Christmas, more than any other holiday, is deeply rooted in a nation’s culture. This is why Christmas carols from different cultures sound so vastly different from one another. This collection of songs includes music all the way from the Middle Ages to the present day. Benjamin Britten’s A Ceremony of Carols is a notable track on this release, and is built on folk carols and considered by many to be one of the best Christmas cantatas. One of the world’s best choirs, the SWR Vokalensemble, performs these works.

This fourth volume in Marin Alsop’s acclaimed Prokofiev symphonic cycle features two of his most viscerally exciting works. Using material salvaged from his opera The Fiery Angel, the Third Symphony was hailed by Serge Koussevitzky at its 1929 première as ‘the best symphony since Tchaikovsky’s Sixth’. Originally commissioned as a ballet by Sergey Dyagilev but rejected as un-danceable, the Scythian Suite has become a popular orchestral showpiece, while Prokofiev retained a lifelong fondness for his dark-hued early symphonic sketch Autumn.

Review:

Even die-hard fans will admit that Prokofiev's seven symphonies aren't always magnificent and Marin Alsop's elegant lucidity provides only a partial solution to the problem. She gets unfailingly good string playing, often more sensitively nuanced than that of her rivals, but her Sao Paulo team does tend to 'normalize' the invention, smoothing away rough edges in a manner that not everyone will find idiomatic. Still, Alsop's reading works on its own terms, and if she makes the music sound as much like Roussel as Stravinsky one can perhaps discern why Serge Diaghilev chose to reject the Scythian Suite as insufficiently Russian.

– Gramophone

Dr. Franklin Cox studied cello with, among others, Janos Starker and Peter Wiley, and composition with, again among others Brian Ferneyhough. He has received numerous fellowships, prizes, and commissions from leading institutions and festivals of new music. He has performed with many leading new music groups, including SONOR, the Group for Contemporary Music and Ensemble Köln. The New Cello, V2: European Composers, features modern solo cello compositions by seven contemporary composers, with three the work of Klaus K. Hübler.

Shostakovich’s First Symphony propelled the teenage composer to international prominence, its emotional range and innovative orchestration marking him as a daring and precocious talent on the scene. The Third Symphony, ‘The First of May’, originally intended as part of a symphonic cycle inspired by dates on the revolutionary calendar, has been described as ‘a reckless and at times chaotic accommodation between modernist intent and revolutionary fervour’. ‘Thrilling, perfect, essential…the modern reference recording’. (Classicstoday.com on Naxos 8.572461 / Symphony No. 10)

Beethoven was involved in theater in one way or another from boyhood, and the commission to compose incidental music for Goethe's play Egmont at the Royal Imperial Court Theatre in Vienna was the first of many such collaborations. Beethoven's score conveys the essence of this tragedy and reveals his clear affinity with it's theme of heroic sacrifice by a man condemned to death for taking a valiant stand against oppression. Leif Segerstam is recognized internationally as a conductor, composer, violinist and pianist. He is currently chief conductor of the Turku Philharmonic Orchestra. He has also conducted many of the world's most prestigious orchestras, and was one of the most important ambassadors for Sibelius' 2015 anniversary year. His many recordings have been critically acclaimed, and feature works by contemporary composers as well as the complete symphonies of Mahler, Sibelius and Nielsen among many others.

In the words of Duo Odéon: “… We met during our first year as doctoral students at Arizona State University, developing a natural collaborative energy when Hannah began writing her dissertation on Antheil’s three Parisian violin sonatas. Over the course of six months, we discovered the very limits of our technical and musical skill as we worked through each piece. We thrived on the raw energy and driving aggression of Antheil’s early sonatas, finding beauty in their vivacity and quirky athleticism.

In the fall of 2016, we received an email… informing us of a newly discovered Antheil work for violin and piano, found amongst the late violinist Werner Gebauer’s papers. Marc Gebauer, his son, had unearthed a set of three short waltzes, Valses from “Specter of the Rose,” an arrangement of music from Antheil’s 1947 film score for Specter of the Rose. As we studied Gebauer’s Valses, we learned that Antheil and Gebauer’s relationship extended far beyond successful musical collaboration into friendship, mirroring our own musical relationship. Over the course of their collaboration, Antheil composed two works specifically for Gebauer, his 1945 Sonatina for Violin and Piano and his 1946 Violin Concerto… In the ink of the handwritten manuscript at the Library of Congress, we could see Antheil’s borrowed melodies and ideas from earlier works pop out of the page, transformed for Gebauer’s technical brilliance… In our recording we have attempted to remain as close to the handwritten score as possible… With these three pieces, we have come to a deeper understanding of the collaboration and friendship between two incredible musicians...”

REVIEWS:

This disc gives us a collection of Antheil’s chamber music, performed by two of Antheil’s greatest supporters, the Duo Odeon, violinist Hannah Leland and pianist Aimee Fincher. I applaud the focus on Antheil’s music, which is simply not heard widely enough. The recording is an intimate one for all three works, with a hint of room ambiance.

