Gregson: Dream Song; Works for Orchestra / Tovey, BBC Philharmonic
Chandos
CD
$10.99$21.99Save 50%Jul 29, 2014
Edward Gregson (b. 1945), one of Britain’s most versatile and prolific composers, has gained worldwide recognition for his approachable and engaging music. With the BBC Philharmonic, Bramwell Tovey conducts orchestral works, including two recently arranged for ensemble in the Horn Concerto and Aztec Dances, that take inspiration from an array of musical and extra-musical sources, revealing the breadth of Gregson’s musical imagination.
Strauss: Also sprach Zarathustra - Four Symphonic Interludes
Naxos
CD
$9.99$19.99Save 50%Sep 25, 2012
This is "as good a performance and interpretation - and technical recording - of Also sprach Zarathustra as one would expect to find" (Gramophone). Inspired and inspiring, Richard Strauss's Also sprach Zarathustra is one of a series of tone poems which pushed the form to it's limits. The famous opening introduces a musical interpretation of Friedrich Nietzsche's philosophical treatise, taking Zarathustra on a complex search through human aspirations. Based on an incident in Strauss's own life, the suite from Intermezzo distills domestic strife and misunderstanding into four jocular vignettes.
At the time of his death in 2010, Almeida Prado was one of Brazil’s most internationally admired composers, one who created music of unique sonority and color, rooted in his native country. InAurora(‘Dawn’) he employs his newly developed ‘transtonality’ to radiant effect, while theConcerto Fribourgeoisfeatures a collage technique. In his Piano Concerto No. 1 Almeida Prado explores a cogent structure in which the soloist opens up, rips apart or transforms the theme and variations, in a work that is both grandiose and luminous.
REVIEWS:
"The performances by Sonia Rubinsky sound like they are totally committed to the music. The range of her expressive control is remarkable. She has all of the requisite strength to deal with the many percussive moments in the music. The Minas Gerais Philharmonic Orchestra, under the expert direction of Fabio Mechetti, provides a well-considered and exemplary accompaniment. The recorded sound is very good."
--Fanfare
"The southern border of the vast Brazilian state of Minas Gerais lies roughly 100 miles north of (and is broadly parallel to) the road which connects the more renowned centres of São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro. Its capital Belo Horizonte lies centrally and seems to be the home of the Minas Gerais Philharmonic, which on the evidence of this disc appears to be an impressive orchestral unit.
Aurora is both dramatic and monumental; the engineers have done a splendid job in taming its excesses and realising an ideal balance between the demanding piano part and the orchestra.
The Piano Concerto No. 1...embodies an arch-like structure, framed by brief panels labelled Apelo (Appeal) I and II in which contain the four-note thematic germ which drives the entire work. Apelo I inhabits murky depths whose severity soon yields to a sequence of rapid variations, performed with remarkable incisiveness and clarity by Rubinsky and the orchestra. The Piano Concerto No 1 makes a lasting impact – it’s difficult to imagine a more compelling or definitive account than Rubinsky’s.
The issue concludes with the Concerto Fribourgeois, commissioned in 1985 to celebrate the tricentenary of the birth of J.S. Bach[.] Rubinsky’s supreme commitment to this music provides yet more evidence of her devotion to Almeida Prado, whilst the recording rates highly in its depth and clarity.
I found all three of these very different works most enjoyable; they are each sufficiently colourful and invigorating to merit further reacquaintance.
To witness a performance of Delius’s A Mass of Life, arguably his supreme creative achievement, is to look into the heart of the composer and his Nietzsche-inspired world. Moreover, this ravishing music, written between 1898 and 1905, represents Delius at the height of his powers, when musical ideas seemed to pour out of him at a time when he had finally learned to assimilate, in an entirely individual, not to say maverick manner, a confluence of modernist styles embracing Grieg, Wagner, Strauss, Charpentier and Debussy.
