"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

Also available on standard DVD

Rossini wrote L’equivoco stravagante (‘The Curious Misunderstanding’), his first full-length opera, when he was only 19 years old. As its title suggests, the plot of this dramma giocoso offers a panoply of absurdist stagecraft with one character being led to believe that the work’s heroine is in fact a castrato trying to avoid military service. Full of his trademark buffo humour, melodious and musically buoyant, the opera ran foul of the censors and was swiftly banned, which accounts for its rarity in performances and recordings. The new edition of the score used in this production corrects numerous previous errors.

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

As James MacMillan celebrates his 50th birthday he here conducts his large-scale, complex work, The Quickening coupled with the symphonic suite The Sacrifice: Three Interludes, taken from his opera, The Sacrifice, a work based on a medieval Welsh tale and focusing on issues of love and conflict. Co-commissioned by the BBC Proms and the Philadelphia Orchestra, The Quickening sets poetry by MacMillan's frequent collaborator Michael Symmons Roberts. Hailed as some of the most distinguished writing since that of Benjamin Britten, the powerfully imaginative score explores the themes of birth, new life and new impulses, but as MacMillan says, it also has its dark side out of which hope is glimpsed. Joining the BBC Philharmonic is the Hilliard Ensemble, who premiered the work at the BBC Proms, accompanied by the City of Birmingham Symphony Chorus and Youth Chorus. MacMillan was awarded the 2008 Royal Philharmonic Society Opera and Music Theatre Award The Sacrifice following its premiere in September 2007 by Welsh National Opera. As did Britten in the now famous Four Sea Interludes from his opera Peter Grimes, MacMillan uses the Interludes as opportunities to withdraw from and reflect on the action, and he says, 'the orchestra provides another dimension to the narrative and to the drama, which allows the imagination to travel deeper or in a different direction.' James MacMillan is one of the UK's leading contemporary composers, and several of his earlier compositions are available on Chandos under his direction, including The Confessions of Isobel Gowdie (Classic FM Award winner), and The Berserking. Also available: CHAN 10092, 10275, 10377, 9997.

For most of the past century the Russian composer Leonid Sabanayev (1881-1968) was known principally as a writer, not least for his publications on his close friend Alexander Skryabin (he was also a scientist and mathematician). It is only now that his own music is being rediscovered. This first recording of his monumental Piano Sonata, 'In Memory of Skryabin', cast in a single movement half an hour in length, is prefaced by a number of characteristic miniatures.

A member of the Society for Jewish Folk Music in St Petersburg, Russia, Leo Zeitlin (1884–1930) was known almost exclusively for Eli Zion, a classic of Jewish art-music. Zeitlin died only seven years after emigrating to New York, still a young man, and his reputation languished until the recent discovery of a trunk full of scores brought his music back to light. This album attempts to remedy decades of neglect, especially for his charismatic Yiddish song-settings for voice, strings and piano, powerful declamations of spoken Yiddish and Russian poetry underscored by Romantic piano music, all of which points to a once popular but now forgotten genre. The Festival musicians of the Pittsburgh Jewish Music Festival are the highest-caliber local professionals; players for the orchestral and chamber-music concerts include members of the Pittsburgh Symphony, the Pittsburgh Opera and Ballet Orchestras, and university faculty members. In its eleven seasons since its founding by cellist Aron Zelkowicz the PJMS has programmed over 130 pieces of classical chamber and orchestral music inspired by Jewish traditions. The recordings on this CD series represent a six-year project devoted to the St Petersburg Society for Jewish Folk Music and its affiliated Russian composers.

REVIEW:

The performances of Leo Zeitlin’s music are first-rate from start to finish, as is the recorded sound. The liner notes by Paula Eisenstein Baker (a key figure in the resurrection of the Zeitlin’s music) and Robert S. Nelson provide detailed information on the composer’s life and the featured works. Original language texts (Cyrillic script for Russian, and transliterations for the Yiddish poems) and English translations are provided for each of the songs. While the repertoire on this disc may have a less broad appeal than the Stutschewsky release, I think anyone at all curious to explore the work of Leo Zeitlin will not be disappointed.

