“Since Beethoven, nothing has been written that even comes close!”

The great conductor Arthur Nikisch made this remark to Bruckner’s former student, Joseph Schalk and also his fellow conductor, Hermann Levi, described the piece as “the most significant symphonic work since Beethoven’s death.”

Arthur Nikisch conducted the first performance in the Stadttheater, Leipzig, on 30 December 1884, with Bruckner in the audience. While the performance was not a total triumph, it brought the sixty-year-old composer significant international recognition for the first time. During the composer’s lifetime, the Seventh, especially its Adagio, was his most popular symphony, and it remains among his most beloved and frequently performed works.

Bruckner’s Third Symphony had always been something of a problem child among Bruckner’s symphonies, from its disastrous first reception (an enthused youthful Gustav Mahler notwithstanding) until well into the 20th century. In its original form, it is the longest, most Wagnerian of his symphonies – and often considered, rightly or not, the first truly Brucknerian symphony. While some cherish the uncompromising originality of the first version, Bruckner himself wanted the third, much tightened Edition performed, finding it “incomparably better”. It is that final version that is here recorded – and listeners can now easily decide for themselves.

Bruckner’s Second Symphony is a rare enough encounter in its 1877 version, but it’s virtually unperformed in the 1872 original version. This is not owing to some deficiency of the earlier ideas compared to the later alterations. It’s mainly habit and convenience because to get new parts and re-learn something ostensibly known, that differs in a great many details, means an extra expense of effort and resources. That’s a shame, really, because it is decidedly worth discovering the original, not-yet-ironed-out rawness of Bruckner’s early masterpiece, which was something unheard of at the time – but needn’t remain unheard now.

Franz Schmidt was not only a brilliant cellist, but also a gifted pianist who mastered almost the entire piano repertoire with ease. Nevertheless, he had a kind of love-hate relationship with the piano. His great love was the organ. However, this did not prevent him from writing numerous works for the left hand (Beethoven Variations, Piano Concerto in E-flat major, Quintets). All of these were commissioned by the one-armed pianist Paul Wittgenstein. For two-handed piano, on the other hand, Schmidt left behind only one composition. It is the melancholic Romance, which he dedicated to his English teacher Geoffrey Sephton in 1922. Karl-Andreas Kolly: 'The fact that I have nevertheless decided to set three of Franz Schmidt’s organ works for piano has primarily to do with my great passion for his music. And also a little with my hope that in a piano version, his organ works could possibly reach an additional audience.'

Besides the well-known Left Hand Piano Concertos by Korngold, Prokofiev, Ravel and others, this very first Concert of Josef Labor marks the beginning of this genre in 1915.
One-Handed pianist Paul Wittgenstein ordered it already during his captivity in Russia where he lost his right arm but determined to forward his pianistic career. Labor was part of Johannes Brahms’s close circle of friends. At the age of three, he lost his sight due to smallpox. For him composition was a luxury, insofar as he had to rely on the help of a scribe who had to commit the work to paper. Labor’s music is very skillfully composed, always sensuous, and first and foremost melodious; it does not require a too complete concentration on itself. These World Premiere Recordings marks an highlight of Capriccio's Labor-Edition which focused already since years on this sensitive Music of an mostly forgotten composer.

Miklós Rózsa feared that success as a film composer might overshadow his reputation as a composer of classical concert fare. He was right. Three Oscars and 17 Academy Award nominations tends to do that. The two worlds were strangely incompatible and forced Rózsa into what he called his “Double Life” – the title of both a film for which he won an Oscar and that of his autobiography. The three orchestral works presented here, from his early, middle and late phases, provide a charming introduction to his alternative side.

REVIEW:

Works like the ones on this album ought to appeal to lovers of any of Rosza’s many film scores; the musical language is not that far off. The orchestra, an underrated regional group, gives crisp performances under conductor Gregor Bühl on a release that should appeal to both film buffs and fans of 20th century music generally.

— AllMusic.com (James Manheim)

By his own reckoning, Bruckner began his career as a professional composer when he was thirty-nine years old. With a mere exercise for a symphony under his belt – the unnumbered one in F minor – he was now ready to write his first true symphony. The world was not. First performed in 1868 in Linz – badly – the work flopped and was put aside until nine years and five symphonies later, when it was gently adjusted. A subsequent performance in 1884 was Bruckner’s “most successful Viennese performance to date”, prompting, perplexingly, a thorough revision that would be the 1891 “Vienna” version. This recording uses the unadulterated 1868 “Linz” version.