There is no doubt from the vivid opening choruses of Parts 1 and 2 of this recording (and what openings!) that the message of the work is a life-affirming one. There is a dynamic momentum to the tempi which perfectly evokes Zarathustra’s ruling passion, the Will of Man, and there is a richness to the orchestral sound which adds to the sense of muscularity. The chorus negotiate Delius’s often awkward vocal intervals with great skill and the intonation is virtually flawless. Just occasionally the sheer weight of the orchestral sound, which is quite forward on this recording (more so than Hickox), is apt to overwhelm the voices but this is a minor distraction.
Hill brings energy and élan to the third section, ‘In deine Auge’ (for me perhaps the most exhilarating section of Part 1), where the parallel with the end of Act 2 of Die Meistersinger is almost palpable and where the most unusual example of a Delius fugue (!) is given life, vigour and meaning.
Alan Opie, who has the lion’s share of the solo music in the work, is almost Wotan-like in his performances. From his first Nietzschean dance he is majestic and brings out of the score that vibrant, heady, Teutonic contemporaneity with which Delius had clearly become enthralled at this point in his career. Opie’s singing of what is effectively the role of Zarathustra has immense authority and his impressive range (up to high G) is ideal for Delius’s onerous vocal demands.
Andrew Kennedy, Catherine Wyn-Rogers and Janice Watson also offer fine lyrical interpretations of their solo parts and the choral accompaniments are allowed to intermingle subtly as an extension of the orchestra. The BSO are on fine form too, and special mention needs to be made of the haunting horn-playing in the introduction to Part 2 (‘On the Mountains’), a sound which sums up so much of Delius’s nature music.
This is a must for any Delius Liebhaber and, with the added bonus of the late Prelude and Idyll, a marvellous starting point for anyone new to Delius’s unique but compelling art.
-- Jeremy Dibble, Gramophone 3622320.az_DELIUS_Mass_Life_Prelude.html
DELIUS A Mass of Life. Prelude and Idyll1 • David Hill, Cond; 1Janice Watson (sop); Catherine Wyn-Rogers (mez); Andrew Kennedy (ten); 1Alan Opie (bar); Bach Ch; 1Bournemouth SO • NAXOS 8.572861-62 (2 CDs: 118:19 Text and Translation)
A Mass of Life is quintessential Delius, musically and existentially, composed over 1904–05 in the first great rush of his maturity. From the bounding affirmative choruses to the breathtakingly sustained nature contemplations, from the melancholy to the ecstatic, the Mass of Life traces and forecasts the gamut of Delian affect with a concision, fullness, and abundance he might rival but never achieve so comprehensively again. Unless I’ve missed something, this is but the fourth recording of the work since Beecham’s nonpareil 1952 account. Though its musical demands are daunting—if nowhere near as challenging as those of Mahler’s “Symphony of a Thousand,” with which it invites comparison—the primary bar to frequent performance is its text, drawn by Delius’s friend Ernst Cassirier largely from the Dance Songs of Nietzsche’s Also sprach Zarathustra. For those coming in late, one recalls the oft-quoted passage in Eric Fenby’s Delius as I Knew Him: “When, one wet day … he was looking for something to read in the library of a Norwegian friend … and had taken down a book, Thus Spake Zarathustra—a book for all and none—by one Friedrich Nietzsche, he was ripe for it. The book, he told me, never left his hands until he had devoured it from cover to cover. It was the very book he had been seeking all along, and finding that book he declared to be one of the most important events of his life. Nor did he rest content until he had read every work of Nietzsche that he could lay his hands on”—to which Fenby, a devout Catholic, adds—“and the poison entered his soul.” For listeners and performers today it may still be something of a jolt to find, in place of the supplicating Kyrie that the unfortunate term “Mass” leads one to expect, a glowingly charged hymn to the Will, “dispeller of need, my own necessity,” followed by Zarathustra’s brief praise of laughter (“My own laughter I pronounced holy”), succeeded by Zarathustra’s love duet with