-- Fanfare

As a young man, Harold Shapero (1920–2013) reacted against the dominance of modernism in American musical life by using a Stravinsky-animated neoclassical language with its roots in Beethoven and Schubert. +These three early piano works – two of them receiving their first-ever recordings – reveal his superb craftsmanship and ready wit in music that embraces rather than rejects the past. +The result is an extraordinary fusion between the Viennese classics and contemporary America.

REVIEW:

Massachusetts-born and -raised Harold Shapero belonged to that generation of American 20th-century composers who eschewed European Modernism, including serialism, employing instead a kind of wrong-note Neoclassicism in the manner of Prokofiev. He was extraordinarily well educated; private lessons with Nicolas Slonimsky and Ernst Krenek as a teenager, then on to Harvard where he studied with Walter Piston. World War Two prevented the obligatory post-graduate studies in Paris or Rome, so Shapero worked with Nadia Boulanger, herself dislocated by the war, at the Longy Conservatory in Cambridge.

These three works are from that early period in Shapero’s career, and as the very titles of the works would indicate, are intentionally retrograde. There are echoes of Beethoven strewn about the sonatas, with typical fast-slow-fast three-movement construction in the Sonata in F Minor, and a broad, harmonically complex introduction for the Four-Hand Sonata, while the variations are more Baroque in their use of florid melodic figures and free fantasy. Not surprisingly, given the composer’s superb training, the music is very well crafted. There is an attention to precise detail that recalls Stravinsky. The Four-Hand Sonata is enlivened by an easy theatrical expressivity and jaunty spirit that sounds influenced by the composer’s dear friend Leonard Bernstein, to whom the piece is dedicated, and with whom he performed it. I was mildly bothered, however, by Shapero’s occasional quirky sense of rhythm, including the stuttering pace of the Arioso movement from the Sonata in F Minor. I don’t think I can fault the playing, having heard many fine performances of contemporary piano music from the reliably excellent Pinkas. She is also well abetted by Evan Hirsch, her regular partner (in life as well as on stage).

Shapero, who died in 2013 at the age of 93, probably did not have the robust career that his early days seemed to promise. Perhaps his time is yet to come; this excellent collection of piano music is a step in the right direction.

-- Fanfare

In this new Chaconne release, Trio Goya offers unique accounts of Beethoven’s early piano trios, revealing on period instruments and in the magical acoustic of the Britten-Pears Auditorium at Aldeburgh’s Snape Maltings the extraordinary range of colors and narratives that these pieces suggest. Beethoven’s Opus 1 features amongst Trio Goya’s central repertoire, played regularly in the UK’s most prestigious venues and beyond. After a recent Wigmore Hall concert, Early Music Today wrote that “Trio Goya sent us home spinning on the delights and laughter of early Beethoven. His piano trio opus 1 No. 1 frothed and bubbled down the finale's theme, the musicians swept along by their own hell-for-leather, immaculately kept tempo.” These pieces mark a kind of beginning in Beethoven’s career. They were indeed planned and executed, over a period of two years, with unprecedented care and skill; they mark the start of a new creative period for the young genius, which is distinct from the younger Bonn years and is fully deserving of the label ‘first maturity’ conferred by the musicologist Lewis Lockwood.

Classical Music

In this second volume of Andre Jolivet’s complete works for flute, Kobe International Flute Competition winner Helene Boulegue explores further examples of some of the most individual and important of all 20th-century works for the instrument. The Flute Concerto No. 1 exemplifies Jolivet’s genius for liquid melodic lines and frenetic bravura. The intricately scored Suite en concert for flute and four percussionists is one of the most fascinating in the repertoire, whilst the Sonatine is both trance-like and rhapsodic.

Rachel Barton Pine’s ‘Testament’ is one of the best of this set of peerless works to have been released since Isabelle Faust’s definitive volumes of 2010 and 2012.

