• Heino Eller (1887–1970) was one of the founders of the classical tradition in his native Estonia.
• His output for piano – some 200 works – is largely unknown.
• This fourth volume presents Eller’s First Sonata, a Romantic work of gigantic proportions, a number of miniatures, and ends with the Ballade c.
• Volume 3 in this series won a ‘Choice’ award in International Piano.
• Sten Lassmann, an Estonian pianist based in London, studied these works with Eller’s most important piano student.

After the collapse of her marriage to an illustrious German prince, Baroness Eugenia Münster arrives in America with her brother, in search of wealthy New England relatives. The duo have an immediate impact on their American cousins, the Wentworths. The Baroness captures the eye of young Clifford Wentworth, and his girlfriend’s older brother Robert; meanwhile, Felix falls for his American cousin Gertrude. The Wentworths are overawed by their European cousins and their frivolous lifestyle. What unfolds is a delightful comedy of manners that contrasts the apparently sophisticated and light-hearted Europeans with the serious and puritanical Americans. At times reminiscent of Jane Austen, The Europeans contains beautiful and vivid descriptions of mid-19th century upper-class New England life. Adam Sims trained at LAMDA. His screen and theatre credits include Band of Brothers, Lost in Space and Alice in Wonderland. For Naxos Audiobooks, he has read Mowat’s Never Cry Wolf, and James’s Washington Square and The Aspern Papers, among other titles.

The British composer Robin Stevens is a great talent waiting to be discovered by the global music community. His varied, stimulating and expressive work is exemplified by this collection of music for wind instruments, ranging from the jolly and accessible (yet very difficult to play) Concert Rondoto the darker, deeper and meaningful Grief’s Portrait. Stevens has a brilliant touch, and also is an excellent pianist, cellist and guitarist and plays all three instruments here, alongside some of the foremost instrumentalists from the musical hotspot of Manchester, England: John Bradbury (principal clarinet, BBC Philharmonic); John Turner (recorderist: Academy of Ancient Music etc.); Richard Simpson (principal oboe, BBC Symphony), Janet Simpson (former principal keyboardist, Hallé Orchestra); and freelance soloists Sarah Miller (flutes);Helen Peller (bassoon) and Lindsey Stoker (horn).

This album presents to of Australian composer Stephen Whittington's stunningly beautiful string quartets: his elegant, eclectic seven-movement...from a thatched hut and his evocative, haunting Windmill. Stephen Whittington is a composer whose very personal music combines elements of minimalism, polystylism, and indiginous musics from many parts of the world. As a pianist, he began championing contemporary music in Adelaide in teh 1970's, giving the first Australian performances of music by Morton Feldman, Terry Riley, Christian Wolff, Cornelius Cardew, Alan Hovhaness, George Crumb, and many other composers. Zephyr Quartet is a celebrated genre-defying Australian string quartet that, since 1999, has been expanding the boundaries of art music via diverse collaborations with artists from the worlds of theater, dance, literature, visual art, environmental art, film, and media art. ''If Australia has produced a classic piece of musical minimalism, [Windmill] is it.'' (Graham Strahle, The Australian)

This album features original Egyptian dance compositions as well as traditional pieces with a modern touch, by Essam Rashad. Essam Rashad was born in Cari, Egypt. He learned music from his father early in hi life. In his twenties, he worked as a composer for the national Egyptian radio station. After his father’s death, he began to study violin and joined a small orchestra, recording a great number of songs by various Middle Eastern composers. Thus he gained a great wealth of knowledge and wide-ranging experience in different musical styles and techniques. Gradually he became highly regarded as a talented musician, whereupon he was appointed to join the Egyptian National Classical Orchestra as a specialist of the oud, his first instrument. In 1981, he came to England. He then began to teach music privately, while also looking for an opportunity to release his musical works. He worked on arrangements for Indian and Western music with his special skills. At present, he is completing work on original pieces of full orchestrated modern classical music.

In Great Britain Christmas carols are an integral part of Christmas just like plum pudding and turkey, paper crowns and mistletoe. They are sung in all big cathedrals and churches at Christmas, first and foremost in the time-honored chapel of King’s College. The Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols- a Christmas mass featuring King’s College Choir, nine short readings and, of course, carols- has been broadcast live on the radio every year since 1928 on Christmas Eve. The a cappella choir SWR Vokalensemble belongs worldwide to the best choirs, renowned mostly for its exquisite performances of modern music. This album however contains traditional, centuries old Christmas Carols, arranged by British composers like Benjamin Britten, Gustav Holst, Ralph Vaughan Williams and William Byrd, to name just a few.



