Acclaimed pianist Inna Faliks breaks new ground with REIMAGINED on Navona Records, an homage to Beethoven and Ravel which manages to do the impossible: be breathtakingly innovative while remaining respectful to the source material. Nine contemporary composers, including Richard Danielpour, Paola Prestini, Billy Childs, and Timo Andres, were commissioned to craft responses to Ludwig van Beethoven's Bagatelles, op. 126 (incidentally, the master's favorite) as well as Maurice Ravel's Gaspard de la Nuit. The results are exhilarating, not least owing to Faliks's stunningly precise and sensitive pianistic interpretation: the Ukrainian-born American pianist ties together Classical, Romantic and modern pieces with disarming nonchalance and rock-solid technical skill. Defying the challenge of uniting three centuries of musical styles and social commentary, as well as producing an album during a global pandemic with the help of Yamaha's Disklavier technology, REIMAGINED proudly raises a monument not only to the genius of Beethoven and Ravel, but also to the perseverance and verve of some of today's most exciting and important composers.

With his critically acclaimed AVIE Records recordings of music by Johann Sebastian Bach, Johannes Brahms, Gabriel Faure´ and Sergei Rachmaninov to his credit, the celebrated British pianist Charles Owen scales the heights of Franz Liszt’s anthology Annees de pelerinage, Premiere annee: Suisse (“Years of Travel, First Year: Switzerland”), which evokes the great 19th-century pianist-composer’s Swiss sojourns with aural impressions of the Alpine landscape, its peaks and valleys, mountains and streams, and the country’s distinctive folk music. Literary references abound as they do in the album’s concluding piece, the emotional Benediction de Dieu dans la solitude (“The Blessing of God in Solitude”) which was inspired by a poem penned by Liszt’s friend Alphonse de Lamartine. Emotions ran equally high for Charles Owen who turned to Liszt during lockdown. The uncertainty of being homebound throughout the pandemic was eased by the extra meaning and solace of the composer’s evocations of journeying, experiencing the natural world and its sense of beauty and liberation.

Tobias Picker, hailed as “a genuine creator” by The New Yorker, has written extensively for the stage and for symphonic forces, and these two approaches are represented in this album. The Encantadas (an older name for the Galapagos Islands) derives from a novella by Herman Melville. Picker has set it as a melodrama, exploring the enchanted isles in all their quietly menacing and spectacular beauty. In a radical new form, Picker’s Opera Without Words is set to a libretto by Irene Dische that has now been removed, allowing the music alone to bear the expressive richness and intensity of this “secret opera.” Tobias Picker has been commissioned to write numerous works in other genres, including operas, three symphonies, concertos for violin, viola, cello and oboe, four piano concertos and chamber music. His many honors include the 2020 GRAMMY Award for Best Opera Recording (Fantastic Mr. Fox). Picker is a lifetime member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and is artistic director of the Tulsa Opera, a post he has held since 2016.

REVIEW:

The title for The Encantadas (1983) comes from the early name for the Galapagos Islands. In six sections it relates the journey made there by Herman Melville. The work was conceived for narrator and a standard sized orchestra, and, on this recording, the composer is the very articulate voice that relates Melville’s discoveries he made there.

The more recent score, Opera Without Words, was completed five years ago, and had a strange birth. He had hired a librettist, Irene Dische, to conceive the story, and, after many discussions, all was completed, even down to the stage actions and directions for the producer. But in the end Picker deciding to dispense with words. It receives its World Premiere Recording by one of the commissioning orchestras, the Nashville Symphony. They, and their conductor Giancarlo Guerrero, provide a very colourful score, both works instantly enjoyable in pure tonality. The booklet includes the words narrated in The Encantadas and I hope there is more Picker coming from Naxos.

-- David's Review Corner (David Denton)

This new release from Naxos brings together the two poles of Tobias Picker’s output: symphonic music and opera. He brilliantly straddles both worlds, drawing upon each to bring something new to the other.

…The music on this disc is impassioned and adventurous, providing the curious listener a great introduction to Tobias Picker’s output. The recorded sound is excellent, and the Nashville Symphony is in top form. Recommended.

