With this programme of music for cello and piano, Steven Isserlis and Connie Shih transport us to the world immortalized in Marcel Proust’s a la recherche du temps perdu – the Parisian high society and its glittering salons. For the composers of the time these provided a perfect platform for the introduction of new works, performed by the finest musicians in France for a sympathetic, educated and rich (!) audience. And for the music-loving Proust they offered countless opportunities to meet the composers that he so admired (and others that he may have admired a bit less…) The first of these to make his appearance in the programme is no one less than Proust’s one-time lover and lifelong friend, Reynaldo Hahn, with a brief set of Variations chantantes on a theme from a baroque opera. He is followed by Gabriel Faure, whose music Proust gushed about in a letter to the composer: ‘I could write a book more than 300 pages long about it.’

Proust was less expansive about Saint-Saëns’ music even if he admired him as a pianist, but the composer’s First Cello Sonata is nevertheless the centrepiece of the programme, before Henri Duparc and Augusta Holmes make their appearance. These were both students of Cesar Franck, whose iconic Violin Sonata in A major (here in the version for cello) closes this programme of ‘salon music’ – in the best possible sense of the term.

REVIEW:

The writings of Marcel Proust are suffused with music. Proust depicted the world of the Parisian salons of the late 19th century, where both music and literature flourished. This release by cellist Steven Isserlis and pianist Connie Shih does not depict a specific event, but it does plunge the listener into Proust's world. Isserlis brings the necessary heat to the Franck sonata, an arrangement of the composer's cello sonata that the composer himself sanctioned. Another draw is Shih's accompaniment work, distinctive and appropriately intense. For lovers of French music, this is a standout release.

– AllMusicGuide.com (James Manheim)

Alongside its ongoing and much lauded Haydn and Schubert series, both on-stage and on-record, the Doric String Quartet with this Mendelssohn album is adding a new milestone in its repertoire. Mendelssohn wrote and published these three quartets at very different stages in his life and they therefore outline the complete trajectory of his creative output. The early Op. 12, also called No. 1, was composed in London and includes many musical allusions to Beethoven, dead only a few years before its composition. These subtly contrast with Mendelssohn’s genially flowing energy. While Op. 44 No. 3, which incorporates many deft variations, developments, and combinations, follows an extended honeymoon tour and Mendelssohn’s twenty-ninth birthday, Op. 80 emerged from a bout of helpless depression after the sudden death of Mendelssohn’s older sister and confidante, Fanny. Mendelssohn described this quartet as a Requiem, and the nervous agitation often found in his music here bursts forth with full force. Resignation, agitation, and nostalgia shape the work, the almost shocking finality of which may be said to prefigure Mendelssohn’s own death only six months later.

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REVIEW:

Op. 44/3 is the longest of the quartets, and the outer movements can sometimes come across as prolix. The Doric’s performance steers clear of this trap – again through the controlled variety and technical ease of their music-making – as well as tripping the light fantastic in the scherzo, and laying bare the emotional ambiguity of the Adagio. I look forward to Volume 2.

– BBC Music Magazine

This third volume of our Michael Gielen Edition is devoted to music by Johannes Brahms, with all the recordigns taken from the archives of the Southwest German Radio. These recordings were made between April 1989 and January 2005. Michael Gielen enjoyed a felicitous involvement with Brahms' chamber music, particularly the late piano works where, in Schoenberg's words, the "progressive Brahms" is most evident. Maybe that's why Brahms' first piano quartet, orchestrated by Arnold Shcoenberg, sounds so ravishingly sharp under Gielen's direction. The solemnity of Schicksaslied calls for sincere commitment on the part of the conductor. Working as one, the Symphony Orchestra of Baden-Baden and Freiburg and Michael Gielen achieve an interpretation of this work that is both balanced and comforting.

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REVIEW:

Gielen proposes we listen to Brahms for the sake of his musical arguments rather than for the lustrous sounds that he's capable of conjuring, an approach that seems eminently sensible, and a valid alternative to various fleshier interpretive options.

– Gramophone

After a highly successful recordings of works by Brahms, the Schumanns, and Chopin, Imogen Cooper plunges into the world of another great romantic, Franz Liszt, and places him alongside that other giant, Richard Wagner. This is an evocative programme of original compositions and intimate transcriptions, ranging from poetic movements from the Années de Pèlerinage: Italie to dark and deeply elegiac pieces, including Liszt's La lugubre gondola I and Wagner's Elegie. It also features a transcription by Zoltán Kocsis of the intensely passionate prelude to Tristan und Isolde. The famous pianist and conductor died prematurely in November, 2016. It was his work that inspired this recording to begin with, and Imogen Cooper dedicates the album to his memory. Breathtaking music in unique interpretations: romanticism without melodrama, virtuosity without fuss.