Life in a meadow filled with dancing girls, an archetypal encounter transpiring in a mythical dimension “beyond good and evil,” beyond place and time, crowned by the first, murmured, utterance of the Bell Song, the work’s central mystery. A Mass of Life may, of course, be enjoyed for its power and sensuous magic without reference to its text, but only to those nurtured on Nietzsche will it reveal its full import. Shrugging incomprehension of the text renders Benjamin Luxon’s Zarathustra, for Charles Groves (with the London Philharmonic Chorus and Orchestra), merely mellifluous, while Peter Coleman-Wright’s deadpan delivery for the late Richard Hickox—with the Waynflete Singers directed by today’s conductor, David Hill, and the Bournemouth Symphony Chorus and Orchestra—proves anesthetically workmanlike. When it appeared in 1997, I rated that reading, on Chandos, the best since Beecham’s (Fanfare 20:6). That honor goes now to the present offering. While Alan Opie does not efface memories of Bruce Boyce, for Beecham—whose delivery resonated from the nexus of Delius’s realization of Nietzsche—he teases the text gingerly, making a credible Zarathustra. In some numbers, Delius asks the soloists to share parts, with some of Zarathustra’s lines persuasively taken by Andrew Kennedy, and a portion of Life’s happily rendered by Janice Watson, though Catherine Wyn-Rogers’s beguiling, seductive Life recalls Monica Sinclair’s divinatory geste for Beecham. The choral work is beyond praise, though in Hill’s brisk approach the melting lyricism heard chez Beecham tautens and leaps.
Idyll is a late reworking of music from Margot la Rouge, composed in 1902 for the new opera competition offered by the music publisher Sanzogno. Though it failed to score and was not heard in Delius’s lifetime, it comes from the composer’s ripest years and contains gorgeous swaths of his richest utterance, which he salvaged in 1932, recomposing it to words by Whitman and making an extended love duet of it. Idyll has not lacked for vocally lustrous, persuasive performances submerging Whitman’s quaintness (“Behold me when I pass, hear my voice, approach, draw close, but speak not. Be not afraid of me”) in absolute conviction. Of major interest, the lovingly lingering 1981 account led by Eric Fenby—who took down the score from dictation by the blind, paralyzed Delius—features Felicity Lott and Thomas Allen (deleted Unicorn-Kanchana UKCD 2073). Meredith Davies’s still-available 1968 tilt at Idyll, with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, is made memorable by the divinatory partnership of Heather Harper and John Shirley-Quirk. In keeping with his go at the Mass of Life, Hill pushes the work a bit, spurring the impassioned moments to escalate from the pervasive tone of wistful elegy. Opie, as the anonymous man, is authoritatively resonant, in response to Janice Watson’s brightly edged soprano (touched by a bit of vibrato), with its gloriously amber lower register, buxomly filling the part of the nameless woman.
One caveat: In the headnote the title of the work is given per the album, but you will search the catalog of Delius’s works in vain for an orchestral Prelude. The work so designated is simply the first three minutes—an orchestral prelude, to be sure—of Idyll and has never, until now, been listed separately. The fake title generates a phantom work to bedevil buyers, scholars, and connoisseurs, and detracts from—rather than adding to—the program’s generosity.
Sound packs an immediate wallop making for occasional congestion. In the opening chorus, for instance, the leaping underlining of trombones and tubas becomes indistinct, overwhelmed by choral mass, and while one can pick out the glockenspiel, its function of festive accentuation is lost. In quieter passages, and in the capture of the vocalists, on the other hand, this upfront take is gratifyingly welcome. In German, Zarathustra’s pronouncements recall and parody the Lutheran Bible, in light of which the ostensibly stilted thee-ing and thou-ing of William Wallace’s singing translation—made for Beecham and used by him for all of his public performances (according to notes by Delius aficionado Lyndon Jenkins)—fall into place, if not quite into King James English. Whitman’s text is included.
