Canto Ostinato is the work that defines the legacy of the composer Simeon ten Holt, who died in 2012 at the age of 89. There are 106 sections of repeating five-beat patterns whose patterned, repetitive but gradually evolving repetition produce a mesmerizing effect on the listener – a dance-like sense of even unevenness – akin to masterpieces from the US minimalist school such as Steve Reich’s Music for 16 Musicians and Philip Glass’s Music in 12 Parts. However, the sections need not be repeated literally, and the performers can vary the dynamics, the manner of playing (legato vs. staccato, for example), and the octave in which the material is played.

Ten Holt completed Canto Ostinato in 1979 for an instrumentation of three pianos and electronic organ, but the cycle has proved itself adaptable to several different combinations of keyboard instruments, and these versions were brought together by Jeroen van Veen on a compendium produced by Brilliant Classics in 2014. ‘Canto Ostinato XL’ (9453) included this two-piano scoring as well as versions for prepared pianos, organ and marimbas, but Jeroen and Sandra van Veen have re-recorded it in 2021; the fourth version they have produced, which brings together all the varieties of arrangement and articulation developed through the course of concert performances given across the world. ‘Tonality after the death of tonality’, Ten Holt described the language of Canto Ostinato, and Jeroen van Veen compares its style to the music of Chopin: tranquil, immersive, melancholic and romantic. He worked closely with the composer over many years and can justly be regarded as the most authoritative living performer of his music.

REVIEW:

For listeners coming to this music for the first time, you don’t know what you have been missing. I think a two-piano performance that lasts a little more or less than 120 minutes is a good place to start. (In his introduction to the score, ten Holt actually expressed a preference for four pianos, although the premiere was played by three pianos and an electronic organ.) The two van Veens recorded it together for the first time in 1996, and have recorded it on two pianos at least one other time (in 2008) before this new version from 2021. I think some of their earlier versions (alone or with other musicians) have been more dramatic (with an imaginative performer or performers, ten Holt’s works can be hair-raising, at times), but no one, least of all the composer, said that Canto Ostinato needs to be dramatic. With this new version, one is newly impressed by the music’s ability to maintain its core identity no matter how much the details change, and the details this time make the music sound a little more contemporary and a little less Romantic. Your mileage may vary. As for me, I am glad to add this version to my already not minimal ten Holt collection. 

-- Fanfare

Among the most significant composers of guitar duos in the early 19th century, Antoine De Lhoyer was born in September 1768 in Clermont-Ferrand. His musical talents manifested themselves from early on, and he trained in Paris. His teacher Vidal paid tribute to him as ‘the finest guitarist in Europe’. However, at the age of 20, de Lhoyer embarked on a military career as a member of the King’s Guards, shortly before the French Revolution. Life in France rapidly becoming uncongenial for someone with his loyalties, he left France in a hurry and eventually settled in Hamburg, where his compositions were first published at the turn of the 19th century. De Lhoyer’s travels were by no means over, and over the following decades he took up posts as a professional music teacher and performer in St Petersburg, Paris, Corsica, Aix-en-Provence and Alger, the new capital of the French colony in north Africa. Eventually returning to the French capital, he died there in 1852, at the age of 84. The extant duos on this album were composed between 1814 and 1826, and they comprise a substantial proportion of his total output. One would expect the style of his music to reflect the lively, cosmopolitan nature of his career, and so they do, often cast in three- and four-movement sonata forms with picturesque interpolations such as the ‘hunt’ movement of Op.35 No.2 and the graceful Sicilienne of Op.35 No.5. The eight-movement Fantasie Concertante Op.33 is like a Mozartian serenade, with a superbly flowing Andante con variazioni directly succeeded by a brief but tranquil Adagio.

From the outset of his career, Jean Sibelius was recognized as an outstanding representative of a musical language perceived as typically Finnish. In Finland, the dawn of the 20th century saw a veritable outbreak of nationally inspired artistic activities., It was a time of cultural and national self-discovery for Sibelius, too. He allowed himself be stimulated by the whole of Finland’s folklore tradition, without resorting to specific examples of folksong.