Among Bruckner’s Symphonies, the Fifth is his contrapuntal masterpiece; the grandest until the Eighth. The tour-de-force of a finale gives us an idea of what the finale of the Ninth might have been like. Its magnificent dark and halting opening with the descending bass line – so effectively recalled in the finale – is inimitable. Although long available only in a disfigured version by Franz Schalk, it is also distinct for never having been the subject to revision or, perhaps, even doubt on the part of Bruckner – who never heard it performed with an orchestra. And yet, when Bruckner wrote this masterpiece, he was still far from establishing himself as a composer in Vienna and his spirits were as low as ever, writing a friend that “my life has lost all joy and delight – in vain and for nothing.” A radiant pinnacle from amid darkness.

In celebration of the 150th Anniversary this Album focus on still less-known but exceptional sensitive and impressive Choral Symphonic and Orchestra songs by Max Reger. With these works, Reger entirely adhered to the trend of the time; the large-scale idea, which would have had no place in the operas of the period, is transferred to the concert hall, so to speak, and is as far removed from the "simple" orchestral song as some of Mahler's Rückert-Lieder. The Hebbel Requiem, Op. 144b includes audible parallels with Johannes Brahms‘s German Requiem and was Reger’s memorial for the German soldiers killed in the war.

Théodore Géricault’s larger-than-life painting The Raft of the Medusa has stimulated a great many artists ever since its creation in 1819. Hans Werner Henze and his Librettist Ernst Schnabel were inspired by Géricault and wrote a political oratorio on the painting’s tragic historical subject in 1967. Notable for its harsh and bright sounds, tender depiction of suffering, scathing irony, and gripping dramaturgy, the agitation at the failed premiere lifted the work into the canon of great classical scandals.

Although he had famous students (i.e. Szymanowski) and teachers (Moniuszko), few listeners know much, if anything, about Zygmunt Noskowski (1846–1909). And yet, for most of the 19th century, he was the primary exponent of modern symphonic music in Poland. As a conductor and concert organizer, he had himself championed the causes of forgotten Polish composers. Now it is Antoni Wit, Noskowski’s successor at the helm of the Warsaw Philharmonic at a distance of 94, who helps out his late-romantic colleague – just as he has already done with the music Zygmunt Stojowski on a previous Capriccio recording (C5464).

REVIEW:

When you listen to the music of Zygmunt Noskowski, you can’t help but notice that all of the elemental characteristics of late 19th century orchestral music are present. The intense seriousness of Brahms, the romantic idealism of Schumann, as well as the folk-influenced melodic writing of Dvorák. And within its overall sunny disposition, it even points to some of Bruckner’s more lighthearted scherzo movements.

There’s a heartwarming ease and charm to the inner slow movements of these symphonies, as well as dramatic and rhythmic fervor to the outer movements. All aspects that Polish conductor Antoni Wit brings to the forefront. The members of the Deutsche Staatsphilharmonie Rheinland-Pfalz perform this music with enthusiasm and the same attention to expressive details they would apply to any and all repertoire standbys and warhorses. Makes you wonder why Zygmunt Noskowski’s name doesn’t come up to the surface more often.

-- Classical Music Sentinel

The score of The Prophets, intended as the last act of The Eternal Road, was the last that Kurt Weill composed in Europe and his last extensive setting in German, before he personally and professionally adopted the language of his new home, America. Musically, he drew on all his previous great works, from Mahagonny and the Seven Deadly Sins to his Second Symphony. At the same time, he foreshadowed some of his soon-to-be-written works for Broadway.

In 1998 David Drew devised the concert adaptation of this act, of which this is the premiere’s recording. The Four Walt Whitman Songs, meanwhile, were a product of the war years and reveal Weill at his most touchingly American, fusing American theater song with the German Lied, Berlin with Brooklyn.

The more of Pancho Vladigerov’s work becomes widely accessible, the clearer it becomes that he is the most important Bulgarian composer – well beyond the 20th century. Revered in his lifetime, he was in a position to continue his work largely unaffected by the ideological demands of the Communist regime, although his musical diction, tonal and grounded in late Romantic tradition, wouldn’t likely have provoked any reprisals. In these works for the stage, meanwhile, Vladigerov shows a cosmopolitan side, easily slipping into the world of Strindberg for his Scandinavian Suite, chinoiserie for Klabund’s Chalk Circle, and exoticism for Shaw’s Cesar and Cleopatra.