In sum, a superb production and the grandest addition to the Delius discography in many years. Highest recommendation.
2008 brings us the long-anticipated sequel to 1999's second volume in Naxos' John Ireland piano music cycle. Since he began this project in 1995, pianist John Lenehan has grown more responsive to Ireland's impressionistic yet skillfully contrapuntal idiom, noticeably expanding his palette of nuances, colors, and articulations. Note, for example, how he focuses on On A Birthday Morning's emphatic melodic lilt and treats the thick chordal accompaniment as smooth, supportive padding. The Debussy-like passages throughout The Almond Trees and Amberly Wild Brooks (the second of the Two Pieces) are firmly etched and defined yet never at the expense of the long line, and that also applies to Lenehan's thoughtful animation of Equinox's swirling textures. As for the Piano Sonata, I waver between Lenehan and Eric Parkin. I admire Lenehan's ardent sweep and more generous pedaling in the outer movement's climaxes, yet gravitate toward Parkin's more luminous lyricism and superior legato touch in the slow movement. But that's splitting hairs. Besides, you can't disparage Naxos' price tag and first-class engineering, along with Lenehan's committed artistry. In all, a lovely release, warmly recommended.
Sinigaglia: Complete Works for String Quartet, Vol. 1 / Archos Quartet
Naxos
CD
$9.99$19.99Save 50%May 08, 2020
The renowned Italian composer and mountaineer Leone Sinigaglia wrote a fascinating series of pieces for string quartet that reflect his powers of characterization and elegance. Flowing melodies can be heard throughout, not least in the Concert-Etude, Op. 5, while the more substantial Variations on a Theme of Brahms, Op. 22 display his technical skill and expressive variety, whether reflective, somber or exuberant. His String Quartet in D major, Op. 27 exemplifies his dual inheritance: a commanding central European facility, combined with a natural Italian lyricism.
Jack Gallagher continues his association with the London Symphony Orchestra conducted by JoAnn Falletta with Symphony No. 2 ‘Ascendant,’ a robust, colorful work of dramatic contrasts and expansive architecture that seeks to express the aspirations and strivings of the human spirit. Quiet Reflections is a calm, serenely lyrical meditation which evokes a sense of longing for past tranquility. Gallagher’s previous Naxos release Orchestral Music (8.559652) with the LSO conducted by JoAnn Falletta was awarded five stars by BBC Music Magazine and hailed as “fresh and exuberant” and for “its explosions of sound and colour” by Gramophone.
Compared with his immense vocal composition output (most of which remains to be rediscovered), the quantity of instrumental music composed by Alessandro Scarlatti would almost seem hardly worth the mention. + Yet the selected compositions on this double-disc set are immensely important, in that they allow immediate assessment of Scarlatti’s style, then nearing creative decline, which appears to be suspended between the glorious contrapuntal tradition and beautiful melodies that look decidedly towards the future. + Enrico Casazza leads the Accademia della Magnifica Comunità.
Gudmundsen-Holmgreen: Green Ground / Hillier, Kronos Quartet, Theatre of Voices
Dacapo Classical
CD
$8.49$16.99Save 50%Oct 14, 2016
Pelle Gudmundsen-Holmgreen has made a name for himself as one of the most prolific northern European composers in the past half century. He was known for his unique personality and was established as a major figure in Danish musical life. Gundmundsen-Holmgreen wrote of his compositional style: “I often write music that cannot make up its mind, and that is deliberate.” This is an accurate description, as much of his music is ambiguous and provocative. He repeats motifs and sound elements without mercy, and the violent clashes of expression within the pieces are memorable. This release presents the world premiere recording of Green Ground, a unique set of pieces which were written for and dedicated to the Kronos Quartet and Theatre of Voices with conductor Paul Hillier. The works use text from Henry VIII’s Songbook and take inspiration from Baroque canons.
