The German composer Friedrich Kuhlau (1786-1832) fled to Denmark as a young man and with his strong cosmopolitan personality became a loner – and at the same time a key figure – in the Danish Golden Age. Kuhlau championed new tones in Danish music, and his melodically appealing violin sonatas were the first Danish sonatas in the Romantic style. With this recording Duo Åstrand/Salo lends new luster to music that has only rarely been performed in our time.

The expressive and picturesque music of Fran�ois Couperin ("The Great"), one of the central figures in French baroque-era music, has had a deep impact on many later composers. One of these is British composer Graham Lynch (b. 1957) whose music covers a wide range of styles. His harpsichord music is not derived from Couperin - he does not copy it's style and ornaments - but is the nearest we have to an equivalent: highly expressive, well articulated and full of imagery. Finnish harpsichordist Assi Karttunen specializes in both baroque and contemporary music. This is her fourth published recording.

Handel, G.F.: Water Music / Sinfonias in B-Flat Major, Hwv 3

Norgard, P.: Seadrift / Nova Genitura / Fons Laetitiae

The Danse macabre – the idea that Death comes for everyone regardless of status or importance – has fascinated musicians for centuries. In 2011, inspired by a vast 16th c. painting by Bernt Notke in St Nicholas Church in Tallinn, the English composer Gregory Rose (b. 1948) set the mediaeval German texts which sit below each panel, turning Notke’s terrifying vision into a bleak but grimly humorous ritual. The recording features the world-renowned Estonian Philharmonic Chamber Choir. It was recorded in the very church that houses Notke’s paintings and is conducted by the composer.

REVIEW:

So, if one were interested in the now 21st-century oratorio, or musico-dramatic theater work, then one should well enjoy Rose’s efforts here. Having listened to the work numerous times over the course of a few weeks now, the music has grown on me and stayed in my memory, disturbing as it sometimes is. But in the weeks now leading up to the Christmas season, this music certainly makes one pause and think; and it makes for a vivid contrast to all the jingle bells and songs about St. Nick that one is now hearing all over. So for those paintings in St. Nicolas’s church, we can only be grateful now in numerous ways.

-- Fanfare

Alessio Bax plays an Italian inspired programme, picking his favourite pieces taken from a rich history of music from one of the most romantic countries in the world.

He opens the programme with a J.S. Bach transcription of a oboe concerto by Venetian composer Alessandro Marcello, which reveals a deep insight into Bach’s mind. This is followed by Rachmaninov’s last ever work for solo piano, which is incredibly eloquent, introspective and personal. The Dallapiccola continues this eloquent theme, showing some beautifully crafted dodecaphonism. The recording is rounded off with two pieces of Liszt, which take the listener on a multi-legged journey through hell, purgatory and heaven, with beauty and drama along the way.



REVIEW:

This Italian’s salute to his home country is inspired indeed. The standout performance is a spellbinding account of the Dante Sonata in which Bax masterfully combines scrupulous observation of Liszt’s agogics and dynamics (trusting the composer here really does pay dividends) with quite thrilling bravura in which he throws caution to the wind. Few accounts of the first two pages are so filled with menace and mystery.

– Gramophone

Percussionist and composer Bonnie Whiting's "Perishable Structures" places works for speaking percussionist within a context of storytelling. Through works by Rzewski, Globokar, Parenti, Logan-Greene, and Whiting herself, the album investigates the intertwined relationship between spoken and musical narrative and the unique role that percussion plays in this repertoire. Bonnie Whiting performs, commissions, and composes new experimental music for percussion. She seeks out projects involving non-traditional notation, interdisciplinary performance, improvisation, and the speaking percussionist. She has presented solo and small ensemble shows at The Stone in New York, the Brackish Series in Brooklyn, The Lilypad in Boston, The New York City Electroacoustic Music Festival, at Hallwalls in Buffalo, the Tiny Park Gallery in Austin, The Wulf in LA, the Carl Solway Gallery in Cincinnati, The Grove Haus in Indianapolis, on the Wayward Music Series in Seattle, on tour throughout New Zealand, and at colleges and universities around the country. Her debut solo album, featuring an original solo-simultaneous realization of John Cage’s 45’ for a speaker and 27’10.554” for a percussionist, was released by Mode Records in April of 2017.

EAT THE SUN AND DRINK THE RAIN is a work for choir and live electronics. Sven Helbig has created a concept album in which he appears both as composer and as author of almost all the song texts. Over the course of ten pieces he weaves a loose narrative that addresses pressing questions of the present day. The powerfully resonant work suspends delicate choral passages above pulsating synthesizers.  Sublime a cappella chords spread out above digitally created sounds, in perfect balance between choir and electronics. I EAT THE SUN AND DRINK THE RAIN builds upon the musical principles underlying POCKET SYMPHONIES and POCKET SYMPHONIES ELECTRONICA. Folk?influenced pieces (ABENDGLÜHEN / red sky at night) are set alongside subtle harmonic complexes in the manner of Arvo Pärt (KYRIE) and minimalistic drone music (GEDENKEN / remembrance).