-- Fanfare

"The beautifully produced Çedille album of Jewish cabaret music broke new ground. Yet more depths were revealed in a ravaged culture: modest, entertaining, and humane." -- Paul Ingram, Fanfare

The booklet accompanying this release is so thick that it requires a double jewel case to accommodate it and the single CD it documents. So extensive are the essay, annotations, and bibliography to this production—assumed to have been authored by the New Budapest Orpheum’s director, Philip V. Bohlman, though nowhere is he credited as the author—that I will not even try to summarize their contents, which cover the history, politics, and poetics of Yiddish song in stage, screen, vaudeville, and cabaret. The program of Jewish cabaret songs contained herein complements some of the volumes that appeared in the massive Milken Archive of American Jewish Music, though the composers represented on the current CD were not necessarily transplants to American soil. Of those who enriched the Jewish cabaret literature, some did make it to U.S. shores, notably Hanns Eisler, Kurt Weill, and Arnold Schoenberg. But others, such as Viktor Ullmann and Pavel Haas, perished in the Holocaust.

The disc is divided into seven sections: (1) “The Great Ennui on the Eve of Exile,” featuring songs by Edmund Nick and Erich Kästner; (2) “The Exiled Language—Yiddish Songs for Stage and Screen,” featuring unattributed songs, but at least one by Abraham Ellstein; (3) “Transformation of Tradition,” presenting songs by the aforementioned Eisler; (4) “The Poetics of Exile,” offering songs by Kurt Tucholsky, as well as additional songs by Eisler; (5) “Traumas of Inner Exile,” featuring songs by Ullmann; (6) “Nostalgia and Exile,” presenting additional unattributed songs; and (7) “Exile in Reprise,” offering songs by Friedrich Holländer.

The songs were chosen to reflect the various phases of exile—physical, emotional, and psychological—that European Jewry experienced in the period leading up to and during WW II and its immediate aftermath, roughly 1935 to 1945, a period that accounts for the second great exodus of Jews from Europe. Primarily then, these are songs from the smoke-filled nightclubs and entertainment halls of Berlin and other European cities before the rise of Hitler, from the barracks of the concentration camps during the Holocaust, and from the months and years following the liberation. The before, during, and after the Shoah aspects of the recorded material frame and reflect the corresponding attitudes, mindsets, and living conditions of the times—from a song like Elegy in the Forest of Things, expressing a kind of resigned world weariness; to Ellstein’s Deep as Night that tries to deaden the senses to the pain of the outside world with the surrogate internal pain of a longed for love; to the bitter sarcasm of Eisler’s Sweetbread and Whips and Georg Kreisler’s Poisoning Pigeons, a song about spreading arsenic on graham crackers and feeding them to the birds in the park; and finally to I’m an Irrepressible Optimist, a song from the aftermath which cannot erase memories and finds optimism only in the release of death. 

The New Budapest Orpheum Society is an ensemble-in-residence at the University of Chicago. A mixed group of vocalists (Julia Bentley, mezzo-soprano and Stewart Figa, baritone) and instrumentalists (Iordanka Kisslova, violin; Stewart Miller, string bass; Hank Tausend, percussion; and Ilya Levinson, piano), the NBOS performs regularly at Chicago’s universities, synagogues, and cultural institutions, and has also appeared at the United States Memorial Holocaust Museum and the American Academy in Berlin. Philip V. Bohlman is the group’s artistic director; and Ilya Levinson, in addition to her role as pianist, also serves as music director and arranger.

Readers who acquired and enjoyed the three volumes from the Milken Archive of American Jewish Music titled “Songs of the American Yiddish Stage” (Naxos 8.559405, 8.559432, and 8.559455) will find much in “Jewish Cabaret in Exile” to their liking. One needn’t necessarily be Jewish, however, to appreciate this material, much of which had its origins in the dives, dance halls, and strip joints of Bertolt Brecht’s, Kurt Weill’s, Lotte Lenya’s, and Marlene Dietrich’s Berlin. Some of it is pretty heady stuff, with the gender-bending sexual stereotyping and absurdist satire of a decadent, Dada-costumed culture on the verge of imploding. Recommended then if you love it. If you don’t, best leave it.
-- Jerry Dubins, Fanfare

Track listing details:

I. The Great Ennui on the Eve of Exile
Edmund Nick (1891–1973) & Erich Kästner (1899–1974)
1 Die möblierte Moral / The Well-Furnished Morals (1:48)
2 Das Wiegenlied väterlicherseite / The Father’s Lullaby (4:49)
3 Die Elegie in Sachen Wald / Elegy in the Forest of Things (3:29)
4 Der Gesang vom verlorenen Sohn / The Song of the Lost Son (5:13)
5 Das Chanson für Hochwohlgeborene / The Chanson for Those Who Are Born Better (2:43)
6 Der Song “man müßte wieder . . .”/ The Song “Once Again One Must . . .” (3:59)