"• Die Jakobiner opera sung in German • Recorded 1952 Kurt Tenner conducting • The young Walter Berry, Kmentt and Uhl together in one recording in Dvorak's great opera. • Splendid sound. A must for every collector of voices. • 2 CD"

CPO's previous release with the soloists and ensembles of the Boston Early Music Festival was awarded two prestigious prizes. The recording of Charpentier’s opera La Descente d’Orphée aux Enfers and La Couronne de Fleurs received the Grammy Award for the Best Opera Production in February 2015 and recently won the Klassik-Echo 2015, again for the Best Opera Recording of the Year. Prior to this double success, other productions by cpo and BEMF had been nominated for Gramophone Awards. In the category of the Best Opera Production these were Ariadne by Johann Georg Conradi and Thésée and Psyché by Jean-Baptiste Lully. In addition, Thésée and Psyché received nominations in the category honoring Baroque Vocal Works.

Now the American ensemble joins forces with successful soloists like Aaron Sheehan and Teresa Wakim for our production of Handel’s opera Acis and Galatea in the version of 1718, which was composed for the landed estate of the Earl of Carnarvon and does not recycle music from the earlier version. Both Acis and Galatea and the cantata Sarei troppo felice heard here represent decisive turning points in Handel’s career. The Italian cantata came at the beginning of the one and half decades spent by Handel in the service of patrons. Acis and Galatea marks the highpoint of this phase and therefore, like the cantata before it, clearly renders recognizable the musical means available to him in the private ensembles of his employers. Moreover, Acis and Galatea contains the musical and textual seeds of the English oratorio, which after 1742 completely supplanted opera compositions.

Four years after a highly successful Bartok recording with the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra, Edward Gardner here returns to the composer on SACD, with James Ehnes as solo violinist, and his Bergen Philharmonic Orchestra. The central piece in this recording is the Concerto for Orchestra, the largest work that Bartok completed during the last five years of his life and described by the composer, in the program notes for its 1944 premiere, as ‘a gradual transition from the sternness of the first movement and the lugubrious death-song of the third, to the life-assertion of the last one.’ It is joined by the Dance Suite, the immediate predecessor, among Bartok’s few works for full orchestra without a soloist, of the Concerto for Orchestra, though by more than two decades; and by the violin Rhapsodies, the colorful folk influences of which are revealed by James Ehnes, a specialist in the repertoire, who already has recorded the complete sonatas as well as the concertos for violin and for viola to critical acclaim.

Engage, Exchange, Connect. That is what this young American piano trio is all about, on stage as well as on this album, it's very first. Experience the group at it's revelatory best in these idiomatic and fresh interpretations of early-twentieth-century American piano trios, by Foote, Korngold and Bernstein. As reported by WXQR radio, "Neave is actually a Gaelic name meaning 'bright' and 'radiant', both of which certainly apply to this trio's music making." Praised for their "heart-on-sleeve performances" (Classical New Jersey), the Neave Trio has been described as "A consummate ensemble" (Palm Beach Daily News), "A revelation" (San Diego Story), and "A brilliant trio..." (MusicWeb International), one that has "exceeded the gold standard and moved on to platinum" (Fanfare).

Austrian composer Thomas Larcher (b. 1963) is one of the great symphonists of our era. This album by the Finnish Radio Symphony Orchestra and conductor Hannu Lintu includes the first recording of his 2nd Symphony, ‘Kenotaph’, and the song cycle ‘Die Nacht der Verlorenen’ performed by the world-known baritone Andrè Schuen. Larcher’s symphony was written in 2015–2016 to a commission from the National Bank of Austria for its bicentenary. The premiere was given by the Vienna Philharmonic under Semyon Bychkov at the Musikverein in Vienna in June 2016. Larcher’s work, originally intended as a concerto for orchestra, engages with tradition as a fertile background, while still embodying the sound and consciousness of our time. The subtitle to Larcher’s work was motivated by the painful awareness of the thousands of refugees who have drowned in the Mediterranean. The work can also be understood as a more general meditation on human tragedy and an exploration of profound existential issues. Larcher ties the material of the work together with a strong sense of dramaturgy, intense emotional expression and a feeling for musical narrative. The song cycle ‘Die Nacht der Verlorenen’ for baritone and large ensemble sets fragments by Ingeborg Bachmann (1926–1973) that were posthumously published. Bachmann’s dark texts inspired Larcher to write intense and compelling music that is entirely in tune with the mood of the poems. Overall, the work is dominated by slow, meditative and often dreamlike and unreal moods, effectively underpinned by delicate and carefully designed scoring that conjures up a multitude of colors and shades.

