In April, the United Kingdom celebrated the birthday of the longest serving monarch in British history. This release is the perfect soundtrack to the celebrations. Some of Britain’s most popular artists and ensembles have gathered together for this two-disc set, which includes patriotic anthems and popular tunes. Musicians include Russell Watson, Jonathan and Charlotte, The Band of H.M. Royal Marines, The Choir of Trinity College Cambridge, and The Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra.

Multi-award-winning violinist Kelly Hall-Tompkins is the entrepreneurial spirit behind Music Kitchen, the pioneering project that brings top classical music and musicians into homeless shelters, sharing the inspirational, therapeutic, and uplifting power of music with those experiencing homelessness. Founded in New York City, Music Kitchen has presented over 100 concerts to more than 30,000 homeless shelter clients coast to coast, including in Los Angeles, Cincinnati, Oakland, Rochester, and internationally in Paris, France. According to the New York Times, “The concerts have an air of authenticity and directness that sometimes does not exist in concert halls.”

Forgotten Voices is a song cycle commissioned by Music Kitchen – Food for the Soul, with support from Carnegie Hall, comprising works by 15 of today’s foremost composers featuring evocative and poignant texts by homeless shelter clients that have provided a profound source of inspiration and reverence. Forgotten Voices premiered to a sold-out Carnegie Hall audience in March 2022 and inspired a short film that has won multiple awards at festivals around the globe, including Winner: Best Cause-Driven Film and Finalist: Best Director and Best Documentary at the Cannes World Film Festival, Winner: Best Short Film at the Los Angeles Documentary Film Festival, and Winner: Best Short Documentary at the Berlin Indie Film Festival.

REVIEWS:

Violinist Kelly Hall-Tompkins is the entrepreneurial spirit behind Music Kitchen and the composer of one of the songs. She and 5 other string players, supply accompaniment to the 4 singers. I presume it is she who plays so nimbly in `Music Kitchen Interplay’ by Ellen Taaffe Zwilich with a text from a client who is amazed at what a violin can do and who gives thanks for how Music Kitchen “was a blessing to my hungry body and soul”.

The longest song of the album, Jeffrey Scott’s `Für Mein Vater’, is a setting of the poet’s fond remembrance of his father’s love of Mozart and Brahms, which was rekindled by hearing Music Kitchen perform it. It is sung sensitively by Allison Charney. Each time I listen to these songs I hear something new to like.

The program ends sublimely with Paul Moravec’s `Music is Love’. The words offer a strong statement about the values of this project and of music itself: “Music is love. It’s freedom, awakening. Music is universal. Music unites us all. Music expands our horizons. Classical music enables you to discover yourself.” After about a 20-second pause the song is repeated in a longer version for all four singers in harmony. I suspect this was sung as an encore at the concert. These final two tracks are especially lovely.

Each of the songs brings a message of gratitude or hope even in the midst of personal struggle. Collectively the album conveys consolation and the healing power of love. The songs call for excellent string playing, and these folks produce it brilliantly. The two sopranos sing with great expression and are especially poignant in their softer singing...Blumberg...begins the program with a tender reading of Steve Sandberg’s `Thank You’. Songs texts are included, though they are hardly needed—the singers’ diction is very clear most of the time. I find the songs appealing. I find the mission of Music Kitchen even more appealing.

-- American Record Guide

The Amsterdam-based recorder quintet has done it again: an original concept, featuring several first recordings, and superb performances which confirm them among the top-tier of today’s early-music chamber ensembles. The present album arises from a concert devised in 2018 for a festival in Bruges celebrating notable female figures from history.

Seldom Sene chose to focus on Margaret of Austria (1480–1530), who was governor of the Habsburg Netherlands for almost 20 years. Margaret had grown up with the benefits of a first-class education afforded to very few of her female peers: she was adept in all the humanities, and her library of books was reckoned one of the most extensive and learned at the time, a fit place to welcome distinguished guests such as Albrecht Dürer. From around 1515, one of the volumes in Margaret’s library was her newly commissioned personal songbook: a collection of 55 chansons and motets, richly decorated with high-quality miniatures and initials.

Many of the song texts speak of loss, sorrow and loneliness, perhaps reflecting her status at the time as a noble widow, following the death of her second husband, Philibert II of Savoy, in 1504. Margaret herself seems to have written several of them, and may also have been involved in their musical setting. Marian devotion is another theme of the songbook reflected in this selection made and transcribed and recorded by Seldom Sene. Sacred hymns are balanced out by secular laments, but also lighter and more cheerful numbers such as ‘Brunette m’amiette‘ and ‘La jonne dame’. Many of the composers are now lost to us and effectively anonymous, but the names that survive are worthy of Margaret’s elevated status, including Josquin and Pierre de la Rue.

