than a symphony.

REVIEW:

There hasn’t been a coupling of these two iconic works this successful in, well, decades. Usually the pieces get divided between different performers, or if it’s the same forces throughout, one work comes off better than the other. Not here. Start with the Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta. No one (except possibly Reiner) attempts to play it at Bartók’s indicated timings–around six+ minutes per movement. Everyone is slower, and often rightly so, but sometimes rather too much slower. Mälkki sounds just about perfect: in the range of seven minutes per movement, with an eerily flowing opening fugue, a ferocious second movement Allegro, a terrifying Adagio (listen to those timpani glissandos at the bottom of the texture), and a finale that features an imaginative and characterful flexibility of tempo, highlighting its dance-like character. The Helsinki strings play with extraordinary discipline, even if some of the “special effects” such as col legno bowing could resister more strongly. Never mind. It’s a great performance.

So is that of the Concerto for Orchestra. Perhaps the best thing I can say about it is that it sounds like a genuine collaborative effort between conductor and orchestra. Mälkki keeps the music flowing, reveling in the fine ensemble that the Helsinki Philharmonic has become: the brass fugato in the first movement, the “games of pairs” in the second, or the eerie woodwind solos in the brooding Elegia–nothing here is less than world-class. In the finale, Mälkki finds an idea balance between hard-driving forward movement and precision of articulation. She also keep something especially exciting in reserve for the coda, which dashes away thrillingly. BIS has captured the entire production in powerfully present, tactile sound that really lets you hear down through the ensemble, from top to bottom. This really is an exceptional release. If you love this music, be sure to hear it.

– ClassicsToday.com (10/10; David Hurwitz)