REVIEW:

An entire program of English music recorded by a German choir doesn’t happen all that often, and a disc of “very English” Christmas repertoire may be rarest of all. However, the top-tier Stuttgart-based SWR Vokalensemble is one group for whom this sort of thing is not so unusual. In fact they’ve not only recorded several discs that feature works by British composers such as Britten, MacMillan, and Vaughan Williams (including his rarely recorded Mass in G minor); they’ve gone where even American choirs fear to tread, recording the complete choral works of Elliott Carter(!), ten of Ives’ Psalm settings, and a disc of American works that includes pieces by Cage, Reich, and Feldman.

 

The program itself, chosen with obvious care by one who knows his way around the repertoire, is marked by first-rate performances that stand solidly alongside similar offerings by this ensemble’s “native” British counterparts. As good as the program and performances are, potential listeners may find the disc’s curious, cursory title misleading: “Christmas Carols” does not accurately describe the program at hand. While the music is almost exclusively Christmas-themed, only perhaps three of the 19 selections (to be generous) could be labeled as “carols” in the traditional sense. Although the liner notes do include a very brief but informed history of the true carol, our attention is quickly directed to the “carol” as it’s come to be identified via inclusion in the popular annual carol service at King’s College, Cambridge: that is, virtually any choral piece—original or arrangement—with a sacred, Christmas-centered text. The programming here all makes sense when you know that conductor Marcus Creed is not only British, but was a student and former singer at King’s College.

 

Just looking at the list of composers, most of whom are as English as they come—Boris Ord, Benjamin Britten, Ralph Vaughan Williams, Gustav Holst, Herbert Howells, David Willcocks—and the works at hand, each one ingrained in the very soul of every English-speaking, Christmas-music-loving listener—sets you up for what you hope will be an hour of pure pleasure, born of the special traditions of a season that is uniquely associated with its music. And, be it from Germany or Lower Slobovia, it doesn’t matter: this program does not disappoint.

 

Whether you choose this for the iconic repertoire—Ord’s Adam Lay Ybounden; Britten’s A Hymn to the Virgin; Howells’ A Spotless Rose; Thomas Ravenscroft’s Remember O Thou Man; David Willcocks’ Tomorrow Shall Be My Dancing Day; Elisabeth Poston’s Jesus Christ the Apple Tree; Holst’s In the Bleak Midwinter—or just for the world-class singing (hopefully both!), you can be assured of a listening experience that will endure many hearings throughout the entire season—and the next. This choir knows the music well and obviously enjoys singing it, demonstrating a mastery of both language and style.

The program’s one non-English-language work is Robert Parsons’ Latin-texted Ave Maria—a most welcome inclusion of one of the 16th century’s greatest masterpieces, and a highlight of the disc. Another plus: the all-too-rare inclusion of a list of publishers of each work (choral directors, take note). Highly recommended.

– ClassicsToday.com (David Vernier)

This release is an interesting musical journey through the paths that led to Arnold Schoenberg’s composition of his masterpiece for string sextet, Verklarte Nacht.+ The pieces presented on this album, which are diverse and include pieces by Bach, Brahms, and Berg, show development of harmony and tonality from Bach’s era all the way to the late romantic period, when a new harmonic language began to emerge. The string sextet utilized in this recording was formed from the principal players of the Orchestra da Camera di Mantova, and led in this recording by Alessandro Maria Carnelli.

An exciting album with a fine collection of fiery Flamenco. 14 pieces, sung, as well as instrumental, from the very traditional to today's modern renditions, presented by some of the finest exponents in the genre.

On a late spring morning in 1968, seventeen-year-old Roslyn Kind graduated from high school in Brooklyn and immediately began a new job later the same day. “I graduated to ‘Pomp and Circumstance’ in the morning,” she recalls, “and that evening I was in RCA Studio B, down around 23rd Street in Manhattan, making my first recording.”

Kind’s two RCA albums Give Me You and This Is Roslyn Kind are fascinating time capsules from a period – 1968-69 – when American popular music was undergoing seismic changes. There is a bit of Broadway to be heard – “I Only Wanna Laugh” from the 1969 flop Jimmy, as well as a ballad from a 1965 Charles Aznavour revue, plus songs by Richard Maltby and David Shire, and Hal Hackady and Larry Grossman (who were about to see their musical Minnie’s Boys produced on Broadway). But most of the material reflects Kind’s own taste and current trends in popular music. There are songs by Lennon and McCartney, Mann and Weil, Harry Nilsson, Jimmy Webb, and Rick Evans of the then-hot one-hit-wonder (“In the Year 2525”) duo Zager and Evans.

Beethoven’s Missa solemnis is the one work the composer admired above all his compositions. It was written for his great patron and friend Archduke Rudolf of Austria at around the same time that he embarked on his Ninth Symphony and as the writer Donald Tovey noted, ‘there is no choral and no orchestral writing, earlier or later, that shows a more thrilling sense of the individual colour of every chord.’ This insightful documentary follows Frieder Bernius on a journey of discovery as he immerses himself in Beethoven’s monumental masterpiece in preparation for a recording.