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REVIEWS:
Some of the most unique and hilariously raucous new music we heard all year.
– Time Out Chicago
Trying to describe the opening quartet in words—or any of his music in words—is inevitably going to fail because the music takes so many unexpected turns and practically none of them fit a verbal narrative. This is a wonderfully imaginative recording, albeit one that’s pretty far off from center.
– The Art Music Lounge (Lynn René Bayley)
Under any circumstances, a new record by the Kronos Quartet or Paul Hillier’s Theatre of Voices is worth attending to. Put the two together and that’s even more true. And now, for a couple of pieces by Danish composer Pelle Gudmundsen-Holmgreen, base a half hour of it on “a famous old ground that (was) used by Johan Pachelbel in his well-known canon.”
In the words of notater Andrew Mellor, on top of that ground, the resultant “discourse becomes ever more complicated and outlandish and, in this case, fractious, flailing, scared and animalistic.” And, as outrageous as it is to put old Pachelbel on the run this way, it’s also exhilarating and crazily compelling. This is why it is ALWAYS necessary to keep up with what the Kronos Quartet and Hillier’s Theater of Voices do.
Haydn: Symphonies No 57, 67, 68 / McGegan, Philharmonia Baroque
Philharmonia Baroque Productions
CD
$9.99$19.99Save 50%Sep 11, 2015
A few years ago Nicholas McGegan and the Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra released a glorious disc containing Haydn symphonies Nos. 88, 101 and 104. Well, they’ve done it again, and their achievement is even more impressive in that this time they have chosen three relatively unknown, middle-period symphonies. None have nicknames, and few get played in modern concerts. I did see Leonard Slatkin–a champion of little-known Haydn–give a superb performance of No. 67, but other than that you’ll be lucky to hear any of these symphonies live.
This doesn’t mean that the music lacks anything in the way of interest. No. 67 is one of Haydn’s most original creations, with a slow movement that features a delicious coda played by the strings “col legno” (with the back of the bow), a trio of the minuet for two muted solo violins–one of them retuned–and a finale with a central “development” that starts as a string trio in an adagio tempo. It’s an amazing piece, and this performance relishes every striking detail.
Symphony No. 57 starts with a surprisingly unsettling slow introduction whose eerie grace notes return, purged of their unease, in the fleet main theme of the finale. No. 68 places the minuet second because the slow movement is probably the longest that Haydn ever wrote. It lasts more than twelve minutes in this performance (fourteen under Harnoncourt), but it’s so full of variety that the time passes without a thought. The finale is a “variation” rondo whose episodes constitute a veritable concerto for orchestra.
In short, each symphony has something special and characteristic to offer, and each gives McGegan and his ensemble an opportunity to display their individual and corporate musicianship and virtuosity. The strings play with precision and warmth. McGegan clearly knows when to sound “authentic,” and when to let his players sing. The solo winds and horns are excellent, ensemble balances invariably what they ought to be to let each work communicate vividly. The live sonics, a touch close and maybe very slightly edgy, actually suit the boldness and panache of the music. Haydn lovers rejoice.
The German composer Johann Adolf Hasse was born in Bergedorf on 25 March 1699 and died in Venice on 23 December 1783. He chose Italy as his adopted country: there he was nicknamed “the dear Saxon”. He was a pupil of Nicola Porpor and Alessandro Scarlatti, from whom he learned the typical composition style of the Neapolitan School. In 1727 he was appointed Kapellmeister of the Conservatorio degli Incurabili of Venice, the city in which he met his bride, Faustina Bordoni. He was engaged as a composer by the Polish court, for which he composed a great number of operas that were staged in Dresden and in other European countries, particularly Italy. The arias presented here by Elena De Simone belong to the genre of the opera seria and have been chosen among the most representative ones in Hasse’s unpublished production, which is based on texts – most of them by Metastasio and Apostolo Zeno – that were a great source of inspiration for the major European musicians of that time.