‘Like Margaret,’ concludes María Martínez Ayerza in her booklet note, ‘like her courtiers and visitors, we see and hear the music and texts in this songbook and we are moved, stirred. These artworks make us change, as we relate the texts, even the titles, and the rather abstract beauty of the music to ourselves.’ Ayerza and her colleagues in Seldom Sene bring this music and Margaret’s world back to life with intense sympathy. The album is sure to receive the glowing reviews accorded to the group’s discography on Brilliant Classics. ‘Commitment, technical versatility, unanimity of ensemble and near-immaculate tuning on display.’ (Gramophone) ‘An excellent release from an ensemble I hope we’ll hear a lot more from in the future.’ (Fanfare)

Strings Attached

Four Strings Around the World is a quite stunning solo CD from the Romanian-born violinist Irina Muresanu that features diverse musical styles from across Europe, the Middle East, Asia and both North and South America (Sono Luminus DSL-92221 sonoluminus.com). Muresanu introduced her Four Strings Around the World project in 2013 after her difficulty in learning Mark O’Connor’s Cricket Dance led her to explore worldwide non-traditional violin styles.

Enescu’s Airs in Romanian Folk Style opens the disc, with works by Ireland’s Dave Flynn, Iran’s Reza Vali, India’s Shirish Korde and China’s Bright Sheng surrounding Paganini’s 24th Caprice, Kreisler’s Recitativo and Scherzo Op.6 and a strongly melodic reading of the Bach D Minor Chaconne. Then it’s Piazzolla’s Tango Étude No.3 and a work by Chickasaw Nation composer Jerod Impichchaachaaha’ Tate before the short Cricket Dance that apparently gave Muresanu so much trouble. 

Not that you would know it – complete with foot stomps, it’s a simply dazzling end to one of the best solo CDs I’ve heard. 

Terry Robbins, The Whole Note, June/July/August2018 edition

The program divides in two: Western and Eastern Europe, which ranges from Bach to the contemporary David Flynn via Enescu, Paganini and Kreisler, and Music from the Middle East, Asia, and North and South America; quite a lot to include here all round... 
“Muresanu has selected wisely when it comes to her fellow countryman, Enescu, whose Airs in Romanian Folk Style, though written in 1926, was not to be published until 2006. There aren’t many recordings around. The four movements offer plenty of opportunities for characteristic rubato-style performance and for vital dance patterns. The taut melancholia of the third piece is followed by the giocoso vibrancy of the concluding Allegro. This galvanizing reading shows its charms in fine fashion...

“For the second part of her journey she visits Iran via Reza Vali’s Calligraphy No.5. This draws on traditional Persian modes, employing the Dastg?h. This is something of which Behzad Abdi is an outstanding exponent and, like Abdi, Vali aims at a concordance between Persian and Western techniques: Bartók is a probable starting point. Representing India, Shirish Korde’s Vák, for violin and electronic drone invariably owes its inspiration to Ragas. The drone effect allows Muresanu to negotiate the work’s three unbroken sections with considerable virtuosity. Bright Sheng’s international reputation is now of long standing and The Stream Flows, of which we hear only the second part (shame) evokes the sound of the erhu in this dance-patterned and pizzicato-flecked piece. Piazzolla’s Tango Etude No.3 possesses all its resonant and driving capital in this solo reading...”

- Jonathan Woolf, MusicWeb International

Premiered in 1919 in Zurich by the leaders of string sections of the Tonhalle Orchestra with Frank Martin himself at the piano, it displays a wide variety of influences, all forming part of a 29-year-old musician’s search for his own artistic voice. At the same time, the Quintet’s style is thoroughly individual, notably in its choice of rich harmonies. Providing a marked contrast to Frank Martin’s filigree, pared-down early style, César Franck’s profuse, monumental Piano Quintet in F Minor (1879) is typical of the Franco-Belgian composer’s late output. All of Franck’s characteristics seem to blend together in this work which he wrote at the age of 57: Wagnerian chromatic harmonies, dramatic developments similar to those we know from his symphonic poems and oratorios, and a polyphonic musical thinking “in organ registers”

Most of César Franck’s works received scant attention at the time of their composition and Hulda was never performed in his lifetime. The narrative is set in 14th-century Norway at the time of the great tribal kings, with marauding hordes spreading fear and terror throughout the land. Hulda is kidnapped and transferred from one tribe to the other, her family is killed and she herself is humiliated. However, Hulda’s spirit cannot be crushed, and she survives with revenge as her goal in life. Franck’s music portrays raging clans, bloodthirsty murderers and shattered lives, but also moments of exquisite tenderness in this acclaimed revival of a forgotten masterpiece that places the role of Hulda among the great tragic stage heroines.

