The few pieces that George Rochberg wrote for flute are as bold and individualistic as anything in his oeuvre. His ability to compose in an astonishing variety of voices is clearly shown in the Caprice Variations, based on Paganini's famous melody, in homage to composers from Bach to Bartok. Christina Jennings' transcriptions challenge the player with dynamic, technical and stylistic extremes. Rochberg's Ukiyo-e pieces are among his most beautiful and haunting works. Praised for her virtuoso technique and rich tone, flutist Christina Jennings is an acknowledged expert in Rochberg's music.

Pixel is a stunning contemporary dance performance for 11 dancers in a virtual and living visual environment. A work on illusion combining energy and poetry, fiction and technical achievement, minimal music and hip-hop. It opens a dialogue between the synthetic world of digital projection and the real bodies of dancers. Pixel appeals to fans of contemporary dance, urban and hip-hop moves, with elements of circus too. Artistic Director and choreograper Mourad Merzouki, together with his Compagnle Kafig has elevated hip-hop to the world stage. In doing so he has created a multicultural contemporary dance form which takes equal place with modern dance and other idioms of the genre. He has incorporated circus elements, martial arts, contemporary dance and puppetry, and brought in performers from Algeria, Brazil and Taiwan in order to develop his ideas. The music was composed by French composer Armand Amar won a Cesar award for his original soundtrack.

This Blu-ray Disc is only playable on Blu-ray Disc players and not compatible with standard DVD players.

Also available on standard DVD

The collaboration of the poet John Dryden and Henry Purcell marked a conspicuous leap forward for English opera. Their greatest project, King Arthur, is a five-act ‘dramatick opera,’ the text of which had its origins in a patriotic musical play Dryden had written in 1684 but which he radically overhauled. The result was a work that appealed to the audience’s enthusiasm for fine costumes, lavish sets, ingenious stage machinery and a cast of singers, dancers and instrumentalists, containing vocal show-stoppers such as the imperishable ‘Frost Scene’ and ‘Fairest isle.’ This critically acclaimed staging uses a new performing edition by Rene Jacobs, and is sung in English with German dialogue. Bachtrack.com greatly admired the 2017 performance: “The singing cast- all of which played up to six parts each- were strong throughout Soprano Anett Fritsch marveled as Merlin’s trusty spirit Philidel and Cupido, her coloratura agile and light, her singing and speaking impressive both on stage and whilst airborne. Bass Johannes Weisser played a suitably repulsive Grimbald and convinced vocally in the Cold Genius’ staccato aria “What Ho,” Soprano Robin Johannsen and Altus Benno Schachtner delighted particularly during their touching love duet.”

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Polychoral music is so synonymous with 16th century Venice that it is easy to forget that the longest flourishing of this style- possibly even its invention- took place in Germany. Whether or not it was in Munich with the works of Orlande de Lassus that the Gabrielis first encountered its effects, polychoral music came to define German textures and techniques for over a century. Both apprentices and rivals to their Italian counterparts, composers such as Hieronymus Praetorius, Schutz, Hassler and Scheidt, as well as Austria’s Biber, fostered a tradition whose influence would extend all the way to the motets of Bach. This performance places a giant of Baroque choral music, Biber’s Missa Salisburgensis, alongside the Venetian choral works of Monteverdi from which it takes its inspiration. The combination is a heady one, a triumphal musical celebration uniquely appropriate to mark the 200th anniversary year of Salzburg’s affiliation with Austria.

Charles Ives' four violin sonatas count among the composer's most focused and imaginative works in any genre. They contain enough craggy dissonances, mangled hymn tunes, and rhythmic horseplay to satisfy hard-core Ivesians, yet their burly textures and volatile mood swings communicate a sense of immediacy not dissimilar to late-Romantic violin sonatas by Brahms and Franck. Individually and collectively violinist Curt Thompson and pianist Rodney Waters are fully on top of and into these works. Thompson's acerbic, nasal tone is particularly effective in sustained lyrical passages, and at times he alters it to take on a cello-like timbre (listen to the Third Sonata's drawn out first-movement coda, for instance). He also digs into Ives' uptempo humor with idiomatic gusto in the Fourth Sonata's outer movements and in the Second Sonata's central "In The Barn" movement--an "unsquare" dance if ever there were one! For his part, Waters brings maximum security and character to the composer's difficult piano parts.


