Capriccio Encore is a series of re-releases of the most famous recordings from Capriccio’s back catalogue, fully re-mastered and competitively priced. The legendary recordings of artists such as Sandor Végh, Ton Koopman, Sir Neville Marriner and the Vienna Boys’ Choir also contain repertoire highlights that have a particularly special appeal, from the baroque to the present day. This Encore release's highlight is Luigi Cherubini's Coronation Mass Krönungsmesse, performed by Kölner Rundfunkchor and Capella Coloniensis.

Georg Philipp Telemann wrote a series of Passions between 1716 and 1767. All of these works were written to be performed in German churches in the days leading up to Easter. He wrote over 40 passions for the churches of Hamburg, 22 of which have survived. One of the most popular is his 1746 St. Matthew’s Passion. Here, the work is performed by Hermann Max and the Rheinische Kantorei and Das Kleine Konzert. This release is part of the Capriccio Encore series, which is a series of re-releases of the most famous recordings from Capriccio’s back catalogue, fully re-mastered and competitively priced. The legendary recordings of artists such as Sandor Végh, Ton Koopman, Sir Neville Marriner and the Vienna Boys’ Choir also contain repertoire highlights that have a particularly special appeal, from the baroque to the present day.

After the great success and Grammy nominated album of Piano Concertos by Russian composer Zara Levina, this recording focuses now on different types of chamber music compositions by the same composer. Again, the Riga-born pianist Maria Lettberg plays the leading part on this recording and shows the high creativity of the unjustified forgotten composer. Zara Alexandrovna Levina, born 1906 in Alexandrovsk (Ukraine), witnessed two world wars, the Revolution as well as the collapse and totalitarian reconstruction of her homeland. She was under the constant ideological pressure of the existentially threatening state censorship, which was particularly exerted by the notorious RAPM (Russian Association of Proletarian Musicians) in the 1920s and 1930s, driving her to the brink of a creative and health disaster. However, Zara Levina was able to retain her own and unmistakable voice in her music. She died in Moscow on 1976 as a respected and much-performed composer beloved of musicians such as David Oistrakh, Maria Grinberg, Victor Knuschewitzki and the public alike.

REVIEW:

Zara Levina’s Piano Concertos made something of an impression when Capriccio brought out its disc in which Maria Lettberg featured prominently, as she does in this latest disc devoted to Levina’s music. Here the focus turns to instrumental and chamber music.

There are two piano sonatas. The first dates from 1925 when she was 19 and is an exercise in ultra-compression; it’s the size of a Scarlatti sonata at rather less than six minutes in length. As is so evident in her concertos she was profoundly influenced by Rachmaninov, and the intensity of the chording reinforces the fact in this taut, descriptive work. Over a quarter of a century later she wrote her second sonata, cast in three conventionally-sized movements. There’s almost childlike innocence in its opening Allegretto, a pellucid sense of generosity too, though the central Andante sees the music deepen in expression that encourages a fiery and passionate Allegro finale. The work progresses from sweetness to purposeful drama by a process of clarification of expressive intensity. Maria Lettberg is the perfect exponent.

In 1928 she wrote a Poème for viola and piano, a sliver of a piece shorter even than the First Piano Sonata. Nevertheless, it manages to convey a rich and refined elegance and allows the viola a brief central panel to muse rhapsodically. The Violin Sonata, a work that predates the Second Piano Sonata by a year, is a piece that combines attractive themes with pellucid writing. The solemn nobility of the central slow movement also sports a beautiful lyric section that swings deliciously before returning to the melancholic tread of the opening paragraphs. The finale, meanwhile, has puckish Prokofiev-like leanings and proves another opportunity for enlivening variation of mood and tone from Levina.

The Three Piano Pieces of 1940—a Wiegenlied, Dance and Toccata—exude light spirits. The first is played with a rich sentiment that almost defeats the chilly acoustic, the second is fulsome and energetic, and the third is a darting, exciting affair with some unusual Iberian-flamenco evocations. The Fantasy on Bashkirian Themes is another six-minute piece, this time for violin and piano dating from 1942. The dancing airs are delicious; there are quirky folkloric elements at work, too, and plenty of virtuosic flourishes for the fiddle. Interesting too, that those Bashkirian themes sound to my ears very like Gershwin and Robert Russell Bennett. Despite the 1943 date the Canzonetta for cello is deft and relaxed. This leaves the Hebrew Rhapsody, a work that occupied her for 25 years, on and off. It was finally completed shortly before her death but written for two hands. Here we hear a four-hand arrangement made by Katia Tchemberdji who joins Lettberg for this 11-minute piece. The music moves, perhaps expectedly given its rhapsodic and ethnic nature, from exuberance to melancholia to fiery drive. It’s really only in this work that Jewish elements are uppermost in her music. There’s no real clue as to why a four-hand version was played instead of the original—perhaps the added density may have something to do with it.

It’s the arranger who has written the pertinent booklet notes. All the performers—I’ve only mentioned Lettberg by name as she appears so often—are excellent and the recordings are, as noted, just a little chilly but very clear. Levina’s music continues to impress. In addition to studio recordings I can’t help wondering what, if anything, has survived in radio archives.