II. The Exiled Language — Yiddish Songs for Stage and Screen
7 Moses Milner (1886–1953): In Cheider / In the Cheder (5:46)
8 Mordechai Gebirtig (1877–1942): Avreml, der Marvikher / Abe, the Pickpocket (5:12)
9 Abraham Ellstein (1907–1963): Tif vi di Nacht / Deep as the Night (3:07)

III. Transformation of Tradition
Hanns Eisler (1898–1962):
From Zeitungsausschnitte, Op. 11 (Newspaper Clippings)
10 Mariechen / Little Marie (1:49)
11 Kriegslied eines Kindes / A Child’s Song of War (2:32)

IV. The Poetics of Exile: Songs by Hanns Eisler and Kurt Tucholsky (1890–1935)
12 Heute zwischen Gestern und Morgen / Today between Yesterday and Tomorrow (2:35)
13 Bügerliche Wohltätigkeit / Civic Charity (3:01)
14 Zuckerbrot und Peitsche / Sweetbread and Whips (2:20)
15 An den deutschen Mond / To the German Moon (2:46)
16 Einigkeit und Recht und Freiheit / Unity and Justice and Freedom (1:53)
17 Couplet für die Bier-Abteilung / Couplet for the Beer Department (1:26)

V. Traumas of Inner Exile
Viktor Ullmann (1898–1944)
Three Yiddish Songs (Brezulinka), op. 53 (1944)
18 Berjoskele / The Little Birch (4:18)
19 Margaritkele / Little Margaret (1:37)
20 Ich bin a Maydl in di Yorn / I’m Already a Young Woman (1:30)

VI. Nostalgia and Exile
21 Georg Kreisler (b. 1922): Tauben vergiften / Poisoning Pigeons (2:46)
22 Hermann Leopoldi (1888–1959) and Robert Katscher (1894–1942): Ich bin ein unverbesserlicher Optimist / I’m an Irrepressible Optimist (3:46)
23 Misha Spoliansky (1898–1985) / Marcellus Schiffer (1892–1932): Heute Nacht oder nie / Tonight or Never (3:22)

VII. Exile in Reprise
Friedrich Holländer on Stage and Film
24 Friedrich Holländer (1896–1976): Marianka (2:32)
25 Wenn der Mond, wenn der Mond . . . / If the Moon, If the Moon . . . (3:00) Lyrics by Theobald Tiger (Kurt Tucholsky)

Telemann’s Wedding Serenata Georg Philipp Telemann never missed the opportunity to delight those around him with countless compositions treating the subject of love and its consequences. The origins of his enormous achievement in this field are certainly to be sought in his personal disposition: in his exuberant joy in composition, combined with an open, optimistic attitude in his dealings with his environment, which in his works not rarely revealed his roguish sense of humor. And so he above all was very much in demand as a composer of wedding pieces. The texts of the wedding serenata »Liebe, was ist schöner als die Liebe« undeniably exhibit mirthful exuberance and belong to the most original and wittiest musical creations of all by this composer. The serenata has the form of a disputatio, a dramatic dialogue in which an advocate of marriage (Ametas, soprano) and a skeptic (Crito, tenor) are in disagreement about the usefulness of the institution of marriage. The album also includes the solo cantata “Lieben will ich,” in which the imponderables of love are celebrated in witty free texts, and the cantata “Der Weiberorden,” which quite clearly was composed in conjunction with a wedding feast and in lighter tones enables to join the young bride in joyous anticipation of her future married life.

Xiaogang Ye is regarded as one of today’s leading Chinese composers, having won prestigious awards for his concert music and for numerous highly successful film scores. The works on this recording share a deep affection for the beauty and power of nature and landscape in China. Mount E’mei eulogises the great spectacle and cultural significance of the mountain, creating a multi-dimensional picture through the use of traditional instruments. Lamura Cuo and The Silence of Mount Minshan describe mystic atmosphere and melancholy silence, while Scent of Green Mango uses vibrant colors and shading to express gratitude for the fruit’s refreshing fragrance.