True, Thompson doesn't match the tonal and expressive variety violinist Gregory Fulkerson commands in the above-mentioned reference versions, which are better engineered as well. But you can't beat having all four Ives Sonatas on a single, bargain-priced disc, and the brilliant booklet notes by Ives scholar H. Wiley Hitchcock are models of their kind. Recommended.

--Jed Distler, ClassicsToday.com

In addition to touring troupes and performances on parlor pianos, much of Foster's music circulated during his lifetime in versions for brass bands. Adolphe Sax, best known today as the inventor of the saxophone, had perfected "saxhorns" in the 1840s, a matched family of conical bore brasses using the recently developed valve system, and their powerful yet sweet sound quickly came to dominate public music throughout mid-19th century America. As an adventure in musical time travel the sounds that listeners in Foster's time would have heard are duplicated on this recording by a quintet of authentic period instruments. Their unique sound is strikingly different from that of modern brasses. Additionally, at a time when the distinctions between classical and popular music were less marked than today, their performers would have blended elements of classical, popular and folk traditions. Though Foster wrote few instrumental pieces himself, his sturdy melodies were regularly adapted as marches, quick steps and dance pieces by other composers, a typical practice of the time.

Synthetic Waltzes (1925) is a charming legacy of those years. A stylized society waltz, it is full of subtle misbehavior, such as at the opening and conclusion, where Thomson creates the impression of two waltz tempos heard simultaneously. Other works of this period, especially his Gertrude Stein song settings, display a serious whimsy that time has not tarnished. A third opera, Lord Byron, occupied much of there making 1960s. From the later 1970s, Thomson's production tapered off, except in an area that fascinated him throughout his career, the musical "Portraits" of his friends and acquaintances. Despite increasing health problems, he composed sporadically until shortly before his death on 30th September, 1989.

The most recent and longest of the works heard here quite possibly makes the longest musical journey as well. The Clarinet Concerto (2001), subtitled Landscape with Blues, was commissioned by the IRIS Chamber Orchestra for Richard Stoltzman. In offering the commission, the orchestra's Executive Director, Albert Pertalion, asked for a work that might reflect in some way on the heritage of Mississippi Delta Blues. As the composer notes fondly, "he even took me on a whirlwind tour of blues country to get a feel for the birthplace of one of America's greatest musical traditions. From that trip, I took away an indelible sense of the countryside, the heat and humidity, the purple martens chasing mosquitoes at twilight". But in it's realization, the piece goes much farther afield than that. It starts in the West African nations of Senegal and The Gambia, or "Senegambia" as they are sometimes known, with their great musical story-telling tradition known as griot singing, audibly one of the roots of American blues. These audible links are heard in their repetitive accompaniment patterns and rhythmically free, declamatory vocal melodies that tend to begin high then work themselves down to a lower register. Here, Hartke casts the clarinet solo as the griot, with the woodwinds engaging in a sort of call and response chorus, all built over a repeated five-note bass line. The second movement, entitled Delta Nights recalls Hartke's impressions of the Delta, but just as importantly owes much to the novel, Train Whistle Guitar, by Albert Murray, about his boyhood in a small African-American community near the Delta during the heyday of the great itinerant bluesmen. Hartke writes: "In Delta Nights, the soloist evokes a blues harmonica wailing away in the night, and even the structure of the movement is loosely related to a series of blues choruses. Moreover, some of the soloist's turns of phrase are derived from the opening motive of Cool Drink of Water Blues by Tommy Johnson, one of my favorite bluesmen. But the predominant influence here was Murray's recollection of the excitement which fired his boyhood imagination, hearing the distant sound of blues music drifting across the fields from juke joints that he was too young to visit." The final movement, Philamayork, takes it's title from Albert Murray, a compound word he uses to denote the nearly mythical cities of the North, where blues had gone and become a hard-driving urban music. Here Hartke's own New York roots are most apparent, and the movement unfolds almost like a nightclub dance-set, starting with a blues, then a faster dance number, a slow torchy ballad and some travelling music at the finish.