– MusicWeb International (Jonathan Woolf)

Johanna Doderer studied composition in Graz with Beat Furrer (composition), later in Vienna with Klaus Peter Sattler (film and media composition) and with Erich Urbanner (composition). Her current work ranges broadly from chamber music to orchestral work and six operas. “Doderer cares about content, not cheap effect. She is able to prove convincingly in her very densely written score that even today you can still create intense music by using sound models deriving from the late romantic period…combined in an ideal way with forms of ‘minimal music’...“ (Die Presse)

With "Il tabarro" Puccini wrote the first part of his projected opera triptych, with which he ultimately intended to parody and reverse Wagner’s Ring tetralogy by stringing together three completely incoherent short stories. Once more, for Il tabarro the composer virtually emigrated to France, to which he had already made declarations of love with La Bohème and Manon Lescaut. This affinity is now mirrored more clearly than in these two operas in the music of The Cloak, which emanates French, well-nigh Impressionist perfume. Bertrand de Billy knows how to make the score come alive with a fantastic cast on his side. World famous tenor Johan Botha was on the top of his career at the making of this album, and the results of the entire ensemble together are historically beautiful.

Straus, renewed the most Viennese of all genres, Operetta, with a work aimed at parodying contemporary society. To his great success, every punch Iine was laughed at, and musical allusion understood. There was equal laughter at musical quotations from Wagner's solemnity, dragon's-blood sausage, dachshund dressed as a dragon, and parody of the Nibelung verse metre. Yet what lay, barely concealed, behind it all was also accepted: an attack on military display and Germanic arrogance.

Many of the today-distinguished Soviet composers in the second half of the 20th century knew how to steer a middle course, enabling them to supply what was officially desirable all the while remaining faithful to themselves, writing the music they wanted to write. Kabalevsky was a Jack of all musical trades and, as a specialist for children’s music especially, cultivated a highly personal style, keeping easily within the bounds of comprehensible tonal aesthetics. His works are characterized by some of the features typical of Kabalevsky’s overall oeuvre: a cornucopia of melodious imagination, dance rhythms, above all in the fast movements, expansive slow sections and a positive, often cheerful tone. The present release presents a selection of his orchestral works alongside his violin concerto.

REVIEW:

German harpsichordist and pianist Christine Schornsheim has been making CDs for many years now; I’m mostly familiar with her collaborations with non-period performers such as tenor Peter Schreier and the German oboist and conductor Burkhardt Glaetzner. In fact, the only decidedly “period” CD of hers in my library is a Harmonia Mundi recording of Mozart four-hand music made a few years ago with pianist Andreas Staier on a Stein Vis-à-vis piano/harpsichord. Based on this admittedly limited experience, I was not prepared for the excellence of this release, nor for the depth of her understanding of Bach.

Complete recordings of the Well-Tempered Clavier have been coming fast and furious of late; one need only scan the 70-plus listings of Book I on ArkivMusic to see that the music has attracted harpsichordists and pianists of every stripe and persuasion. Since joining the staff of Fanfare , I’ve personally surveyed four versions, the most exceptional of which is undoubtedly Rebecca Pechefsky’s recording of Book 1 on Quill Classics, reviewed in Fanfare 34:3. The first hint that Schornsheim’s version might be a cut above the ordinary comes in her personal observations about the project, contained in the liner notes: “ The Well-Tempered Clavier has always had a healing effect on me. Whenever I felt bad, I sat down at the nearest keyboard and played fugues.” She goes on to say that despite being an immense challenge, recording the 48 plus 48 has cleansed her soul and given her inner peace. One could interpret this as mere advertising jargon, but I don’t think so. The sincerity of these statements is borne out entirely by the integrity and honesty of the playing on these CDs.


It may surprise you to learn that I don’t automatically subscribe to the early-music dictum that the WTC can be played only on the harpsichord. Like any instrument, the harpsichord has its pluses and minuses, and in the hands of a lesser artist, the harpsichord is ruthless in revealing weaknesses in phrasing and technique. (It’s also very easy to sound dull and mechanical on the harpsichord.) The modern piano, on the other hand, with its damper pedal and increased resonance, is less restricting for many artists, allowing for a freer interpretive approach—or so they think. The best artists, of course, can turn a handicap into advantage. Schornsheim capitalizes on the strengths of the harpsichord in ways that are often hard to verbalize, such as the almost imperceptible changes in articulation—which would be lost on the more resonant modern piano—that set one voice against another in a fugue, or the minute applications of rubato that make sense of the rhetoric of a prelude. It is a style of playing grounded in intense study of and appreciation for Bach’s music, but one that never sounds labored, forced, or unnatural. There is nary a misjudged tempo or instance of flagging inspiration here; throughout Books 1 and 2 the level of accomplishment is remarkably high. In the international arena of Bach performance, I predict that this release will enjoy immediate and widespread favor.


Another reason for the serious record collector to consider the acquisition of this set is the choice of instrument. It is the 1624 two-manual Ruckers (enlarged in France in the 18th century) housed in the Musée Unterlinden, Colmar. The instrument has been the subject of numerous recordings, most recently a Centaur CD of Couperin played by Lisa Goode Crawford ( Fanfare 35:4). It is simply one of the most magnificent-sounding French harpsichords in captivity, and it has never been recorded more intelligently and realistically than it is here. Highest recommendation.

FANFARE: Christopher Brodersen