After Amelia goes to the ball was staged in 1937 at the Metropolitan Opera with acclaim, Gian Carlo Menotti became hot property. Two further radio operas were comparative failures but it was with The Medium that Menotti really hit his stride. A tragedy in two acts for five singers, a dance-mime role and a chamber orchestra of 14 players, Menotti’s opera is both dramatically astute in the Puccini tradition and composed with an acute ear for mood and mystery: the score, often quite dissonant, conveys an eerie, morbid atmosphere. According to the composer, “The Medium is actually a play of ideas. It describes the tragedy of a woman caught between two worlds, a world of reality which she cannot wholly comprehend, and a supernatural world in which she cannot believe.” Premiered in 1945, The Medium received its first Broadway staging two years later, with a hugely successful run of 212 performances at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre on Broadway. As a curtain-raiser for these performances (and a striking contrast), Menotti wrote a light one-act comedy in the opera buffa tradition, The Telephone, which he sub-titled L’amour à trois. The opera’s central role of Lucy became a huge success for its first interpreter, Marilyn Cotlow, and now the young American soprano Elizabeth Hertzberg steps into her shoes with an assured portrayal. Made under studio conditions in Modena in 2018, these recordings took place in association with semi-staged performances given by artists on the distinguished Raina Kabaivanska Masterclass programme. According to the Giornale della Musica, Hertzberg was ‘excellent’ as Lucy, and more critical praise was directed towards the fluent and insightful conducting of Scogna. There are comparatively few modern recordings to rival the classic 1947 recording; an essential acquisition for avid listeners of 20th century music theatre.

Classical Music

Classical Music

Classical Music

Classical Music

Aged only 17, Schubert conducted his first complete Mass setting, in F major, D. 105, in September 1814, gaining the approval of his former teacher Antonio Salieri.

Classical Music

The German composer Felix Woyrsch was born in 1860 in Troppau (then the capital of Austrian Silesia and now, as Opava, in the Czech Republic) but became prominent in the musical life of Altona, now part of Hamburg, as organist, choirmaster and teacher; he died there in 1944. Woyrsch’s late-Romantic organ music, with distant roots in Bach’s counterpoint, inhabits a harmonic world somewhere between Brahms and Reger, its dark colors reflecting the upheavals in the times through which he lived.

Classical Music

The organ music of Gerald Hendrie - born in England in 1935 but resident in France since 1996 - encompasses a huge range of influences, among them the organist-composers who went before him (not least Franck, Dupr� and Messiaen), dodecaphony, mediaeval plainchant and modality and jazz. The resulting works are as varied as the styles that fed into them, from grandiose to gentle, from severe to whimsical, from lyrical to lively.

Toivo Kuula (1883–1918) is one of the many composers who died at a tragically young age – 35 in his case, the result of an alcohol-fuelled pub brawl. The striking quality of the music he wrote during his short life points to the immensity of the loss not only to Finnish culture but to music more generally – as this first album of two, presenting his entire output of songs for solo voice and piano, makes abundantly clear. The range of moods captured here is striking, from cheery folksongs to dark existentialist contemplations of the meaning of life and death. The most passionate of them generate an operatic intensity in their short span, in a style that balances directness of expression and rich late-Romantic harmonies.

The Dutch conductor Bernard Haitink and the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra were linked by a long and intensive artistic collaboration, brought to an abrupt end by his death in October 2021. BR-KLASSIK now presents outstanding and as yet unreleased live recordings of concerts from the past years. This recording of Mahler's Seventh Symphony documents concerts from February 2011 in Munich.

As an interpreter of the symphonic repertoire, and especially that of the German-Austrian late Romantic period, Haitink was held in high esteem worldwide. With him, the symphonies of Gustav Mahler were always in the best of hands. His driving principle was to take the sound architecture of a musical composition with its many-layered interweavings and render it transparently audible; extreme sensitivity of sound was paired with a clearly structured interpretation of the score.

A valid recording of Mahler's Seventh Symphony places the highest demands on the skills of the conductor as well as on the virtuosity of each individual orchestral musician. Only under such circumstances can the highly complex individual voices merge to form a magnificent whole – an undertaking that achieves breathtaking effects time and again. A conductor is required here who unites the ensemble of individual, soloist-level musicians with an overarching musical concept. With its two grotesque "night musics", its sounds of nature, naïve folk motifs and intoxicating orchestral tutti, the Seventh Symphony is highly typical of Mahler's unique sound world.