Strings Attached

Four Strings Around the World is a quite stunning solo CD from the Romanian-born violinist Irina Muresanu that features diverse musical styles from across Europe, the Middle East, Asia and both North and South America (Sono Luminus DSL-92221 sonoluminus.com). Muresanu introduced her Four Strings Around the World project in 2013 after her difficulty in learning Mark O’Connor’s Cricket Dance led her to explore worldwide non-traditional violin styles.

Enescu’s Airs in Romanian Folk Style opens the disc, with works by Ireland’s Dave Flynn, Iran’s Reza Vali, India’s Shirish Korde and China’s Bright Sheng surrounding Paganini’s 24th Caprice, Kreisler’s Recitativo and Scherzo Op.6 and a strongly melodic reading of the Bach D Minor Chaconne. Then it’s Piazzolla’s Tango Étude No.3 and a work by Chickasaw Nation composer Jerod Impichchaachaaha’ Tate before the short Cricket Dance that apparently gave Muresanu so much trouble. 

Not that you would know it – complete with foot stomps, it’s a simply dazzling end to one of the best solo CDs I’ve heard. 

Terry Robbins, The Whole Note, June/July/August2018 edition

The program divides in two: Western and Eastern Europe, which ranges from Bach to the contemporary David Flynn via Enescu, Paganini and Kreisler, and Music from the Middle East, Asia, and North and South America; quite a lot to include here all round... 
“Muresanu has selected wisely when it comes to her fellow countryman, Enescu, whose Airs in Romanian Folk Style, though written in 1926, was not to be published until 2006. There aren’t many recordings around. The four movements offer plenty of opportunities for characteristic rubato-style performance and for vital dance patterns. The taut melancholia of the third piece is followed by the giocoso vibrancy of the concluding Allegro. This galvanizing reading shows its charms in fine fashion...

“For the second part of her journey she visits Iran via Reza Vali’s Calligraphy No.5. This draws on traditional Persian modes, employing the Dastg?h. This is something of which Behzad Abdi is an outstanding exponent and, like Abdi, Vali aims at a concordance between Persian and Western techniques: Bartók is a probable starting point. Representing India, Shirish Korde’s Vák, for violin and electronic drone invariably owes its inspiration to Ragas. The drone effect allows Muresanu to negotiate the work’s three unbroken sections with considerable virtuosity. Bright Sheng’s international reputation is now of long standing and The Stream Flows, of which we hear only the second part (shame) evokes the sound of the erhu in this dance-patterned and pizzicato-flecked piece. Piazzolla’s Tango Etude No.3 possesses all its resonant and driving capital in this solo reading...”

- Jonathan Woolf, MusicWeb International

The Places
The visit to the Czech Republic starts with Hluboká Castle, a massive building that for over three hundred years belonged to the Schwarzenberg family. The present building is modelled in part on England's Windsor Castle. Other sites visited include Konopiště Castle, the picturesque town of Telč, and Vranov Castle.

The Music
Music for the visit is by Mozart and consists of his four Horn Concertos, written during the last decade of his life, when he was in Vienna. They were intended for his old Salzburg friend Ignaz Leutgeb, who had also settled in Vienna, prudently married there, and, in tandem with his musical activities, had become the owner of a small cheese-shop. The concertos, one of them unfinished at the time of Mozart's death, represent his work at its height.

Picture format: NTSC 4:3
Sound format: PCM Stereo / Dolby Digital 5.1 / DTS 5.1
Region code: 0 (worldwide)
Running time: 53 mins
No. of DVDs: 1

This is a Lohengrin sure to be welcomed by the true Wagnerian connoisseur. Offered complete for the first time on CD and re-mastered in 24bit/96kHz audio, Walhall’s Eternity Series brings to market a 1949 Moscow, USSR performance of the opera, sung in Russian. Evincing tremendous vocal power and voice control, Ivan Kozlovsky (1900-93), a lyric tenor then at his apex, heads the all-Russian cast; his performance ranks with those of the more familiar Wagnerian Lohengrins of the era, Melchior and Konya, in their respective primes. Samuil Samosud conducts the USSR Radio Symphony Orchestra and Chorus.

• A 2011 concert performance by Italian mezzosoprano Sonia Ganassi singing French arias of Bizet, Gounod, Massenet, and others. • Conductor Carla Delfrate leads the Orchestra Filarmonica Marchigiana. • Recipient of the Italian Abbiati prize in 1999, Ms. Ganassi has appeared in many of the world's major opera houses, and is scheduled to appear with the Vienna State Opera as Jane Seymour in Donizetti's Anna Bolena during the 2013/14 season.