Still in his twenties, Pétur Sakari studied in his native Finland and in Paris and made his recording début at the age of 18. On his previous disc for BIS, he performed works by five French composers, receiving international acclaim with top marks in Diapason as well as on the Klassik-Heute website. For the present disc, Pétur has chosen to focus on César Franck, performing the composer’s Three Pieces and Three Chorales ‘pour grand orgue’ on an instrument perfectly suited to the repertoire. Completed in 1880, the great organ in the Sainte-Croix cathedral of Orléans is a major – and well-preserved – example of the art of Aristide Cavaillé-Coll, the same maker who had previously built Franck’s beloved organ in Sainte-Clotilde in Paris. (‘My new organ? It’s an orchestra!’ was Franck’s verdict.) Together the two gave the French organ tradition a new impetus with Franck laying the groundwork for a French symphonic organ style while Cavaillé-Coll constructed hundreds of organs capable of producing a sound that was full, homogeneous and modern. The Trois Pièces, which closes with the famous Pièce héroïque, were written for a Cavaillé-Coll instrument built for the 1878 World Fair in Paris. Twelve years later, and only weeks before his untimely death, Franck completed the Trois Chorals. The idea of writing organ chorales was inspired by Bach, but Franck composed them ‘with quite a different plan’: instead of traditional hymns they use an original, freely composed melody which is gradually revealed ‘with great imagination’, as Franck himself put it in a letter to his publisher. Both the Pieces and especially the Chorales have become central works in the repertoire of concert organists.

The court at Manneheim, one of Europe’s great 18th-century musical centers, provided myriad opportunities for creative development. Having absorbed the ideas of his teacher, Johann Stamitz and other luminaries, Beck wrote a series of symphonies notable for their dramatic contrasts, breadth and sweep, the progressive inclusion of the woodwinds and a willingness to explore expressive intensity. His progressive use of woodwind instruments in the Symphony in G major, Op. 4 No. 5 is among the notable developments to be heard in this second recording of Beck symphonies by Marek Štilec and the Czech Chamber Philharmonic.

Frederick II, King of Prussia, was a gifted musician who built up a court orchestra noted both for its quality and its size. Great musicians such as Graun, Quantz and C.P.E. Bach were members and contributed hugely to its standing. A patron of the fine arts, Frederick was a highly accomplished flautist whose works, performed in small private concerts, show a remarkable range of forms and expressive effects with slow movements offering long-breathed arcs of melody. The pieces by Alessandro De Marchi, conceived in the spirit of improvisation, provide a revealing impression of contemporary performance practice. This new release of Frederick the Great’s flute sonatas relates to the450th anniversary of the Staatskapelle Berlin, first established as the Royal Prussian Court Orchestra by the monarch. Claudia Stein became first flute of the orchestra at the age of 23. She recorded Weinberg’s Flute Concertos for Naxos in 2019 (8.573931), which received 5 stars from Pizzicato: ‘Stein plays them absolutely ravishingly, with a touch of melancholy.’

Contemporary American music for wind band continues to offer a rich combination of color and variety. David Maslanka was one of the most prolific and admired of all wind band composers, and in Liberation he utilizes plainchant in a moving exploration of death, the afterlife and the continuance of hope. Inspired by Walt Whitman, Aaron Perrine’s In the Open Air, In the Silent Lines creates a rich sense of space, while Kevin Walczyk’s moving Symphony No. 5: Freedom from Fear – Images from the Shoreline is unified by its themes of adoption, segregation and immigration. The University of Kansas Wind Ensemble enjoys a long history of excellence and musical leadership in the state of Kansas, across the nation and around the world. The ensemble is at the forefront of the Naxos Wind Band Classics series, having recorded five previous albums on the label. The ensemble is committed to contemporary music and regularly commissions, premieres and records new works.

The Finnish-American composer Alex Freeman has been described as being ‘as comfortable in the realm of the pop ballad as in that of the concert hall’ and yet his songs ‘are imbued with the craftsmanship and care one would expect of a composer of his formidable academic training, just as his concert works carry the emotional immediacy of popular music.’ Himself a choral singer, Alex Freeman has written a number of works for choir: music that aims to be sonorous and melodic, but is carefully crafted to avoid the clichés that can burden conventional tonality. Freeman’s requiem Under the arching heavens was commissioned by Nils Schweckendiek and the Helsinki Chamber Choir to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the 1918 Finnish civil war. The work incorporates poems in Finnish, Swedish and English, reflecting both the specific reason for the commission and the universality of human suffering caused by war. In the non-liturgical texts chosen by Freeman, birds are a recurring image, as is that of a mother and child. The work ends with lines by Walt Whitman from a poem written in the aftermath of the American Civil War. Also included on the album is A Wilderness of Sea, another recent choral piece which draws on works by Shakespeare, and the poet’s images of the sea, and of mankind’s relationship with it.