To help artists develop exciting projects that are difficult to realize under existing conditions is the goal of the SWR NEWJazzMeeting. This legendary sound laboratory for jazz of the SWR was founded in 1966 by Joachim-Ernst Berendt and takes place every year. The idea: musicians who always wanted to perform with one another but who, for a variety of reasons, have so far not been able to do so, develop a concert programme in the broadcaster’s studios that the SWR then presents in several concerts in its transmission area. In the course of its fifty-year history, the SWR NEWJazz Meeting has in this way served as a driving force for new trends in jazz. “I see a particular value in exploring the music of my South African homeland and making it fit for the future.” Kyle Shepherd, born in 1987, is the most innovative and important pianist of the contemporary South African jazz scene. His sound boldly makes reference to the roots of township jazz and the Goema Beat of his hometown of Cape Town. Nevertheless, he refuses to be put into a pigeonhole; his horizon extends far beyond his beloved Cape Jazz. “It’s cool to choose the African thing in conceptual questions. But just as cool to choose something else.” Kyle Shepherd, the most innovative and important pianist of the contemporary South African jazz scene, is the curator of the 2016 SWR NEWJazz Meeting. At his wish, four young jazz musicians from South Africa and the Benin-born guitarist and singer Lionel Loueke (who since 2001 has been living in the United States) met in November 2016 at the SWR’s Baden-Baden radio studios. The musicians named their project “Sound Portraits From Contemporary Africa”. The African improvisers experimented for five days and developed a concert programme that they then presented on a tour in the SWR broadcasting area.

Penderecki wrote music for string quartet over a period of 56 years. His StringQuartetNo.1was written in the same year that he achieved international success with Threnody (Naxos8.554491), and includes a wide range of playing techniques reflective of the avant-garde. String Quartet No. 2 reveals the influence of Ligeti, while No.3is a personal, even autobiographical work. In No. 4 there are modal or even folk inflections, in writing that is both limpid and abrasive. The eventful Derunterbrochene Gedanke completes Penderecki’s music for quartet, while the String Trio exemplifies his music’s motoric energy.

REVIEW:

Penderecki's First Quartet pointed to his fascination with hard-edged atonality and 12-note influences, the one movement score expressed in pizzicato and lasting just a little over six minutes. With his Second Quartet he had begun to move away from astringency to a more legato quality but with atonality to signpost things to come. There was to be a gap of twenty years before the more lengthy Third appeared in 2008, and it was period when he ‘took stock’ of the way music was going. At the same time his music was moving to an even more communicative melodic period we experience to a final degree in the Fourth of 2016. Now in a more ‘traditional’ two movements, and with a Vivo finale, its style has a melodic starting point. Integrated into these changes were two further works for strings, an extremely brief String Quartet from 1988 given a title Der unterbrochene Gedanke (The Interrupted Thought), and a String Trio from 1990. Both fit neatly into the changing moods of the quartets that surround them. They are here performed by the much acclaimed British-based Tippett Quartet who encompass these changes with a conviction that would place the performances as my number one choice and in quite superb sound.

– David's Review Corner (David Denton)

This selection of pieces for mandolin and guitar represents the rich variety of music from Israel. Styles range from the diaspora of Babylonian Jewry through European klezmer traditions, and Balkan Ladino songs, to contemporary influences from America. Paul Ben-Haim and Marc Lavry pioneered the use of music originating in the Jewish East, and Jan Freidlin continues the tradition, employing Oriental dance figures in his music. Oren Lok's Ahavais an homage to love, while Ittai Rosenbaum’s Duet offers a vibrant and jazzy conclusion to this wide-ranging conspectus.

REVIEW:

This a distinctive program takes us to the Promised Land and, in fine interpretations, will probably cause most music lovers to explore new musical territories.

– Pizzicato

Musical America’s ‘Conductor of the Year’ for 2015 Gianandrea Noseda continues his Chandos ‘Musica Italiana’ series with select works of Niccolò Castiglioni (1932-96), an intellectual and an aesthete who occupied a singular place in the profound renewal of Italian and European musical life of the 1960s-‘70s.Having a predilection for clear sonorities and airy, transparent textures, Castiglioni created his own unique and original artistic philosophy, from tonal harmonies to the more fragmented and experimental.Mr. Noseda leads the Danish National Symphony and guest vocalists.