Alvin Lucier is one of America’s foremost experimentalists, challenging the fundamental principles of music and focusing on acoustic phenomena and how listeners perceive them. Music for Piano with Slow Sweep Pure Wave Oscillators explores the acoustic ‘beating’ effects and tuning phenomena of sine waves against piano tones. This new XL version expands the extraordinary listening experience in a work described by Nicolas Horvath as ‘immersive, intense and enigmatic’. Nicolas Horvath is an unusual artist with an unconventional résumé. He began his music studies at the Académie de Musique Prince Rainier III de Monaco, and at the age of 16, caught the attention of the American conductor Lawrence Foster who helped him to secure a three-year scholarship from the Princess Grace Foundation in order to further his studies. His mentors include a number of distinguished international pianists, including Bruno Leonardo Gelber, Gérard Frémy, Eric Heidsieck, Gabriel Tacchino, Nelson Delle-Vigne, Philippe Entremont, Oxana Yablonskaya and Liszt specialist Leslie Howard who helped to lay the foundations for Horvath’s current recognition as a leading interpreter of Liszt’s music. He is the holder of a number of awards, including First Prize of the Scriabin and the Luigi Nono International Competitions.

REVIEW:

This performance by Nicolas Horvath is disciplined and precise, providing just the right touch for the piano notes under each acoustic condition. Music for Piano with Slow Sweep Pure Wave Oscillator XL will surely add to Horvath’s reputation as a leading interpreter of the most unusual experimental forms in contemporary music.

– Sequenza21.com

Wagner’s Siegfried is the third opera in the cycle that makes up Der Ring des Nibelungen. It premiered during the first complete performance of the cycle in August 1876 at the Bayreuth Festspielhaus. Rene Kollo performs in one of his greatest recorded performances in the title role of Siegfried. German conductor Marek Janowski is a brilliant interpreter of Wagner, having conducted the first digitally recorded Ring cycle between 1980 and 1983.

Percy Grainger was one of the great “originals” of 20th century music. Australian-born, he studied with his mother while a boy and later went to Germany where his career as a virtuoso pianist began. As a composer he was largely self-taught and strongly influenced by the folk music of Great Britain and Ireland, Many of his “miniatures”-such titles as Country Gardens, Handel in the Strand and Molly on the Shore-established his composing credentials very early on. But Grainger was also an inveterate innovator and experimenter in music, and the kaleidoscopic aspects of his compositional creativity-evident in highly imaginative works often with unprecedented rhythms, harmonies and scoring-are fully represented in the programme heard on this recording. The music was digitally recorded with the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra in February 1989, at the acoustically excellent South Melbourne Town Hall.

Chief conductor of the BBC Symphony Orchestra since 2013, Finnish conductor Sakari Oramo has a special affinity with the music of his compatriot Sibelius which this recording admirably demonstrates. Sibelius’ ever-popular ‘Lemminkäinen Suite’ is coupled here with ‘Spring Song’, and the lesser-known Suite from ‘Belshazzar’s Feast’. Sibelius composed the ‘Lemminkäinen Suite’ (also called the Four Legends, or Four Legends from the Kalevala), Op. 22, in the 1890s. Originally conceived as a mythological opera, Veneen luominen (The Building of the Boat), the suite is based on the character Lemminkäinen from the Finnish epic, the Kalevala. Sibelius’ music for ‘Belshazzar’s Feast’ was originally composed as incidental music for a play (by Hjalmar Procopé), in 1906. First performed in the Swedish Theatre in Helsinki in November of that year, conducted by the composer. The following year, Sibelius extracted four of the eight movements to form the more widely known orchestral suite we hear in this recording.

REVIEWS:

The BBC Symphony's chief conductor brings deep insights to bear here. It is thrilling to hear the rarity Spring Song played with full acknowledgement that this is rather more than a seasonal ditty. We once again come close to the heart of Sibelius in an unlikely place.

– Gramophone

The Lemminkäinen Suite has tended to be viewed as an important staging post on Sibelius’s path to the symphony. What Sakari Oramo shows is that it’s a marvellous achievement in its own right, and as such not quite like anything else. Superbly recorded, this is a Lemminkäinen Suite to treasure.