There is in her interpretation a surprisingly striking contrast between its crystalline voicing, clear articulation, and warm tone that makes the listener feel that it is concerned with the plain and simple beauty of the music as much as with the genius of its counterpoint and relationships between movements. All this is further supported by the sensible combination of Baroque bow and metal strings on a period instrument in modern set-up – the tuning is unfailingly accurate and the strength of the bowing means there is never any interference with the musical line by a squeak or break.

These are thoughtful and generous performances amplified by great maturity and depth.

– Gramophone (Editor's Choice; June 2016)

Dumisani “Ramadu” Moyo started his career as a professional musician in 1990 in the City of Kings- Bulawayo in Zimbabwe. The city is in the South of Zimbabwe where the Ndebele language is spoken. The music in this city is very much like South African music because of the Zulu language which has similiarities with Ndebele such as the “clicks” which can be heard in Miriam Makeba’s songs for example. His name “Dumisani” means “to praise” and the family name “Moyo” means “heart.” “Ramadu” is his chosen artistic name which he prefers to use as a musician. Ramadu dropped out of school at fourteen and decided to make music his career. In 1990 he joined the a cappella group Insingizi Emnyama who specialized in iMbube and traditional dances like Indlamu and “Gumboot Dance.” Today Ramadu runs a music label and studio working with different musicians from within Zimbabwe and around the globe, in a variety of styles from pop to classical music, from blues to Afro-pop to traditional roots music from southern Africa. Ramadu recorded this, his first solo album, in the summer of 2001. It is a mixture of traditional and self-composed songs from his hometown, mostly in the Ndebele language combining traditional and modern sounds. His focus is to develop and popularize the traditional music of his culture throughout the world by staging live performances and recordings and producing music.

This unusual album begins with archival recordings, in excellent sound, of the Russian-born composer-pianist Tcherepnin (1899–1977) playing some of his most memorable piano music. The 2nd part of the CD, performed by the Russian pianist Shilyaev, presents a selection of attractive, rarely heard works from various periods in Tcherepnin's career.

REVIEW:

As the only composer to have done significant work in all 5 UN Security Council nations—Russia, Britain, France, China, and the USA—it is unsurprising that Willi Reich, in his biography called Alexander Tcherepnin a ‘musical citizen of the world’.

Piano Sonata No.1 began life as No. 14 but Tcherepnin destroyed vast amounts of his juvenilia; not that you’d ever guess that this sonata was written by someone so young it is so incredibly self assured, an assurance which will have come from all the works he had previously composed. It is a fabulously rich piece of writing with a theme that emerges in the first movement that would have been worthy of Liszt. This sonata and the Op. 85 piece are played by the composer himself showing his complete mastery of the instrument both technically and compositionally.

Incredible as it may seem for such a prolific composer his second sonata had to wait 42 years to be written. The first movement is fascinating, alternating between lento and animato while the second, marked andantino is wistfully beautiful. The final animato has the sonata finally disappear mid-phrase.

His Quatre Préludes Nostalgiques from 1922 come next, the first of which creates an air of mystery. The second is a quiet interlude before the third’s tempestuoso lives up to its name. The last one is a mixture of sadness and grandeur.

The final work on the disc played by the composer himself is a little 1½ minute cracker with almost all the notes coming from the piano’s lowest register. At this point pianist Mikhail Shilyaev takes over showing how gently he can caress the keys which is what is required with the first of his contributions Moment Musical from 1913, when the composer was only 14, and is its first recording.

From 1918 to 1919 we have another first recording, Tcherepnin’s Petite Suite. This is full of delights. Rondo à la Russe from 1946 is “Russian” as it is supposed to be but interestingly Tcherepnin otherwise rarely shows his origins in his music though sometimes he does remind one of Rachmaninoff or Prokofiev. Entretiens composed over a ten year period from 1920 to 1930 is in ten parts, all of them showing the composer’s inventive flair. One of the recurring ideas in his music is the evocation of bells as with the final piece from the set.

