Chisholm: Music for Piano, Vol. 7

In 1832 German-born Friedrich Burgmuller settled in Paris where he became internationally admired for his salon pieces and studies. At a time when demand for new teaching material had reached unprecedented heights, he supplied a sequence of works that appealed to the amateur market by virtue of their musical interest and appropriate technical demands. Written for the burgeoning market for piano teaching material, the set of 25 Easy and Progressive Studies, Op. 100 was soon followed by the 18 Characteristic Studies, Op. 109, a continuation of the earlier set, each piece bearing a charming title. They continue to provide a basis for teaching to this day. These works are performed by Swedish pianist Carl Petersson, whose previous albums for Grand Piano have won critical acclaim.

• Lutenist Axel Wolf's fourth Oehms release

Time Flies is an album of sixteen contemporary solo harpsichord works. All of these works have been composed within the last twenty years. Harpsichordist Elaine Funaro is “regarded as one of the leading performers of new music for harpsichord” (Classical Music: The Essential Listening Companion). She is a popular presence at contemporary and early music festivals around the world, and was the first, now past, president of the newly merged Historical Keyboard Society of North America, and is currently the Artistic Director of Aliénor, the American-based international competition for new harpsichord music. Elaine Funaro performs on a custom-made contemporary harpsichord, the Kingston Opus #333, which is decorated throughout by original artwork from North Carolina artist Lisa Creed.

Recorded in the presence of the composer, Andrew Penny’s survey of the Complete Symphonies and Dances by Sir Malcolm Arnold has long been considered to contain benchmark recordings. Born in 1921, Sir Malcolm Arnold quickly established himself as a fluent and versatile composer, a gifted tunesmith and a brilliant orchestrator. His music is typically lucid in texture, rich in melody and clear in draughtsmanship yet there are frequent signs of a complex musical personality and dramatic tensions not far beneath the surface. The Dances are light-hearted, vivid and jaunty, yet the nine symphonies explore the composer’s darker side, painting a picture of his private ‘journey through hell’ as he struggled with physical and mental health issues. They are masterworks which exert continued appeal and stimulate repeated listening.

REVIEW:

These are performances of uniformly high quality made in the presence of the composer and recorded with more realistic balances and cleaner textures than any of their rivals. While all of these readings are first class, highlights include a superb Symphony No. 5 and interpretations of Nos. 7 and 8 in which conductor Andrew Penny sets tempos that allow Arnold’s fanciful orchestrations to register with maximum color and impact.

– ClassicsToday.com (10/10; David Hurwitz)

This double album dedicated to Psalms and Dialogues (released after the 4-album release titled Oratori, Mottetti e Lamentazioni) is completing the opera omnia of sacred works hitherto known by the Augustinian friar Ippolito Ghezzi. Within these recordings, the Cappella Musicale di San Giacomo Maggiore in Bologna led by Roberto Cascio is revealing to us a prolific and talented composer, endowed with technique, inventiveness, and happy melodic vein. The Cappella Musicale San Giacomo Maggiore was founded in 2006 with the aim of reviving the unpublished scores of the many composers who belonged to the order of the Augustinian fathers between the 16th and 18th centuries. Among the ensemble’s performers are renowned theorists such as Lodovico Zacconi and composers like Ippolito Ghezzi, Guglielmo Lipparini and Tiburzio Massaini. The Cappella Musica, with its research and restoration work, intends to contribute to the rediscovery of the Italian historical and musical heritage.

Federico Moreno Torroba composed about one hundred works for the guitar, thereby reinforcing his status as one of Spain's great twentieth-century composers. Homenaje a la seguidilla pays lively tribute to that characteristically Spanish song and dance, while the Tonada concertante is in turns playful and introspective. Concierto de Castilla features a free-spirited lyricism evocative of the folklore of Castile, a vast expanse in the middle of Spain with which the composer strongly identified. "You would expect Pepe Romero to excel at the Concierto en Flamenco...The piece is gorgeous, the performance vibrant and passionate...The soloist in Dialogos is Romero's gifted pupil, Vicente Coves, who plays as well as his mentor, and whose brother leads the orchestra vividly and sympathetically." (ClassicsToday.com on Volume 1, 8573255)