For many years, Carl Nielsen was viewed outside his native Denmark as the poor cousin of his more famous Scandinavian counterparts, Grieg and Sibelius. Yet his achievements as Denmark’s greatest symphonist of the 20th century were, if anything, even more remarkable than the successes of his geographical neighbors. Nielsen’s symphonic output is some of the most remarkable of its time.

The Norwegian conductor and composer Johann Svendsen was born in 1840 in Christiania (now Oslo). in 1867, he finished his Symphony No. 1, a work that Grieg later described as showing scintillating genius, superb national feeling and really brilliant handling of an orchestra. In 1872 Svendsen returned to Christiania beginning a fruitful period that saw the creation of his Symphony No. 2 in B flat major Op. 15.

Hugo Alfven's First Symphony (1897) has a melancholy Sturm und Drang mood that recurs at intervals in his later compositions, but there is also a life affirming side that flourished in his Second Symphony, two years later. Of his Third Symphony, he stated "it depicts neither concrete nor abstract. It is an expression of the joy of living, an expression of the sun-lit happiness that filled my whole being.”

Wilhelm Stenhammar's Symphony Op. 34  saw the light of day in 1907, dedicating it to “my dear friends, the members of the Goteborg Symphony Orchestra.” He was to remain its chief conductor until 1922. That symphony, which had its first performance under the composer’s direction in 1915, was in fact Stenhammar’s second and is today called Symphony No. 2, even if the composer himself never gave it that number.

Edvard Grieg’s Symphony in C minor, which the composer withdrew, saw scholar after scholar writing about it disparagingly, with much discussion of the its style, all too often based on the question: what are its unoriginal or unsuccessful features? But it was Grieg himself who began the tradition with his admonition that it “must never be performed”. Now, however, very few feel, on moral grounds, that the work should not be performed.

By the time of the ‘Ottocento’ (19th century), opera was the dominant force in Italian musical culture, with bel canto composers such as Rossini and Donizetti creating a public appetite for opera that eclipsed achievements by Italy’s musical sons in other genres. Some of these composers who focused their energies instead on instrumental music, swimming against the operatic tide, remained in their native land, while others found a home (or were forced to find one) abroad.

Giuseppe Martucci (1856-1909) is one who stayed. A gifted pianist, he bypassed the operatic path and wrote music with a kind of fluent synthesis of Italian lyricism and German, dialectic approach to form that reached an early peak in his Cello Sonata of 1880. Yet Martucci, as a teacher of composition in Bologna and then Naples, urged the teenaged Alfredo Casella (1883-1947) to study abroad.

Ildebrando Pizzetti (1880-1968) is among the few composers in this set whose entire career centered in Italy, and he wrote a substantial body of instrumental music.

Before the war and eventual exile, Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco (1895-1968) succeeded in reinventing an essentially Romantic model (of both form and harmony) for his own time with his Cello Sonata Op. 50 of 1928.

From seven years earlier, Ildebrando Pizzetti’s Sonata of 1921 is a more gloomy, even tortured affair. The Cello Sonata of Francesco Cilea (1866-1950), while unmistakably cast as an ‘operatic’ work from its opening solo, features a protagonist scarcely burdened by the existential angst to be found in comparable works from northern Europe.

Like Cilea, Ermanno Wolf-Ferrari (1876–1948) is known for his operas but unlike Cilea’s cello sonata, Wolf-Ferrari’s Op. 30 dates from the final three years of his life and belongs to a mature output of instrumental music.

Virtuoso cellists Alfredo Piatti (1822-1901) produced many trifles and showpieces to display his artistry to his adoring public in London. He was most proud of the set of six sonatas included in this set. In 1844 he made his first appearance in the English capital and soon settled there, playing both as a soloist and in one of the first celebrity string quartets.

The Cello Sonata by Mario Pilati (1903-1938) is another product of the fast-moving 1920s, formed in a Romantic tradition but inflected – like the music of Casella, Pizzetti, and Castelnuovo-Tedesco – by contemporary trends in impressionism and futurism.

From the next generation of composers, the Cello Sonata composed in 1948 by Eliodoro Sollim (1926-2000) fluently incorporates the kind of modal harmonies and cross-rhythms adopted by the likes of Bartók and Janáček from the folk traditions of their own cultures.