Krzysztof Penderecki’s works for (string) quartet neatly encapsulate the stylistic breadth and trace the development of Poland’s most important modern composer throughout his six-decade-long career. From the avantgarde rhythmical study that is Quartet No.1, via an ode to Webern, to the neo-romantic elder Penderecki’s Schubertian Clarinet Quartet, this collection covers all his chamber music for three and four strings, even the early neo-baroque outlier of his Three Pieces adapted from his film music for the steamy 1964 movie, The Saragossa Manuscript.

REVIEW:

From wild child of the experimental avant-garde to luscious neo-Romantic, Krzysztof Penderecki had an unusually profound stylistic transformation across his career. When his string quartets neatly encapsulate that trajectory, written as they were between 1960 and 2016, it’s no mean feat to pull off the entire cycle in consistently convincing and compelling fashion. Yet, that is what the Meccore Quartet has done here.

-- The Strad

Bruckner’s frantic revisions of his symphonies Nos. 3, 4, and 8 were borne out of his disappointment with Hermann Levi rejecting the original version of the 8th symphony. Helping in this large-scale revamping effort were former Bruckner-students Franz and Joseph Schalk, Ferdinand Löwe, Max von Oberleithner, and Cyrill Hynai, which resulted in these versions’ reputation – and especially that of the last version of the 4th – being varnished as something not quite Echt-Bruckner.

It wasn’t until the discovery of photographs of the 1888 version’s manuscript score and the subsequent publication of Benjamin Korstvedt’s edition thereof that it became clear: This late edition really did reflect Bruckner’s intentions. To ears familiar with the still better-known 1881 version, the result might sound mystifying, even troubling, but it also surprises with many particularly exquisite passages!

If you know the cellist-professor-composer Georg Goltermann (1824-1898) and his eight (!) cello concertos, you’re either a cellist or married to one. In his lifetime and for a while thereafter, the instrumental virtuoso-cum-composer was popular and well-liked enough to have the Cantilena of his Cello Concerto recorded by Pablo Casals – but not much since. That’s a shame because that lyrical-melancholic, never gratuitously virtuosic op.10 is a picture-perfect, delightful romantic cello concert. The symphony, then well received and Goltermann’s pride, too, goes down nicely in a post-Brahms vain rather à la Bruch or Gernsheim, especially the exquisite, lively hunting Scherzo with its sweeping Trio.

REVIEW:

The Symphony, the third of the works in the key of A minor, is receiving its first recording here. It was premiered in Leipzig, and I think that is quite significant, because it owes much to the memory of the recently deceased Felix Mendelssohn, in particular his Scottish Symphony. It was very well-received by public and reviewers. I was amused by a quote in the notes from a newspaper report of the premiere, which stated that even in 1851, critics were bemoaning that the quality of melody was no longer being adequately appreciated by composers (but Goltermann was excused from this criticism).

I’d not heard of Turkish cellist Jamal Aliyev before, but he has performed at the Proms and won a number of prizes at international competitions. It is not hard to see why; he is very good, giving these little-known works his fullest efforts. Under the assured direction of Howard Griffiths, such a champion of the unsung composer, the ORF Vienna orchestra sound superb. My only quibble with the sound quality was the occasional sharp intake of breath from Aliyev (but hey, he’s got to breathe).

This is one of those unsung composer discs that really does “sing”. Goltermann might not have had the most original of compositional voices, but he knew how to write concentrated, melodic pieces, and now we know that even in the mid-19th century, melody was in short supply (what would those critics have thought of the 20th century, I wonder?).

-- MusicWeb International

As the Staatskapelle Berlin begins to look for its next music director (only the fourth since 1955!), this release finds the band’s own winds turning to Richard Strauss, who held the job some 110+ years ago. Together, they recorded their old chief conductors’ complete music for winds, including rarities like the Sonatinas “From an Invalid’s Workshop” and “The Happy Workshop” which Strauss dedicated to Mozart. Covering Strauss’ very early and very late creative output, the four pieces (plus the Eulenspiegel arrangement), give a fascinating insight into the development of Strauss, a horn player’s son.

REVIEW:

More Richard Strauss here in this comprehensive release which shows a range of different music for different combinations of wind. There are moments of lightness and drama here, the juxtaposition of which is highlighted for me in the 3rd movement of the Suite in B flat major for 13 wind instruments – light, playful flutes sit alongside the more demonstrative brass with its repeated downward motive which has a slightly sinister feel. Music that should be more widely heard.