The twice-Grammy-nominated Lincoln Trio ― violinist Desirée Ruhstrat, cellist David Cunliffe, and pianist Marta Aznavoorian ― offers engaging, rarely heard piano trios by 20th-century Chicago composers Leo Sowerby, winner of the Rome Prize and Pulitzer Prize for music, and Ernst Bacon, recipient of three Guggenheim Fellowships and a Pulitzer Fellowship. Bacon’s Trio No. 2 for Violin, Cello and Piano (1987) receives its world-premiere recording. Hailed by The New York Times as “a Composer Known for Echoing America,” Bacon infuses his six-movement trio with American influences including marches, folksong-like melodies, and jazz rhythms, validating Virgil Thomson’s assessment of Bacon’s music as “full of melody and variety; honest and skillful and beautiful.” Sowerby’s Trio for violin, violincello and pianoforte (1953) is “a work of tremendous integrity” that exhibits an “imposing structure, contrapuntal gymnastics, and a concern for instruments sounding as good as they can” (Classical Net). Sometimes virtuosic, sometimes reflective, the work is distinguished by an ever-evolving rhythmic and harmonic interplay between instruments.

REVIEW:

The works heard here by the "Early Modern" native Chicago composers Ernst Bacon (1898-1990) and Leo Sowerby (1895-1968) have several stylistic commonalities between them: both rich in melodic zest, expressionist on the edge of Romanticism but further afield to the Modern in their arcs of harmonic-melodic movement, winding, and labyrinthian. Working together most impressively, the members of the Lincoln Trio approach both pieces with elan, zeal, and sympathy. If you are up for something well composed and well played, something from the recent past yet unmistakably belonging to that time, grab this and I think you’ll find it worthwhile.

– Gapplegate Classical

Remembered today for the Olympic Anthem, Spyridon Samaras was the most distinguished Greek composer of his day and the first to gain international recognition. By the time Mademoiselle de Belle-Isle was produced, Samaras was a well-established and much-admired opera composer in the Italian Romantic style. The narrative of the opera sees the mischievous plans of the Duke of Richelieu descending into a complex tangle of amorous deceptions, tests of faithfulness and the perils of dueling. The score for this world premiere recording has been painstakingly restored by Byron Fidetzis.

Freudvoll und leidvoll (Joyful and sorrowful)

The tenor joins forces with pianist Helmut Deutsch to perform a programme of songs by a largely neglected lieder composer, Franz Liszt.

After their album Selige Stunde, Jonas Kaufmann and Helmut Deutsch used the lockdown necessitated by the coronavirus pandemic, to make a further series of recordings. Their second album of songs is devoted to Franz Liszt, a composer for whom both feel a special affinity and whose music has long featured in their shared concert career.

Together with a group of six other songs including Vergiftet sind meine Lieder, Der König von Thule and Ihr Glocken von Marling, the demanding Petrarch Sonnets have been a part of Jonas Kaufmann’s repertory for many years, while Loreley, O lieb, solang du lieben kannst and Es muss ein Wunderbares sein are among his regular encores. As he himself explains, the process of studying lesser-known “jewels” such as Goethe’s eponymous Freudvoll und leidvoll, two versions of which are heard here, has been a period of intense discovery, during which time he has learnt to value these songs more than ever:

I’m very pleased that our enforced rest made this album possible – under normal circumstances it would probably not have come into existence quite so quickly. As a result we were able to record not only those Liszt songs that we had already tried out in the concert hall but also a number of others that until now have been overshadowed by Liszt’s “great hits”. Among them, pride of place goes to Die stille Wasserrose, which I find more beautiful the more often I hear it. I’m very grateful to Helmut for introducing me to these songs, and I think there will be many listeners who share my delight in these discoveries.

For Helmut Deutsch Liszt was one of the great idols of his youth, alongside Elizabeth Taylor and Herbert von Karajan:

Thanks to these jewels, Liszt deserves to occupy a leading place in the history of the art song, and yet even today he is denied this status. It is a source of tremendous pleasure for me that I have been able to share my enthusiasm with Jonas Kaufmann and persuade him to record an entire album with me.

Because Avishai Cohen’s previous outing—a 2017 album titled 1970 (Sony)—was his most commercially successful release thus far, one wouldn’t blame him for revisiting a similar artistic wellspring. Instead, for his 17th leader date, the bassist went in another direction, recruiting an entirely different set of musicians for the deeply personal, nostalgia-fueled Arvoles. Half the program here consists of trio recordings with pianist Elchin Shirinov and drummer Noam David, and on the other half, the band expands to a quintet with trombonist Björn Samuelsson and flutist Anders Hagberg. - DownBeat Magazine Editors' Pick

Click here to read the full review at DownBeat Magazine