The name of Cor de Groot (1914-1993) adorned the cover of many LPs of canonic concertos and sonatas throughout the 1950s, when his qualities were summed up in High Fidelity magazine in a review of the first two concertos of Beethoven: ‘De Groot is a solid and sympathetic interpreter in the Central European tradition... His playing impresses with its substance and authority rather than with ostentation and glitter.’ Some of those recordings have received modern reissues on album, but his own compositions have received comparatively little attention. An early Sonatina pokes fun at serial technique, before an Old Holland Suite deftly sketches a sequence of 11 Dutch landscapes and portraits. A sequence of five Homenajes documents his fondness for Spain, played here by its dedicatee Jacob Bogaart.

Folke Nauta likewise became a friend and colleague of de Groot, making him an ideal pianist to record the repertoire for left-hand piano which the composer wrote once a long term injury to his right hand had derailed his career at the end of the 1950s. Eastern European influences such as Bartók can be found in most of the seven movements of Apparitions, while a trio of later miniatures such as Cloches dans le matin (1979) makes a virtue of simplicity. Between them, Nauta has made an imaginative selection of music written for de Groot, as a left-handed pianist, by friends and colleagues including Willem, Juuriaan and Louis Andriessen, allreceiving their first recordings here. The collection ends on a note of personal homage and affection with EnCor, which Jacob Bogaart wrote in 2013 as a reminiscence of his improvisation and practice sessions with de Groot. Both pianists contribute substantial essays to the booklet, which is further enhanced by a memoir of the pianist by the curator, musicologist and producer Frits Zwart.

Performers and listeners alike have long gravitated to Louis Couperin's music more than to that of any other member of the French keyboard school of the time, probably because of its fascinating and surprising harmonic language. There are 129 pieces catalogued as authentic.

In making this new recording of all 129 pieces, Massimo Berghella has chosen to take the Preludes as starting points for ‘suites’ – 17 in all – which gather up the remaining dance movements into coherent sequences cast in the same key as the relevant Prelude.

Among the most distinguished active Italian harpsichordists, Massimo Bergella studied with Kenneth Gilbert at the Mozarteum in Salzburg and at the Accademia Chigiana in Siena. He has a 30-year-long career as a teacher himself, as well as a performance diary and discography that has taken him across Europe for recitals, broadcasts and recordings. Of a previous album of d’Anglebert, La Nazione remarked that Berghella ‘grasps the reconstructive necessity of the scores, performing them in all their poetic complexity.’

Mauro Giuliani (1781-1828) was a contemporary of Schubert and one of the many Italian guitar virtuosos who had to flee his own country to get noticed. He ended up in Vienna frequently playing in the fashionable salons and contributing to the guitar becoming all the rage there. As a composer he mainly wrote for his own use: around 200 pieces in all. Many of his works are still popular today, and belong to the standard guitar repertoire. 'Composer, or rather translator of beauty'. This is how Giuliani described himself in a letter to Anton Diabelli on 24 January 1824, and it contains all the poetry and aesthetics of his music, which is quintessentially beautiful, charming, melodious and witty. This new recording presents the complete works for flute and guitar, a popular combination. Included are sets of variations on popular themes from operas, serenades and divertimenti, potpourri’s, Grand Duo’s and Marches, a veritable treasure trove of instrumental brilliance and joie de vivre.

Flutist Daniele Ruggieri completed his studies in Venice where he graduated with the highest marks under Guido Novello and subsequently in Geneva where he was awarded the first Prix de Virtuosité in the class of Maxence Larrieu, after which he built an impressive career as a soloist and ensemble player: “...Rarely will you hear the flute flutter around a concert hall in such a beautiful and playful display of virtuosity.” (M. Connolly, The Times, London). Master guitarist Alberto Mesirca is twice winner of the Golden Guitar, for the best recording of the Year. He recorded the complete guitar music by Regondi, Asencio and Sanz, and “Voces de Sefarad”, four centuries of Sephardic Songs.