The WESER-RENAISSANCE ensemble had two goals in mind in its concert series “Breslau – A City in the Heart of Europe”: the first was to offer musical enjoyment and the second was to remember an old cultural environment that had been forgotten for many decades. The music manuscripts and printed editions discovered in the Berlin State Library attest to the great diversity and high quality of music culture in what was once the capital of Silesia. “Die Geburt unsers Herrn and Heylands Jesu Christi” (The Birth of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ), a Christmas narrative by Tobias Zeutschner, who was active at Breslau’s principal churches St. Bernhardin and St. Mary Magdalene, forms the focus of the present selection from these sources in a program entitled “Weihnachten im Breslau des 17. Jahrhunderts – Festmusik in der Kirche St. Maria Magdalena” (Christmas in Seventeenth-Century Breslau – Festive Music in the Church of St. Mary Magdalene). This early example of a Biblical history composition is richly scored for eighteen voices.

Soprano Patrice Michaels, “a formidable interpretative talent” (The New Yorker), and collaborative pianist extraordinaire Kuang-Hao Huang offer Notorious RBG in Song, an album of world-premiere recordings saluting the life and work of legal pioneer Ruth Bader Ginsburg in celebration of her completion of 25 years on the United States Supreme Court. Ginsburg, a longtime crusader for equal rights, has become a pop culture icon known as “Notorious RBG.”

Michaels, a vocalist of “spectacular and diverse gifts” (Journal of Singing) is also a gifted composer. Her nine-song cycle, ‘The Long View’, illuminates key aspects of Justice Ginsburg’s personal and professional life through letters, remembrances, conversations, and even Court opinions. The album concludes with songs by American composer Stacy Garrop, winner of many prestigious awards and commissions; JUNO Award-winning Canadian composer Vivian Fung; prolific art-song composer Lori Laitman; and an aria from Derrick Wang’s new comic opera, Scalia/Ginsburg.

American composer Stacy Garrop, recipient of many prestigious awards and commissions, based her deeply moving “My Dearest Ruth” on the farewell love letter the Justice’s husband, Georgetown University law professor Martin Ginsburg, wrote shortly before his death in 2010. The aria “You are Searching in Vain for a Bright-Line Solution,” from Derrick Wang’s opera Scalia/Ginsburg, which captured widespread media attention, crystallizes Justice Ginsburg’s views on interpreting the U.S. Constitution. JUNO Award-winning Canadian composer Vivian Fung’s humorous “Pot Roast à la RBG” provides directions for preparing the beef dish, using Justice Ginsburg’s own words as related in the text by daughter Jane Ginsburg. Prolific art-song composer Lori Laitman’s setting of the Emily Dickinson poem “Wider than the Sky” wasn’t written with Ginsburg in mind, but it was performed at her 80th birthday celebration because it perfectly embodied her intellectual breadth.

REVIEW:

This is a difficult production to review, not just because Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg has become such a significant figure in modern American life, but because the range of her achievements—whether as a jurist or as a wife, mother, opera maven, attorney, professional colleague and feminist icon—resists purely musical treatment. That’s not a reason to hesitate in offering her this lovingly produced tribute. Like RBG herself, who responded to the notion that women had no place in the legal profession by going ahead and doing it anyway, Cedille General Manager Jim Ginsburg (her son) and singer Patrice Michaels (her daughter-in-law) have taken the plunge with evident gusto.

The main item here is The Longview, an imposing portrait of RBG in nine songs composed by Michaels for voice and piano in an attractive, post-modern tonal idiom. There are vivid and beautiful numbers here, especially the central Anita’s Story, a wonderful tale of the power of Ginsburg’s words to change a life; but for many listeners the main interest will lie in the eighth song’s quotations of Ginsburg’s own legal opinions. Imagine setting this to music to get an idea of what Michaels is up to: “I have said before and reiterate here that only an ostrich could regard the supposedly neutral alternatives as race unconscious.” What results from this effort is not so much a conventional song cycle as a theater piece—I could readily imagine it staged, particularly as Michaels, whose voice is hardly conventionally beautiful but whose intelligent artistry is beyond question, performs it here.