– BBC Music Magazine

Ivan Ilic came across these transcriptions, scarcely known at all, through the most unlikely and serendipitous sequence of events. Carl David Stegmann (1751 – 1826) was a tenor, keyboard player, conductor, and composer, who worked mostly in the field of opera. Employed by the Court Theatre in Mainz (where he sang in the first German-language production of Don Giovanni), he also gave a number of acclaimed performances in Frankfurt. Trained as an organist, he made transcriptions of string quintets by Mozart and Beethoven’s Trios, Op. 9 as well as keyboard transcriptions of twenty-five of Haydn’s symphonies. Ivan Ilic writes: ‘It is unclear to me whether these transcriptions were ever meant to be played as concert repertoire, in public. Nevertheless, the enthusiasm I have encountered wherever I have played them has persuaded me to make this recording, to allow more people to hear Stegmann’s idiomatic arrangements.’

At the age of 20, Henry Purcell entered his 14 Fantasias and two In Nomines into an autograph bearing the title ‘The Works of Hen; Purcell, A.D. 1680’. Despite his youth Purcell was already making his mark as a composer, writing music for the London theatres and holding posts at Westminster Abbey and at court. But unlike his works for the theatre and the church, which were intended for specific occasions, very little is known about the impulse behind fantasias. Composed for between three and seven parts they are a consciously anachronistic distillation of an old style at a time when the reigning taste was for more modern sounds – for dance-based music with lively rhythms and hummable tunes. It isn’t even clear what kind of ensemble they were intended for: given the association with older music, one might assume that Purcell had viols in mind, but the distribution of the parts is not always in keeping with the standard sizes of the viol consort – nor for that matter those of the violin consort.

Were the fantasias in fact ever performed? None of these questions has a satisfactory answer, and in this respect the Purcell Fantasias resemble Bach’s The Art of the Fugue, because of their quality and inventiveness but also owing to the mysteries that surround them. The collection is here performed by Chelys Consort of Viols, following up on three previous and acclaimed releases on BIS featuring the music of Michael East, John Dowland, and Christopher Simpson.

REVIEW:

The Chelys readings, clean and rather circumspect, merit strong consideration for those interested in these youthful and intellectual Purcell works. Nicely recorded by BIS at Girton College Chapel, Cambridge, they don't overdo the mystery: the sound is clean and the polyphony clear. The pungent dissonances scattered through these works, which were a feature of the tradition (not just of Purcell's pieces), emerge with the proper emphasis, but the Consort does not lean into them unnecessarily.

-- AllMusic.com (James Manheim)

Having begun their collaboration in 1997, the Swedish Chamber Orchestra and its conductor laureate Thomas Dausgaard have developed an unusually tight partnership. Nowhere is this demonstrated more clearly than in their cycles of the symphonies of Schumann, Schubert and, most recently, Brahms – performances which have been characterized by reviewers as variously ‘fresh’, ‘vivid’, ‘transparent’ and ‘invigorating’. Of Mendelssohn the team has previously recorded the incidental music to A Midsummer Night’s Dream, a release described as ‘capturing Mendelssohn’s inimitable spirit’ on the website Crescendo. The same disc included The Hebrides, and now the SCO and Dausgaard return to Scotland, with Mendelssohn’s ‘Scottish’ Symphony. This was begun in 1829, after a stay in London during which the composer conducted his Symphony No. 1, also included on this disc. Mendelssohn’s imagination was often fired by impressions from nature, and Scotland was the Romantic landscape par excellence, celebrated for its rugged Highland scenery and melancholy tunes. ‘I think that today I found the beginning of my ‘Scottish’ Symphony’, he wrote to his parents after a visit to the ruined chapel at Holyrood Palace in Edinburgh. It took more than a decade for him to complete the symphony – but ever since its first performance, in 1842, it has been a staple of the symphonic repertoire.

REVIEW:

With the 38-member Swedish Chamber Orchestra, conductor Thomas Dausgaard here offers an ensemble probably quite similar in size to that which played Mendelssohn's Symphony No. 3 in A minor, Op. 56. The size fits Dausgaard well, for his readings are crisp and restrained, without a lot of vibrato (as is his trademark with this group) or big emotional climaxes. Dausgaard's quick, high-tension approach works well here. BIS contributes fine engineering from the Örebro Concert House in this fresh Mendelssohn release.