During the 1813–14 carnival season in Naples, Simon Mayr wrote a much-admired opera semiseria called Elena. The post-revolutionary Napoleonic era saw great enthusiasm for the rescue opera genre and Elena is a perfect example, in which a complex plot, based on French models, sees an innocent falsely accused of a capital offence. Mayr’s subtle accommodation of Neapolitan opera and Viennese Classicism ensures a series of choruses and recitatives that drive the action forward, punctuated with arias, romances, ensembles, lyric richness and moments of witty buffo color.

REVIEW:

Franz Hauk continues his dedicated role championing the music of the German-born, Simon Mayr, now returning to his operas thought to number almost seventy.

First produced in Naples in January 1814, Mayr's Elena was well received and revived in 1816 at the much more influential venue of La Scala, Milan, and that was followed by Florence. At both theatres it is thought is was probably much revised. The story is complex—to say the least—and made even more so as you need to know the history that surrounds events that took place before the opera begins; all that is explained in the enclosed booklet. The opera calls for a dramatic soprano as the wronged Elena, here taken by the German-born Julia Sophie Wagner, who is enjoying a major career on both sides of the Atlantic. Her perky voice is perfect for her dual role where she has to masquerade as a young man when she returns to her homeland. But it is the many other characters who share the bulk of a work lasting around two and a half hours, though it does not seem that long! By this point the fine bass voice of Daniel Ochoa has taken over the score as Elena’s husband, Costantino, the two having parted as they fled from their execution, his long first act aria not far short of ten minutes. We are now introduced to Edmondo, who was part of the plot against Elena, here taken by the tenor, Markus Schafer, whose outstanding performances have graced many Mayr recordings. That leaves me to say how much I have enjoyed the bass, Niklas Mallmann, in the buffo role of Carlo; the bass, Andreas Mattersberger as Urbino, and Fang Zhi in the pivotal part of the Governor. He is joined in the opera’s final rejoicing with the fulsome Simon Mayr Chorus. For Hauk, the conductor, this is another major and unqualified success, his period instrument orchestra, Concerto de Bassus, both neat and with impeccable intonation. A fabulous release in every respect.

– David's Review Corner (David Denton)

Classical Music

Classical Music

BACKHAUS

Sándor Balassa has stated that his music for piano ‘has to evoke genuine emotions, recalling the abundance of a springtime meadow, giving us a feeling of richness, and inspiring a sense of adventure in us and touching our hearts’. In this third volume, which includes piano versions of pieces for harp and cimbalom, the sheer diversity of Balassa’s imagination is amply illustrated, conjuring atmosphere and poignant recollections as well as demanding exceptional virtuosity. Balassa considers the closing Fantázia, Op. 97 to be his best piano work. István Kassai graduated as a pianist from the Budapest Academy of Music in 1982 studying in the class of Pál Kadosa. In 1984 he pursued a second diploma at the Conservatoire Européen de Musique under the close supervision of professor Yvonne Lefébure. He also undertook several master courses, including one led by György Cziffra, who had a great impact on Kassai’s artistic development. During his career, Kassai has won several first prizes in international competitions such as the International Piano Competition for Young Artists in 1972 in Czechoslovakia, the Piano Competition organized by Hungarian Radio in 1979, and the Paris International Debussy Piano Competition in 1982.

This is a hybrid Super Audio CD playable on both regular and Super Audio CD players.

Mozart’s Don Giovanni is a staple of operatic repertoire. The two-act opera is tenth on the Operabase list of the most-performed operas worldwide. Don Giovanni is based on the legends of Don Juan, a fictional womanizer and seducer, and has a libretto by Lorenzo Da Ponte. This release is a recording from 1985, conducted by Rafael Kubelik. One of the last century’s most revered conductors, Kubelik only made a few complete opera sets, and this opera is the only Mozart among them. Alan Titus performs as Giovanni. Opera magazine praises him as he “generates lively spirit in his scenes with Rolando Panerai, a Leporello into in 60s but still able to inflect his lines with verbal point as well as expressive colour: the Catalogue aria is quite masterful in its slightly seedy relish.”

Overtures

Featuring the Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra, this new release includes compositions by Alessandro Scarlatti (1660-1725). La Gloria di Primavera, the work featured on this album, has been called a “feast of vocal invention, supplemented by wondrous instrumental writing…” The performances on this album were recorded live in Berkeley, California, at First Congregational Church in October of 2015.

Distinguished Bach specialist Sir Andr�s Schiff returned to the BBC Proms in 2018 to present Book II of The Well-Tempered Clavier. Extending the variety already evident in Book I (available on 2.110653), Bach's effortless brilliance and new-found sonorities push harmony and counterpoint further than ever with a combination of ancient and modern styles, church austerity and gallant lightness. Schiff has said that 'no-one combines the sacred and the secular as Bach does', and this is comprehensively demonstrated in Bach's fascinating and challenging sequence. This performance in the Royal Albert Hall was described as 'a musical meditation for our troubled times' by the Independent.