The remainder of the program consists of four songs by four different composers, all inspired by RBG’s life and legend. Vivian Fung’s “Pot Roast à la RBG” is the most amusing; Stacy Garrop’s “My Dearest Ruth”, a love letter written by husband Martin Ginsburg from his death bed, is the most touching. I suspect that more than a few tears were shed both here and elsewhere during this project. Through it all, Michaels receives ideally sensitive support from pianist Kuang-Hao Huang, while Cedille’s engineering, as usual, is first class. The final impression that emerges is a portrait of a family as much as of an individual—a very remarkable family indeed. I suspect that RBG may regard this as her greatest achievement of all.

– ClassicsToday.com (David Hurwitz)

The Finnish-American composer Alex Freeman has been described as being ‘as comfortable in the realm of the pop ballad as in that of the concert hall’ and yet his songs ‘are imbued with the craftsmanship and care one would expect of a composer of his formidable academic training, just as his concert works carry the emotional immediacy of popular music.’ Himself a choral singer, Alex Freeman has written a number of works for choir: music that aims to be sonorous and melodic, but is carefully crafted to avoid the clichés that can burden conventional tonality. Freeman’s requiem Under the arching heavens was commissioned by Nils Schweckendiek and the Helsinki Chamber Choir to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the 1918 Finnish civil war. The work incorporates poems in Finnish, Swedish and English, reflecting both the specific reason for the commission and the universality of human suffering caused by war. In the non-liturgical texts chosen by Freeman, birds are a recurring image, as is that of a mother and child. The work ends with lines by Walt Whitman from a poem written in the aftermath of the American Civil War. Also included on the album is A Wilderness of Sea, another recent choral piece which draws on works by Shakespeare, and the poet’s images of the sea, and of mankind’s relationship with it.

Includes work(s) by various composers. Ensembles: United States Army Band, United States Army Chorus.

Ireneusz Wyrwa (b. 1975) started playing the organ while at the Frederic Chopin State Secondary Music School. In 1999, he graduated with honors in organ performance from the Karol Szymanowski Academy of Music. For over 20 years, Mr. Wyrwa was an active church musician in several Polish dioceses. He is currently professor in the Department of Church Music of Fryderyk Chopin Music University in Warsaw. This DUX organ recital features works written between the 17th -19th centuries.

ARSO Ensemble is made up of the leaders and soloists of the Podkarpacka Philharmonic Orchestra - Robert Nasciszewski and Orest Telwach (violin), Anna Nasciszewska (cello) and Slawomir Ujek (double-bass). The ensemble plays Rossini's lesser-known Six sonatas a quarttro, penned by Rossini in 1804 at the age of 12.

Described by critics as a 'bona fide angel playing' and an 'electrifying pianist', the young Ukrainian-born, North Carolina-based Valentina Lisitsa has been receiving rave reviews ever since her debut in Avery Fisher Hall for the Mostly Mozart Festival.

Among various dance forms cultivated by Frederic Chopin, the polonaises appear to be the most significant. They are the beginning of his creative journey and are not only proof of his geniues but they are also the unique genre that shows the pianistic and stylistic evolution of Chopin's work. Andrzej Pikul has many awards and accolades under his musical belt, having given many performances throughout his time as a pianist. He is a Laureate of the Polish Piano Festival, the International Competition Foundation Dziffra and the European Broadcasting Competition.

On their first album featuring madrigals and canzonettas by Andrea Gabrieli, the WESER RENAISSANCE ensemble led by Manfred Cordes was already in its element. On SWR2 Radio Michael Stegemann commented: “A most highly entertaining and successful album. Perfect balance in the mixture of singers and winds, audio transparency of the polyphonic structures, great textual intelligibility.” And on the ensemble’s second Gabrieli release, now with madrigals, psalms, and organ works by this master delighting so much in experimentation, his intention and wish to offer intelligent entertainment to his fellow human beings are clearly shown. By 1566 at the latest, Andrea Gabrieli was appointed to the coveted post of organist at St. Mark’s Cathedral, and already during his lifetime he was esteemed in particular because of his enormous versatility.

William Bolcom was awarded the 1988 Pulitzer Prize in Music for his 12 New Etudes for piano, and his music has always revolved around works for the instrument on which he still performs as a soloist and accompanist. This collection of mostly premiere recordings reveals student pieces that negotiate twentieth century musical battles between the avant-garde influences of Boulez and Messiaen and Bolcom’s love of Schumann, as well as later work that embraces the 1960s ragtime revival and draws inspiration from friends and colleagues in every phase of his distinguished six-decade career. Elegantly performed by friends of the composer, this wide-ranging program is summed up by Bolcom as ‘cleaning house’ in the Charles Ives tradition.