-- Lark Reviews

When Toscanini encouraged Nino Rota to study at the Curtis Institute, where instructions by Fritz Reiner and a friendship with Aaron Copland awaited the precocious composer, it was already clear he would have a massive career. Only the direction wasn’t certain yet. It turned out to be classical music and film music, the former informing the latter. Notable when you listen to the delicious waltz Rota from War & Peace or the darkly humorous snippets from the very apropos Orchestra Rehearsal. And while the de-facto horn concertino Castel del Monte, inspired by King Frederick II’s famous medieval castle in southern Italy, isn’t technically film music, it very much sounds like music to a fantasy film of Rota’s imagining.

REVIEW:

As a sampler of the range and effectiveness of the music he wrote, this new disc from Capriccio is excellent. The orchestra play this presumably unfamiliar music with great skill and real flair, aided by a very immediate and lush recording. Add a total playing time of just under 84 minutes for this single disc and the appeal is clear.

I would encourage curious collectors to seek out more of Rota’s orchestral and symphonic works. For all the qualities of his film scores he is much more than just the composer of music for Fellini or The Godfather. This disc provides a valuable overview of his range and style – excitingly played and boldly recorded.

-- MusicWeb International (Nick Barnard)

"Look, when they tell me that in my music I am mainly concerned about bringing a bit of nostalgia and lots of good humor and optimism, well, I think that’s exactly how I’d like to be remembered: With a bit of nostalgia, lots of optimism, and good humor."

If only we listen to enough of his music (and not just his film music), Nino Rota’s wish should well come true. Not the least, if we lend our ears to his third (of ten) and most popular opera, the snappy Florentine Straw Hat (Il cappello di paglia di Firenze), which Rota wrote in Bari, after the War ended, and orchestrated a decade later for its premiere in Palermo.

REVIEW:

The whole cast works hard under Daniele Squeo’s direction, which has verve. The recorded sound is clear. The opera is fun, the performance excellent and there is a feel-good factor to enterprise.

-- Opera Now

When the music of Nikolai Kapustin was discovered by a wider audience in the West, it was positively shocking: Who was this Soviet (!) composer, whose music sounded more like an Oscar Peterson improvisation than anything else – but who wrote detailed scores, black with notes?! As we discover more and more of his music (and there’s so much more yet to discover!), a very distinct, always wholly charming voice emerges, whether in a freewheeling outright-jazzy work like his Concerto for 2 Pianos and Percussion, the more symphonic Fifth Piano Concerto, or the frisky Sinfonietta which transports us into a smoky 1940s bar in Manhattan.

REVIEWS:

Pianist Frank Dupree, with his stupendous pianistic bravura, his glowing personal commitment, and ultimately his standard-setting recordings, allows us to understand Kapustin's genius in all its stylistic range.

The Fifth Piano Concerto Op. 72, written in 1993 for the pianist Nikolai Petrov, is characterized by incredible virtuosity. The stylistic parallels to the US music tradition and in particular to George Gershwin, are emphasized again and again.

Second on the album is a later work by the composer, namely the Concerto for 2 Pianos and Percussion Op. 104 from 2002. Is it presumptuous to interpret this glittering, entertaining, exuberantly celebrating life and yet formally quite concise piece as a hymn to freedom. From a purely musical point of view, a real event can be reported: Frank Dupree and the equally young Adrian Brendle form Kapustin's exuberant concert session in swirling concordance with the percussionists Meinhard 'Obi' Jenne and Franz Bach under the musical direction of Dominik Beykirch and the stylish Berlin Radio Symphony Orchestra to an impasto big band sound full of wispy shooting star sounds.

The album concludes with the Sinfonietta for Piano Four Hands Op. 49 with the movements Overture, Allegro; Slow Waltz, Larghetto; Intermezzo, Allegretto and Rondo, Presto. Commissioned by the Soviet Ministry of Culture in 1987, the “little symphony” was first set for an orchestral version, and is performed here in an arrangement by the composer for piano four hands. The two mood cannons Dupree and Brendle swept across the keyboard like a roaring whirlwind, doing bella figura in the languid three-four bar slow waltz, before escorting us out of the album into the silence with intricate rhythms and a furious finale.

-- Merker Online (Germany)