Kemel Belevi’s music is steeped in the colors and atmosphere of the eastern Mediterranean, and his aim is ‘to create beautiful music’ based on melodies and rhythms that have been absorbed from the folk music of Greece, Turkey and the Middle East. Belevi’s own arrangements of works such as the evocative Suite Chypre and the richly varied Cyprian Rhapsodies have significantly extended the repertoire for two guitars. The Duo Tandem are drawn towards this composer’s skillful modernity and his celebration of traditional heritage reimagined within the sound world of the classical guitar.
Chopin: Piano Concerto No 1 / Sokolov, Rowicki, Munich Philharmonic
Sony Masterworks
CD
$6.49$12.98Save 50%Apr 15, 2016
For the first time on CD, this rare recording of Chopin’s piano concerto is one of Grigory Sokolov’s only productions in a concerto role, accompanied by an orchestra. This original Eurodisc session recording with Münchner Philharmoniker has been newly remastered from the original tapes. Grigory Sokolov is regarded as one of the world’s leading pianists, dedicated to his art, and adored by his audience in sold-out concerts. Few pianists of recent years have become quite such a legend in their own lifetime. Sokolov created a huge worldwide fanbase solely by playing concerts, as he refused do studio recordings. The only recordings available are live recording of concerts.
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REVIEW:
An extraordinary document, with Sokolov’s integrity and humanity illuminating every bar.
The Fifth House Ensemble of Chicago chamber-music group aims for the stratosphere with Excelsior, its adventurous debut album on Cedille Records. The title refers to an experimental, extreme-altitude U.S. Air Force project of the Cold War era. Excelsior presents world-premiere recordings of works by Caleb Burhans, recipient of commissions from Lincoln Center, Carnegie Hall and the Library of Congress; prolific, award-winning composer Alex Shapiro; and Jesse Limbacher, winner of the ASCAP Morton Gould Young Composer Award. The disc also includes a work by Mason Bates, Chicago Symphony Orchestra composer-in-residence. Commissioned by Fifth House Ensemble, Burhans’ 30-minute title track depicts Captain Joseph W. Kittinger’s 1960 record-setting free fall and parachute landing from a height of more than 19 miles above the earth. Excelsior transports listeners through a seamless, ethereal blend of acoustic and electric instruments and voice, propelled by suspenseful, repeating motifs.
• Gaudete Brass makes its Cedille Records debut with Chicago Moves, an album of new and diverse American works for brass quintet. All were composed in the last six years, and all but one were written expressly for the Chicago-based ensemble of young brass virtuosos and receive their world-premiere recordings on the new CD.
Bach: Six Suites for Viola Solo BWV 1007-1012 / Libralon
Brilliant Classics
CD
$8.99$17.99Save 50%Sep 24, 2021
In the music of Bach, the Italian violist Simone Libralon has found a lifelong companion, who ‘unfailingly touches that emotional chord we need in the varied and contrasting moments of human experience - a safe haven reserved for intimate spirituality.’ His own approach to the suites which Bach wrote while Capellmeister at Weimar, however, is inflected not only by lived experience but also scholarship and a lively sense of performance style: ‘I’ve always thought of the sound of Bach in keyboard-related terms: fresh and light like a harpsichord, with the depth and solemnity of the organ, but sensed throughout as a continuum that conceals great compositional and conceptual complexity.’ His new recording of the Suites is accordingly personal and unique; he omits most of the marked repeats and brings a refreshingly flowing pulse to movements which are often interpreted as monuments of reflection such as the Sarabande of the Fifth Suite (here lasting less than a minute and a half). However, his decisions always arise from a sense of each movement’s inner character, and his account of the Sixth Suite’s Prelude is as spacious as Rostropovich’s. In doing so, he further demonstrates the imperishable quality of music which absorbs and reflects an almost infinite multiplicity of interpretations while conveying the different character of the artists who channel Bach’s inspiration.