– Audiophile Audition

This entire disk is devoted to Antheil’s mid-40s compositions for violin and piano and it is in that capacity a major undertaking. We get a chance to hear three substantial compositions played with true verve and understanding.

The Sonatina is a major offering performed with an excellent insight into the music, which is illuminating certainly of Antheil’s brilliant inventive talents.

The Concerto is most lively, and if I sometimes notice some passages very indebted to Prokofiev’s First Violin Concerto, it is with a certain joy since Antheil integrates and revivifies the motifs to make something altogether his.

The Valses are a welcome addition. Three movements at a little over six minutes do not sound at all incidental but substantial in their brevity.

And in the end I come away from this CD with a real appreciation for Duo Odeon and their beautifully communicative Modernist musicianship and virtuosity.

– Gapplegate Classical Modern Music Review

This is a disc of late period Antheil, specifically 1945-47, a good 20 years removed from his wildest and most experimental period when he was the enfant terrible of Paris and New York. That being said, late Antheil was still a very good composer, perhaps more influenced by Stravinsky than previously, and it shows in the superb structure of these works, written for violinist Werner Gebauer, concertmaster of the Dallas Symphony Orchestra. The Valses are, in fact, a world premiere recording.

– Art Music Lounge

WAGNER: Symphonic Excerpts from Parsifal / TCHAIKOVSKY: Symp

A fine guide with performances as subtle as they are perceptive.

It’s very unusual to find all Honegger’s Violin Sonatas — which includes the solo sonata of 1940 — grouped together in one disc. In fact I’m not aware of another such coupling in the current catalogue, which gives this budget price entrant cachet. Even better, the performances are persuasive and finely played and recorded.
 
This would amount to a recommendation even were the music not so attractive, which is not to say it’s transparent, as there are moments of occlusion and introspection along the way. The First Sonata is actually the unnumbered D minor of 1912. I agree wholly with Anyssa Neumann’s booklet notes that the opening embeds genuine ‘pathos’—it’s the pathos of popular song, in my view, to which Laurence Kayaleh responds with pervasive and elegant portamenti and effusive lyric intensity. There’s a degree of agitato in this work and Brahmsian striving, and it’s understandable that it was not published during Honegger’s lifetime in a sense, given the influences. But it’s still a big, confident utterance from the young composer. The slow movement is engagingly done, with its odd Delian moments, and the March section is well characterised. The confident and puckish finale is interrupted by a moment of baroque reportage, before a nobly conceived maestoso sweeps us to the finish. As she does throughout, Kayaleh plays with a refined tonal palette. She doesn’t make a big sound, but it is finely coloured.
 
The first numbered sonata was written during the last two years of the First World War. It’s a more focused work, less effusive, and sites the fast movement centrally between two essentially slow ones. The central panel of the Presto is played with the mute, and the whole thing is freely ruminative, though I detect Franck still in his musical handwriting. Stark intoning begins the finale, and here Kayaleh powerfully intensifies her vibrato width. It’s hard not to read into this movement something of the same spirit, but not the same means, that informs John Ireland’s contemporaneous Second Violin Sonata.
 
By contrast the 1919 Second Sonata has rather dreamlike qualities. It takes in a fugal moment, whilst remaining strongly chromatic, indeed compact in its reach — it’s 12 minutes in length in this performance. The finale’s ebullience removes the rather heavy atmosphere brilliantly, fully conveyed by Kayaleh and Paul Stewart. The solo sonata is becoming ever more popular and this performance will not harm that status in any way. What I like especially is the generosity of her grazioso phrasing in the Allegretto; delightfully done.
 
So if you lack these sonatas, or are curious about Honegger’s approach to them, this disc will stand as a fine guide with performances as subtle as they are perceptive.
 
-- Jonathan Woolf, MusicWeb International  

The project entitled In the Sphere of Sound as Crossroad of Cultures wants to draw a semantic and aesthetic musical path based on the investigation of timbres carried out by the Italian comporary composers from Giacinto Scelsi to Biagio Putignano. The program on this recording shows the interweaving of different musical perspectives in order to interpret the idea of sound as "a crossroad of cultures".

Although John Ireland is best remembered for his orchestral works, his 91 songs convey a peculiarly English quality of emotion expressed through reserve.

Alma Mahler-Werfel was born in Vienna 1879, the daughter of a soprano and a landscape painter. Her musical talent was soon recognized and she had lessons with a.o. Zemlinsky. In 1922 she married Gustav Mahler, who explicitly forbid her to continue her composing. Later however, seeing her withering, Mahler allowed her to publish a song cycle in 1910. Alma Mahler was a highly intelligent and cultured woman, surrounded by great artists like Klimt, Zemlinsky, Gropius and Werfel. Her salon in Vienna was the centre of high cultural life. After the war she settled in New York, where she became an iconic figure in the music scene till her death in 1964. Her songs reflect the Zeitgeist of composition: dramatic, brooding, the darkness occasionally lifted by visions of serenity and peace. These are beautiful performances by Catharina Kroeger and Monica Lonero, champions of neglected romantic music. As a bonus they perform a soprano-actress based work called “Penelope” by contemporary composer Patrizia Montanaro.