It's always good to have new recordings of Ives' two quartets (here including a bonus of the zany Scherzo for String Quartet). They are wonderful works, the first tuneful and charming, the second one of Ives' finest mature pieces. In the Second quartet the Blair Quartet charts a middle course between the Emerson's sleek and swift version on DG and the much slower, heavier Leipzig Quartet reading on MDG. Their less-polished ensemble sonority, grainier than the competition but never in an unpleasant or inartistic way, suits the music well, whether in the plain-spun hymn tunes of the First quartet or the raucous eruptions of the Second.


Only in the latter work's transcendental closing bars might I have wished for a smoother, richer timbre, but there's no questioning the sensible pacing or the players' mastery of the idiom. The sonics are also flatteringly clear and coherent, allowing plenty of contrapuntal detail to register without picking up extraneous performance noises or the ensemble's own breathing--almost always a problem, it seems, with quartet productions. God only knows if the Emerson version is still available, and for all the enticing additional couplings (a bevy of short pieces), the Leipzigers' Wagnerian take on the Second Quartet may not be to all tastes (and the disc is extremely expensive). That makes this release a very welcome addition to the Ives discography.
--David Hurwitz, ClassicsToday.com

Paul Moravec's The Time Gallery, scored for violin, piano, cello, flute, clarinet, and percussion explores various aspects of time--or more accurately, our relationship to it through the use of various time-keeping devices. The first movement, Bells: The Devotional Hours, begins in a ringing panoply that easily could find a home in Mussorgsky's Boris Godunov. Multi-layered clock ticking introduces the following Time Machine, while a human heart sets the meter for the mercurial Pulse movement. The finale, Overtime: Memory Sings, superimposes chimes over ticking clocks, setting the stage for the mysterious and meditative music to come. This and the first movement form the slow bookends to the piece, while the inner movements feature a bracing energy and rhythmic vitality similar to that found in Shchedrin's Carmen Ballet. Moravec's own musical language is generally tonal--and although it's not consistently melodic, it's always accessible. More than that, it's highly engrossing, especially in this stimulating performance by the ensemble Eighth Blackbird.

Protean Fantasy and Ariel Fantasy present opposite poles of motion: serenely relaxed in the former and nervously swift in the latter. Whatever the pace, both works require imagination and impeccable musicianship, qualities that violinist Paul Sheppard-Skaerved and pianist Aaron Shorr provide aplenty. Naxos' recording captures it all in clear, vivid sound. Now this is a disc of new music most anyone can enjoy.

--Victor Carr Jr, ClassicsToday.com

William Bolcom's four violin sonatas span 50 years of compositional activity. The First dates from 1956 (his freshman year at the University of Washington in Seattle), the Second was written 22 years later, while Nos. 3 and 4 respectively appeared in 1993 and 1994. Play the First's energetic concluding Quasi-Variations movement first and you'll realize that the 18-year-old composer already could embrace and manipulate many moods, shifting from sweet tunefulness and thorny dissonance as he pleased. His ability to do this, of course, would develop to more blatant extremes once hard-core jazz, pop, and world music idioms gained unreserved admission to his expressive kingdom.