Tcherepnin enjoyed fun as much as being serious and this is amply demonstrated in the little Polka from 1944. Scherzo from 1917 has elements of both Prokofiev, Tcherepnin’s idol at the time, and Rachmaninoff, though much harsher in sound to his lushness, though it begins that way. The set of 10 little pieces that together form Expressions, dating from 1951, are the only ones played by Shilyaev that are not first recordings and each bears a title rather than a tempo marking. At the Fair brings some Russian elements into play and I was reminded of Stravinsky. Barcarolle is a beautiful and delightful sounding piece and one of the longest on the disc at 3 minutes long; Tcherepnin had an amazing ability to exploit ideas within a tiny time-frame. La Quatrième from 1948-9, the last offering, is another first recording. It’s full of grandeur and the title is a reference to the Fourth Republic in France which heralded its post-war era following liberation. It received its première only in 1959 since it was part of a project by the publisher to have several compositions from immigrant composers of the École de Paris group in a collection that never materialized.

The overall impression one is left with after hearing this disc and others of Tcherepnin’s music is the breadth of his inventiveness; there is never a dull moment and discovering his music has been one of the musical highlights for me this year. As one would expect the tracks recorded this year sound fresher and crisper than those recorded by the composer in March 1965, though to have his own interpretations of those works is so valuable. Tcherepnin showed what a considerable pianist he was while Shilyaev amply shows his interpretive skills with that full range of moods and touches. This is vital for music that can range from a mere whisper to almost cataclysmic thunder.

The booklet notes by Benjamin Folkman are extremely well written, highly informative and contribute towards making the whole experience both enjoyable and memorable. If you have discovered the wonderful world of Tcherepnin’s piano music then this disc is a must for you and, if not, it is a perfect place to start to get to know this fascinating composer.

-- MusicWeb International

Tomas Breton's distinguished career as an opera composer and leading figure in Madrid's musical life at the turn of the 20th century has tended to overshadow the significant contribution he made to Spanish chamber music. He remained true to the historic roots of the string quartet genre- his First String Quartet being a tribute to the Viennese tradition in it's Classical poise. The Third String Quartet exudes Mendelssohnian inspiration in it's first movement with overtly Spanish idiom, the Allegro no mucho third movement also having been turned into a version for piano trio as the Scherzo andalou. This is the first of two albums of the complete string quartets.

Blu-ray pressing. Paul Anka is known as the last great crooner. On this live release, Anka promotes his successful Rock Swings project by performing many of the tracks live alongside his own classics including 'Diana', 'My Way', 'New York New York', 'Put Your Head on My Shoulder' and more.

Intended to be a defense of the Christian religion, Pensees is a penetrating collection of thoughts on faith, reason, and theology. Unfinished at the time of Pascal's death, the book consists of philosophical fragments on the 'wretchedness' of man and the controversial schisms of the church at the time. It includes the philosopher's infamous wager encouraging belief over agnosticism, as well as his thoughts on numerous other topics, including the great essayist Montaigne and the Stoic teacher Epictetus. Endlessly quotable, Pensees overflows with pearls of wisdom, with each elusive sentence pregnant with a universe of thought. Peter Wickham's elegant and personable reading makes Pascal's work immediately approachable and accessible.

Daniel Barenboim began his career as "child prodigy" with great technical qualities. The young pianist had studied first with Claudio Arrau, then with Edwin Fischer. He recorded this, his first LP, featuring three famous Beethoven sonatas, in 1958, when just sixteen. It can be seen as a sort of challenge: show to the public that a young pianist could compete with the most famous soloists of the time. We can easily tell that the young Barenboim met that challenge; his talent, interpretations and performance technique underlining the beginning of a long artistic and human story still being told.

Noukilla’s Soley is a mix of sega and seggae music, with a touch of jazz: a tribute to their home country of Mauritius. Created by Creole slaves, sega music was publicly shunned in Mauritius until the 1960s, when it was embraced nationally. In the 1990s, a Mauritian Rastafari, known as Kaya after the Bob Marley classic, infused it with reggae, creating seggae. Although he died under questionable circumstances in 1999, countless contemporary Mauritian musicians are influenced by his legacy and music. The album cover features the island’s most famous ex-resident, the dodo bird.