REVIEW:

Anyone suitably provoked should accordingly investigate this set, each of whose discs is well planned as a standalone sequence. Piano tone is clear but never clinical and Bolcom’s own notes, informative and laconic, complement his music unerringly.

-- Gramophone

This extremely useful set gathers together all of Bolcom’s piano music that you don’t already have in your collection. There are many delights here, and some fascinating revelations about the development of this most versatile pianist-composer who has always resolutely refused to respect musical genre boundaries. …There are two delicious rags, separated by almost forty years, student pieces that show the composer coming to terms with the avant-garde polemics of the 1950s and 60s, and a concert paraphrase of an operatic aria in the popular ‘Neapolitan Song’ style.

-- Records International

What was originally mooted, by Klaus Heymann of Naxos, as a complete retrospective of the piano music of William Bolcom, eventually materialized as this 3-CD collection of works not easily available elsewhere. The compositions span 1956-2012, with music from his teen years to the present day, so you get a good overview of works from all periods of his career. Four pianists were engaged for the task, all with connections to the composer. Most of the recordings were set down in New York in 2014.

The music has been beautifully recorded with an attractively clear piano sound in each case. The excellent accompanying liner notes provide personal reflections and background to the pieces played, by the composer himself. On my first encounter with Bolcom’s music, I would offer a warm recommendation for this most enjoyable release.

-- MusicWeb International

These youthful chamber works by Richard Strauss, not widely represented on disc, are filled with sparkling inventiveness and lyricism. Written at the age of thirteen, his charming Piano Trio No. 1 follows the models of Mozart and Beethoven.

The Ancient Greek word Kalon was used by philosophers to describe perfect physical and moral beauty. In this recording, the Albion Quartet and the Czech Philharmonic explore the different aspects of Kalon through the context in which beauty can exist in ugliness and darkness. This record is the result of Richard Blackford's doctorate at the University of Bristol, which investigates the use of polytempo. The recording is a way of applying the findings of his doctorate in a range of musical contexts. Kalon is unique as it explores the use of polytempo in the context of extended tonality and modality, which could be said surpasses the complexity posed by serialist works of a similar nature, such as Stockhausen's Gruppen or Carré.

"Nicolas Horvath, with precise playing and imaginative interpretation has made Glassworlds 2 an indispensable reference for the serious enthusiast as well as marking an important milestone in the evolution of the music of Philip Glass." -- Sequenza 21

This new recording from the Vida Guitar Quartet continues to highlight Vida’s passion for ground-breaking arrangements. Mark Ashford’s version of the English Folk Songs by Ralph Vaughan Williams is just one example of the quartet’s ability to re-work established masterpieces with breathtaking virtuosity. The Vida Guitar Quartet brings together four guitarists of exceptional artistry and “unerring musical instinct.” (Gramophone) Vida’s ability to “conjure up an orchestral palette of color and effects” (Classic FM) combined with their “exquisite tonal and dynamic control” has firmly established them as a passionate and masterful ensemble who sparkle with “vitality and spontaneity” (Acoustic) Vida’s seemingly effortless sense of ensemble and their broad range of timbres and dynamics evokes “listening to an entire orchestra and note merely to four guitars. There’s only one word for it: magic.” (Gramophone)

Listen to the Naxos Podcast to learn more about this release!

Terry Riley’s name will always be associated with his breakthrough work In C, but his influence on modern music has stretched far beyond minimalism. Both of the works on this recording reveal Riley’s spirit of exploration and his close collaboration with remarkable musicians. Commissioned by the Nashville Symphony, The Palmian Chord Ryddle is a kind of musical autobiography in which electric violin pioneer Tracy Silverman’s “one-man string quartet” sets the pace for the sparse, translucent orchestration. At The Royal Majestic is another recent example of Riley’s work with a symphony orchestra and a virtuosic soloist, in this case organist Todd Wilson. Its title refers to “the mighty Wurlitzer housed in grand movie palaces,” and the music draws on a wide variety of genres including gospel, ragtime, Baroque chorales, and boogie.

REVIEW:

The late career of Terry Riley has received less attention than that of Philip Glass or even Steve Reich. The resurgent Nashville Symphony under Giancarlo Guerrero makes a good case here that such neglect is misguided. The Palmian Chord Ryddle (2011) is an eclectic, playful eight-movement work for electric violin and orchestra, but steering mostly clear of highly extended techniques. Even stronger is At The Royal Majestic, an homage to the golden age of the theater organ. Engineering kudos for clarity in an extremely diverse set of materials. Highly recommended.

– All Music Guide (James Manheim)

Classical Music