The husband and wife team of violinist Solomia Soroka and pianist Arthur Greene simply eat up this music like starving artists getting their first substantial grub in ages. Examples: their gutsy delivery of the Fourth's Arabic-influenced Arabesque, their impassioned, flame-throwing dialogue at the Third's outset, and dagger-like articulation of the Second's terse second movement. Perhaps a quicker, suppler approach to the Second's "Joe Venuti meets Salsa" finale, in the manner of Maria Bachmann'a 1994 Catalyst recording, would be more stylistically apt, but the music bears up well when articulated in "longhair" accents (will Nonesuch ever reissue the still-unsurpassed Sergiu Luca recording with the composer tearing up the keyboard?). Bolcom provides his own informative, entertaining booklet notes to a lovingly executed and beautifully engineered release that does all participants proud. [2/27/2006]
--Jed Distler, ClassicsToday.com

Schumann at Pier2 is not a usual documentary, it explains the whole idea behind the project and it contains footage from rehearsals, comments from Paavo Järvi about the symphonies and the interpretation, biographical information about R. Schumann and footage of musicians who explain and play key themes and more. Stars of the film are the conductor Paavo Järvi and the Deutsche Kammerphilharmonie Bremen and it´s filmed at „Pier2“, a former dockyard in the harbour of Bremen.

“Järvi's Schumann is most notably extremely exciting, performed with a lot of enthusiasm.“ -- Fono Forum

"Since their great Beethoven-Cycle Paavo Järvi and the Deutsche Kammerphilharmonie are one of the top ensembles." -- Crescendo

Repertoire:
Excerpts from
Symphony No. 1, Spring, Op. 38
Symphony No. 2, Op. 61
Symphony No. 3 Rhenish, Op. 97
Symphony No. 4, Op. 120

Bonus:
- The making of Schumann at Pier2

Picture format: NTSC 16:9
Sound format: PCM Stereo (whole DVD) / DTS 5.1 (concert film only)
Region code: 0 (worldwide)
Subtitles: English (whole DVD) / German, French, Spanish, Korean, Chinese (concert film only)
Booklet notes: English, German, French
Running time: 98 mins (concert film) + 18 mins (bonus)
No. of Discs: 1 (DVD 9)

The opening concert of the Salzburg Festival, for many regarded as the world's most renowned music festival, is by tradition a high-profile event and the 2011 gala presented here was one of the best in memory. Pierre Boulez, the "grand seigneur of subtle minimalism and exquisitely beguiling sounds" (Der Standard), assembled a cast of tremendous distinction to join the Vienna Philharmonic for this prestigious concert, conceived as a tribute to Gustav Mahler: Dorothea Roschmann, Anna Larsson, Johan Botha and rising star Anna Prohaska. After two works by Mahler's pupil Alban Berg, featuring Roschmann and Prohaska, the main event of the concert if Mahler's large-scale cantata Das klagende Lied - a "great spectral opera for the mind's eye" (Vienna Zeitung).

Also available on Blu-ray

Christian Thielemann and the Staatskapelle Dresden are continuing their internationally acclaimed Bruckner cycle with the Symphony No. 5. For Anton Bruckner, his Fifth Symphony was a glorious confrontation with the music of the past – from a personal, biographical angle, but also as a departure from the composition techniques he preferred up to this point. Not for nothing is this tremendous opus magnum regarded as Bruckner’s “contrapuntal masterpiece”. In this universally lauded performance, Christian Thielemann, already the leading Bruckner interpreter of our times, has once again proven himself to be a “magician of the Bruckner sound”. (Kurier)

Anton Bruckner
SYMPHONY NO. 5


Dresden Staatskapelle
Christian Thielemann, conductor

Recorded live at the Semperoper, Saxon State Opera, Dresden, 2013

Picture format: NTSC 16:9
Sound format: PCM Stereo / DTS 5.1
Region code: 0 (worldwide)
Subtitles: English, German, French
Running time: 89 mins
No. of DVDs: 1

UNIKO features the Kronos Quartet together with the Finnish Duo - accordion adventurer Kimmo Pohjonen and sampling guru Samuli Kosminen. They create a new, multi-dimensional sound world. Commissioned by Kronos in 2003 and premiered at the Helsinki Festival in 2004, UNIKO has drawn sellout crowds. The spectacle is as visual as it is aural, and is a must-see on DVD.