Classical Music

In the days before sound recording, orchestral music was often arranged in versions for piano duet as a way for the public to hear, play and enjoy music by the great composers of the day. As a result, the number of arrangements made available soon exceeded that of original piano duet compositions. Robert Schumann, who loved to play duets together with his wife Clara, often supervised and occasionally created many of his own arrangements in the form. This is the penultimate album in this seven-volume series containing all of Schumann’s orchestral works arranged for piano duet. Mariko and Volker Eckerle founded the Eckerle Piano Duo in 2006. The cleverly conceived concert programs of the German-Japanese duo are very popular with critics and audiences alike. Along with central works of the piano duet repertoire, the Eckerle Piano Duo regularly plays rarely heard pieces and works together with other musicians, actors and ballet companies.

Ján Cikker (1911–89) was one of the leading 20th c. Slovak composers, credited with no fewer than nine operas. This disc features several first recordings of his piano music, of which little is known even in his native Slovakia. The music sits downstream from Szymanowski and Janáček, like them blending folk influences with French impressionism echoes. As also with Szymanowski, some of the pieces evoke the composer’s fondness for the Tatras, the mountainous borderland between Poland and Slovakia.

Lutz Cassel came in touch with the culture of his ancestors for the first time in the early 1960s. This was during song contests at the Castle “Waldeck” in Germany. Although he had no idea of his background (he had been raised in the Christian faith) the music touched him deeply and from this time onwards he began to collect everything connected with Jewish culture and especially with Jewish music and to adapt it for his performances in folk clubs. Step by step he developed a repertoire of songs and also the idea to describe the history of the Jewish people and its music and culture. By and by Lutz started to season his performances with jokes, anecdotes and stories from the thousands of years of history of this people, which consists of more than just the Bible, the Roman Empire and the Holocaust. Lutz was often dissatisfied with the fact that singers of Yiddish songs in Germany generally only described the modern history of the Jews. The origins of the songs were not explained and therefore only a few people understood their meaning. His successes in many small cabarets encouraged him to combine history, stories and music. He did this not in the then popular way of many singer/songwriters, with a moralizing undertone, but with humor and irony- the typical self-irony of Jewish humor. This release is a live recording of a concert which took place in the Hamburg Music Hall for the Hanukkah Celebration of 1986.

The violin-accordion Duo ViA! (Sinn Yang and Harald Oeler) made their debut in 2009 with the program Seasons at the Heidelberg Spring Festival. + At that time, it required a great deal of courage to present to the public, in a sold-out hall, one of the most popular and most frequently played classical works, Vivaldi’s I quattro stagioni in combination with Astor Piazzolla’s Las cuatro portenas. + For the Duo, the program Seasons was and still is both an experiment and a daring feat.

Classical Music

The Naxos Deutsche Schubert-Lied-Edition: Schubert set the poetry of over 115 writers to music. He selected poems from classical Greece, the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, from eighteenth-century German authors, early Romantics, Biedermeier poets.

Classical Music

On her debut album with the ORF Vienna Radio Symphony Orchestra and Roberto Paternostro, Selina Ott presents an exciting selection from the opulent range of 20th century trumpet concertos that have been written in close temporal proximity to one another.

Classical Music

This 3CD collection highlights past releases by the young renowned recorder and blockflöte virtuoso, early music specialist and OehmsClassics artist Stefan Temmingh. CD1, ‘Corelli À la Mode’, features, among other works, the groundbreaking op. 5 sonatas in world premiere recordings of the 18th c. ornamented versions. CD2, ‘The Gentleman’s Flute, follows on with works by Handel and the last disc features select excerpts from the French and English works by J.S. Bach and other Bach miscellany.

Roman Trekel’s sixth and latest OehmsClassics CD includes many well-known lieder by Richard Strauss as well as the Five Wesendonck Lieder of Richard Wagner. Strauss’ Four Last Songs is heard in the much more intimate version with piano accompaniment. Wagner designated two of the Wesendonck Lieder – Im Treibhaus and Träume – as studies for Tristan and Isolde. Roman Trekel has distinguished himself as one of the most sought-after baritones today. A close collaborator of Staatsoper Berlin and Daniel Barenboim, he has sung to great acclaim on the most important stages of the world.

Classical Music