This diverse programme features eight premiere recordings of Australian music for two pianists, including seven works recently commissioned by the acclaimed Viney-Grinberg duo. Demonstrating the innovative potential of this medium, these pieces range from duets on a single piano to Mill Life in which 22 pianos are overdubbed and piled on top of each other. Other highlights include Visible Weapon, pairing virtuoso velocity with electronics, and The Art of Agony – a musical picture frame for Percy Grainger’s spoken voice.

Including premiere recordings, this programme provides us with a privileged opportunity to engage with 36 of Ludwig van Beethoven’s rarely heard sketches, variations and briefest of compositions, even the earliest of which have much to teach us about the emergence of his unique voice and style. The range of Beethoven’s musical experimentation reveals a lasting interest in counterpoint, as well as practical pages such as cadenzas for a Mozart concerto, an incomplete sonata and a second version of the famous bagatelle Fur Elise. A significant supplement to his greatest works, these miniatures bring the full arc of Beethoven’s singular genius into ever clearer focus.

The four works for symphonic wind band composed by Peter Fischer – born in 1956, across the bay from San Francisco, in Martinez, California – are almost textbook examples of American eclecticism, mixing urban vibrancy with a sense of the timeless outdoors, bringing in flavors from jazz and rock and moving easily between vigorous dance-rhythms and sultry nightscapes. Dance, indeed, lies at the heart of most of this music, which gives the mambo, the tango, the tarantella and the waltz a new and spirited twist amid echoes of Stravinsky, Revueltas and Bernstein. In Fischer's Trumpet Concerto, soloist Jens Lindemann plays trumpet, cornet, and flügelhorn.

Signum’s first album with Mexican composer Rodrigo Ruiz combines the composer’s musical and literary passions in performances by world-class soloists Kerenza Peacock, Huw Watkins and Laura van der Heijden. Born in Tijuana, Mexico, Ruiz has attracted commissions from a number of artists, with both the opening Violin Sonata and ‘A riveder le stelle’ commissioned by Kerenza Peacock for this recording. The second work is a duo for violin and piano that is accompanied by poetic quotations from Canto XXXIV of Dante’s Inferno. The booklet notes include an interview with the composer by Jessica Duchen, who describes how the programme “clearly shows Rodrigo´s roots in the traditions of Beethoven and Brahms, but with individual twists that clearly indicate we are in fact on new territory”.

Michael Haydn’s colorful and inventive music is uplifting and expressive in equal measure, but his music has been eclipsed by that of his elder brother Joseph, and by Mozart. Sacred music is central to Michael Haydn’s oeuvre and was considered by some contemporary critics as superior to Joseph’s. Encompassing a broad range of textures and styles, parts of the Missa Sancti Nicolai Tolentini demonstrate Haydn’s music at its most exhilarating and energetic, and his supreme gift for empfindsames (‘sensitive’) lyrical writing is also to be heard in the Vespers.

These two works present two sharply contrasting sides of Malcolm Arnold: his limitless resources of knockabout fun, and a sense of existential tragedy. But each score presents its own surprises: the jocularity of the Grand Concerto Gastronomique conceals some seriously good (though not seriously serious) music; and the delicately scored Ninth Symphony, written after five years when its composer had, in his own words, ‘been through hell’, irradiates its emotional restraint and elegiac tone with moments of light and warmth.

REVIEW:

Overall, this is a typically excellent disc from Toccata; first rate music receiving effective performances presented in an informative and valuable package. Even the rather sombre, indeed haunted, image of Arnold that stares bleakly from the booklet cover is well-chosen and apt. Given that it is two decades since we have had a new survey of Arnold’s magnificent symphonies, I hope that this will prove to be just the beginning of a new cycle – a warmly welcomed disc.

-- MusicWeb International

The Hartt School Wind Ensemble presents recent concertante works by three contemporary American composers- demonstrating once more the versatility of the ensemble, heard here in conjunction with soloists. Susan Botti’s sull’ala is inspired by flight, expressed in rhythm, harmony and texture, while Jess Langston Turner describes powerful meteorological phenomena in Heavy Weather. In Guignol, Stephen Michael Grye conjures witty banter and frenetic action from his puppet hero.

Rob Keeley considers chamber music to be the most direct and expressive medium for him as a composer. The spirits of Haydn and Chopin can be heard in the Second Piano Trio, and there is a wink towards Mozart in the wonderful blend and agility to be found in the Clarinet Quartet. All of these works are the result of musical friendships, the faith and commitment of the players an integral part of each performance, with the remarkable sonorities of Distil as its still center.

Francesco Morlacchi was a native of Perugia, but early success led him to become music director of the Dresden Opera where he remained for the rest of his life despite having an opportunity to succeed Rossini in Naples in 1822. He did make tours to Italy however, and Tebaldo e Isolina received its triumphant premiere in Venice, becoming the most successful of all his operas. Morlacchi’s gifts as a lyricist and for characterization are heard here at their best, with showpiece arias and duets in a version of the Romeo and Juliet story that ends in happiness and the victory of reason over vengeance.

Beethoven’s Missa solemnis is the one work the composer admired above all his compositions. It was written for his great patron and friend Archduke Rudolf of Austria at around the same time that he embarked on his Ninth Symphony and as the writer Donald Tovey noted, ‘there is no choral and no orchestral writing, earlier or later, that shows a more thrilling sense of the individual colour of every chord.’ This insightful documentary follows Frieder Bernius on a journey of discovery as he immerses himself in Beethoven’s monumental masterpiece in preparation for a recording.