Belonging to the generation of Respighi but dying several decades later, Gian Francesco Malipiero (1882-1973) is a far more varied composer than listeners to his post-Romantic chamber and orchestral music would guess. This album is both the most comprehensive publication ever issued of his song output on record, and a valuable opportunity to reappraise an often under-rated 20th-century composer. Malipiero wrote songs throughout his career, and in his late 20s found an affinity with the visionary and influential poet Gabriele d’Annunzio. Their artistic partnership began in 1909 with I sonetti delle fate, full of Wagnerian yearning in the spirit of Debussy’s incidental music to d’Annunzio’s St Sebastian play. The composer’s literary leanings and gifted word setting soon produced equally idiomatic settings of French poetry in a set of Cinq mélodies and an elliptical cycle of three poems (titled in English) by Georges Jean-Aubry, Keepsake. With Le stagioni italiche, however, Malipiero shows himself up to date and in sympathy with the latest developments in expressionist song writing from the pens of Mahler, Schoenberg and Webern, and with an ambition to match: a 40-minute cycle of four varied texts ranging from the 15th century to Malipiero’s own day. Like much else here, the cycle has previously been recorded but never in the context of Malipiero’s other songs which help us to understand the composer’s stylistic evolution. Three years later, there followed a through-composed drama based on the ancient legend of Philomel (immortalized by Ovid in the Metamorphoses) from which Malipiero extracted a cycle of three songs. He continued to refresh his style and innovate with Le sette allegrezze d’amore from 1945, but little in his music prepares the listener for the pointilliste precision of the Sette canzonette veneziane from 1960.

Leon Böellmann (1862-1897) was born in the Alsatian town of Ensisheim. He moved to Paris after the Franco-Prussian War after which Alsace became part of Germany. In Paris, he studied organ, piano and composition at the Classical Music School, graduating from it with honors. After graduation, he worked as a teacher at school. His compositions brought him considerable recognition, and he would almost certainly have made a bigger name for himself if he had not died at the young age of 35. Presented on this album is his remarkable Cello Sonata Op. 40, hailing from the late French Romantic period.

The Cello Sonata Op. 80 in A major of 1907, by Charles-Marie Widor (1844–1937), is a grandiose work consisting of three movements with a magnificent introduction, foreshadowing a sonata full of ideas. When comparing the cello part with other sonatas of the period, a cellist feels that Widor cared little for technical constraints. Due in part to the use of huge intervals, the cello part matches the piano part for virtuosity. The sonata’s premiere was given by Jules Lebeau and the composer on 14 March 1907 at the salon of Madame Max, who also offered Widor’s Violin Sonata Op. 79 in the same program.

Vincent d’Indy (1851–1931) was a French composer and organist, conductor and teacher, music critic, publicist and meaningful public figure. He lived a long and active live throughout at least three epochs of French history. He is considered the greatest representative of the César Frank School of composition. His Sonata for Cello and Piano Op.84 was written in 1925 when d’Indy was over 70 years old. His style had undergone significant changes in the years following his retirement and move from Paris to the south of France, where he composed a series of works generally in a bright and cheerful mood. Despite its name, this Sonata in fact takes the form of a Baroque suite. The opening movement (Entrée) is elegant and charming. This is followed by a Gavotte in Rondo, in which pizzicato in the cello is used to evoke the lute. The third part (titled "Air") is characterized by a soft and melancholic mood. The finale (Gigue) is a lively updated form of this baroque dance.

At 76, Wolfgang Rübsam is undoubtedly one of the Bachians of our time, and yet until quite recently his long and distinguished discography has included no recording of the single most central collection to Bach’s output as a keyboard musician, the two volumes of The Well-Tempered Clavier. Rübsam’s chosen instrument for this recording is the lute-harpsichord: a unique keyboard instrument with a unique sound that Bach apparently cherished. It is more forceful than the clavichord but less brilliant than the conventional harpsichord, requiring a touch of its own.

According to Fanfare magazine’s review of the set when originally released, ‘I thought I’d heard it all. I was mistaken, and never, on any instrument, have I encountered a take on these masterpieces that breathes such new life into them.’ This set is now widely available on CD for the first time, and joins Rübsam’s other recordings on the lute-harpsichord for Brilliant Classics, of music by Bach and Weiss, as well as a complete set of the organ works by Louis Vierne.