-- AllMusic.com (James Manheim)

The music of Michael Jarrell has been said to “examine states of dream and unreality, searching for a moment of truth” – a truth which is often found in the lowest sonorities and slowest tempi, a place where time stands still. His works are often interrelated, not only by a certain sensitivity or a distinctive tone, but also by the recurrence of particular features that he reworks in different contexts. The present disc combines two recent concertos, each of them performed by its dedicatee. In July 2019, three years after they gave the first performance of Émergences-Résurgences, Tabea Zimmermann rejoined l’Orchestre National des Pays de la Loire and Pascal Rophé in order to record the work. In the liner notes Jarrell describes his method in the concerto in visual terms: ‘Curves, colors, chiaroscuro or strong lines; I tried to integrate a pictorial dimension into the scheme of this piece…’ Jarrell’s fourth violin concerto, 4 Eindrücke, is even more recent, and was first performed in 2019 in Tokyo’s Suntory Hall by Renaud Capuçon and Pascal Rophé conducting. As suggested by its title, the work is in four contrasting movements, of which the second stands out in that the soloist plays only pizzicato throughout. Framed by the two concertos is an orchestral work from 2009 which takes its title from Lucretius: ‘the sky, recently so clear, suddenly becomes horribly murky’. Although the work lacks a programme as such, the title paints in words the abrupt contrast between what the composer describes as ‘great expressive violence’ and an atmosphere that is ‘gentle, calm and full of inwardness’.

The c/o chamber orchestra is a collective of thirty young musicians from a dozen different countries. Playing without a conductor, the orchestra is dedicated to that particular collaborative process which is the essence of chamber music. For their first album, the members have chosen to highlight a genre more difficult to pin-point than one might think. Its very name, divertimento, implies that it is simply a diversion, light music for entertainment – but many of the best-known examples of the form transcend that definition. And as many composers have learned, even light-hearted music should be taken seriously: humor requires a master’s touch. The four works recorded here offer different perspectives on the genre, starting with Ibert’s seven-movement suite in which the composer constantly plays with the listener’s expectations. Some forty years before Ibert, his compatriot Émile Bernard composed a very different Divertissement. It is scored for double wind quintet, reminiscent of Mozart’s divertimenti and serenades for winds. But even though the music is melodious and carefree, the debt owed by Bernard to the German romantic composers is never far from the surface. A very special case is Bartók’s Divertimento for strings, composed just before the outbreak of World War II. The closing work on the album reunites the winds and strings of the c/o orchestra in a work written especially for this project by the American composer Michael Ippolito, who in his Divertimento pays full tribute to the contrast-rich nature of the genre.

In June 1995, a virtually unknown group of Japanese musicians embarked on the monumental task of recording the complete sacred cantatas by Johann Sebastian Bach. Almost eighteen years later, on 23rd February 2013, the Bach Collegium Japan and Masaaki Suzuki – by then household names in the international music world – reached their goal when they finished recording the 55th release of a series which, in the meantime, had been met with overwhelming acclaim worldwide. Made in conjunction with the final cantata recording, this film commemorates the occasion. Besides performances of the three last cantatas – Gloria in excelsis Deo, BWV191, Lobe den Herrn, meine Seele, BWV69 and Freue dich, erlöste Schar, BWV30 – the film includes interviews with Masaaki Suzuki and key members of Bach Collegium Japan as well as behind the-scenes footage.

REVIEWS:

This disc is essentially Volume 55 of the Bach Sacred Cantata series with an extra chorus and added video. At least two reviews are elsewhere on the Music Web International site. The addition of 25 minutes or so of interviews with the soloists, chorus members, players, engineers and Suzuki himself make this celebratory issue fascinating to watch and hear. A secondary bonus is the presence of subtitles during the four performances, making it far easier to stay with Bach’s religious message. The air of dedication hanging over all the activity is actually quite inspiring, and rightly so, for this series is a landmark in recording history, up there with the Solti Ring. Not only has a complete set of the sacred cantatas been committed to disc but they are in period style, in SACD surround and they are superbly well documented. Reviewing this has cost me money because I realised that I could no longer resist buying the recently released, complete remastered set on BIS SACD9055, not only for the missing few dozen cantatas I gained, but also for the old CD-only issues being newly minted as SACD surround. And, I might add, for the useful indexes to help navigation around the 55 discs!

The performances of the three cantatas on this Blu-ray are of course superb; from the most prominent soloists to the back desk of the violins, all are now seasoned performers, and it shows. Each cantata appears to be a single performance with only the audio and video team and the microphones as audience. The singers move smoothly out of their place in the chorus to the front to sing their solos and then walk back into place. It is all impressively smooth and unfussy. The addition of the great Dona Nobis Pacem chorus from the B minor Mass acts as a wholly appropriate closing tribute. The surround sound, unusually not in DTS Master Audio but LPCM Surround 5.0, is excellent as always. Even those who have purchased the final volume of the series should obtain this too. You might even be tempted to raise a glass to the series as you watch the performers and engineers do just that on your screen.

-- MusicWeb International

These two discs profile French composer Erik Satie, and include his famous works Gymnopedies, gnossiennes et autres pieces pour piano.