Classical Music

Includes work(s) by Erik Satie.

The start of an exciting ane prestigious series: the complete Beethoven piano sonatas played by Giovanni Bellucci. Bellucci is one of the most interesting and extraordinary pianists of today. Described by Piero Rattalino as ''a force of nature, vast and palpitating'', his playing is highly original, striving to recreate the original impact of the work she is playing: ''het akes us back to the Golden Age of the Piano'' wrote Le Monde. His recordings, notably with works by Liszt, were showered with prizes such as Diapson d'Or, Choc, Editor's Choice, CD Maestro, etc. Giovanni Bellucci embarks on this epic musical journey of recording the complete Beethoven Sonatas, a challenge that every pianist of world stature will face. His Beethoven is free, with a strong sense of rhetoric and improvisation, adhering nevertheless strictly to the score and its intentions. The result is fresh, exhilarating and illuminating, letting us marvel at the originality and genius of the music.

Spending their summer holidays with Farmer Braithwaite and his wife in Scatterbrook, John and Susan come across a particularly lifelike scarecrow in a nearby field. That evening, much to the children’s surprise, the scarecrow makes an appearance in the Braithwaites’ Kitchen to warm himself by the fire. He is Worzel Gummidge and he is no ordinary scarecrow. His tendency to cause mayhem wherever he goes sparks a series of mishaps and adventures, often with hilarious results. This is the first of the Worzel Gummidge novels written by Barbara Euphan Todd, originally published in 1936. Jessica Martin is a leading musical theatre actor, voice artist and graphic novelist. Her television credits include voice work for Spitting Image and the role of Mags in the Doctor Who story “The Greatest Show in the Galaxy.” She has played numerous lead roles in West End musicals, including Me and My Girl and Elf. Her first graphic novel, Elsie Harris Picture Palace, was published in 2015.

Like his friend and contemporary Rachmaninoff, Nikolai Medtner enjoyed a privileged and affluent upbringing, and was also exiled from Russia following the revolution in 1917. Unlike Rachmaninoff, Medtner could point to an ancestry that was part German, and his father’s passion for Germanic culture ensured that Goethe and Beethoven exerted as much influence on the young Medtner as Russian composers and writers, in particular Beethoven’s piano sonatas and string quartets. Medtner moved first to Germany, then France, before settling in London in 1935. The earlier songs in this programme, Opp. 36 and 37, were written against the backdrop of the revolution, shortly before he fled Russia. Opp. 45 and 46 (written to Russian and German texts, respectively) were composed in France. Praised for her ‘formidably striking’ and ‘stunning silvery’ sound, the rising star soprano Sofia Fomina has performed in Toulouse and Baden-Baden, at Bayerische Staatsoper, Seattle Opera, Hungarian State Opera, Paris Opera, and The Royal Opera, Covent Garden. Her Pamina for Glyndebourne Festival Opera in 2019 received rave reviews. Alexander Karpeyev has performed throughout Europe and toured in the USA, Canada, and Russia as a concerto soloist, recitalist, and chamber musician. A prize-winner of several international competitions, he also completed a doctorate on performance practise in the music of Medtner, based on the Edna Iles Medtner Collection at the British Library.

REVIEW:

The Russian soprano’s lovely voice soars above the staff with ease – no wonder as she is a busy operatic coloratura soprano. But unlike many an opera singer, she is perfectly at home in the intimate world of art song, where her attention to the nuances of expressing the text are greatly in evidence. She is just as comfortable in the lyrical songs in 6 Stikhotvoreniy A. Pushkina (6 Poems by A. Pushkin), Op. 36 as in the rapturously dramatic Arion and in the intensity of Telega zhizni (The Wagon of Life.)

Sofia Fomina is perfectly partnered by the protean pianist Alexander Karpeyev, a Medtner specialist who would be the ideal artist to create an album of piano music by the prolific Medtner.

– Rafael's Music Notes (Rafael de Acha)

Since its founding, the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra (CSO) has maintained an unfaltering commitment to commissioning new music, resulting in substantial new works from a diverse array of composers including Aaron Copland and Philip Glass. For the 2015-16 season, three exciting international composers originating from three different continents, Sebastian Currier, Thierry Escaich and Zhou Tian, were each commissioned to write a new concerto for orchestra, showcasing the virtuosity, style, and sound of the CSO, thus furthering a genre championed by the likes of Bartók and Lutoslawski. The resulting three works featured on this live recording represent the culmination of this exciting project, and once again affirms the CSO’s core value of being a place of experimentation.

Classical Music

Classical Music

"•The particularity of this edition of Donizetti’s masterpiece is in its reconstruction of the 1845 Saint Petersburg version. Along with some key transpositions, this 2010 performance presents the alternative finale adopted at the same time. • Bass-baritone Lorenzo Regazzo is an acclaimed “bel canto” and “coloratura” singer and renowned Mozart and Rossini interpreter. Giovanni Battista Rigon is considered “one of the best Rossini conductors...spirited...never tiring” (Il Corriere della Sera)."