Dodgson: Chamber Music, Vol. 5 – Music for Winds II
Toccata
CD
$20.99Feb 07, 2020
This fifth album in the Toccata Classics survey of the chamber music of London-born Stephen Dodgson (1924-2013) offers a second installment of his many works for woodwinds, as well as a duo for the unusual combination of horn and harp. Much of it brings Dodgson's sense of fun to the fore, often through rhythmic mischief or an insouciance that recalls Poulenc. It can have a spiky vivacity that suggests Janácek, too, and a hint of Baroque formality - but it also has that particularly English strain of lyricism that suggests the impermanence of beauty.
Giacomo Gotifredo Ferrari (Rovereto 1763 - London 1842) was an Italian composer and theoretician. He was the son of a wealthy cloth merchant of Rovereto who at first had destined him for carrying on the family business; but since a very early age he showed a great talent and facility for music. After his father's death in 1784, Ferrari decided to pursue a musician's career, and from that time onwards his life was spent travelling a great deal and staying in the major European courts. In this recording dedicated to the unusual harp and piano ensemble, Roberta Alessandrini and Corrado Ruzza reveal a musical cross-section typical of the aristocratic salons of the late classicism, characterized by a pleasant and elegant style. The pieces are also completed by other instruments such as the hunting horns and the tambourine, whose parts could be played by occasional guests who were added to the private performances of these compositions.
A Ceremony of Carols / Rees, Choir of the Queen's College Oxford
Signum Classics
CD
$19.99Aug 21, 2020
A glorious collection of Christmas music spanning over 900 years, centered around Britten's A Ceremony of Carols – a work seen as both a signal of Britten’s turn back towards English musical and cultural traditions and as a distinctly modern composition. Owen Rees and the Choir of The Queen's College, Oxford present this alongside works that alternate between the early 17th century – by that most prolific composer and arranger of Lutheran Christmas music, Michael Praetorius – and the present: music by Judith Weir (1984), David Blackwell (2011), Jonathan Dove (2000), Dobrinka Tabakova (2018), Toby Young (2017), and Cecilia McDowall (2007). At one point we interrupt the pattern of alternation to look back half a millennium further than Praetorius, with Hildegard of Bingen’s O virga ac diadema. ‘An undoubted jewel in Britain’s choral scene’ (BBC Music Magazine), the Choir of The Queen’s College Oxford is among the finest and most active university choirs in the UK. Previous releases with Signum A New Heaven (2017) and The House of the Mind (2018) both went straight to no. 1 in the Specialist Classical Chart in their first week of release.
Recorded at the height of the international Covid lockdown, Oliver Davis’s sixth album for Signum is a feat of both technological as well as artistic achievement. Following from draws together artists from across the globe for a selection of moving works for a variety of forces – recording a violinist in Los Angeles, a piano duo in The Netherlands, a guitarist in Argentina and the Budapest Scoring Orchestra conducted by Péter Illényi in Budapest. Davis’s previous albums with Signum have reached the top 10 on both iTunes Classical and UK Specialist Classical Charts multiple times, receiving numerous five-star reviews and well over a million streams on Apple Music. British composer Oliver Davis has parlayed a long record as a composer of film and television scores into a successful career as a composer of orchestral music that in performance have attracted top-notch London orchestras and soloists. He has also been active as a composer of ballet – most recently premiering Lineage with choreographer Edwaard Liang at New York City Ballet’s prestigious Fall Fashion Gala.
The Welshman John Thomas (1826-1913), harpist to Queen Victoria, wrote prolifically for his own instrument, both for solo harp and for duos of two harps or harp and piano - a combination where the different sounds of the two instruments enhance the clarity of the texture. Thomas' original works use the elegant Romantic style of his own day, but he often drew on Welsh folksong for his inspiration and left a generous legacy of transcriptions, especially of operatic favourites. Although some of his music was intended for the Victorian drawing room, other pieces require a virtuoso technique - and all of it has a thoroughly engaging melodic appeal. This fifth album of his duets for harp and piano ends a series that has seen the revival of music unheard for over a century and a half.
Tarrodi: Four Elements / Constantin-Reznik, Ringborg, Falletta, Nordic Chamber Orchestra
DB Productions
CD
$18.99Sep 02, 2022
The Nordic Chamber Orchestra, led by multiple award-winning conductors JoAnn Falletta and Patrik Ringborg, perform orchestral works by multiple award-winning Swedish composer, Andrea Tarrodi.
Tarrodi needs no further introduction in Sweden, and international audiences have also opened their hearts to her accessible, colorful music. In 2020, she was the first Swedish composer ever to receive a commission for the BBC’s renowned Last Night of the Proms.
Dan Andersson died at the age of 32 in 1920, more than 100 years ago. His poetry is still relevant and beloved. Many can still recite his poems and sing many of the compositions. He is one of Sweden's most important poets, a romantic working-class poet who gave voice to the poor in the country, depicted areas and conditions in Sweden that had hardly been illuminated before. One of the great strengths of his poetry is that it is universal, human and beautiful. Nature, love and the conditions of life play the biggest role.
Nils Ferlin is one of the Swedish poets whose poetry collections have been published in the largest editions. He is also one of the poets, whose poems most often have been set to music, despite they are often grave with dark motifs. He is one of the eternally living names of Swedish literature and the song treasure, a “people’s poet”.
Absil, Daniel-Lesur, Pillois & Tansman: Hommage / Cracow Harp Quintet
DUX
CD
$21.99Jul 29, 2022
The Cracow Harp Quintet was founded in 2019; it consists of an unusual set of instruments: flute, harp, and a string trio. As the only such professional chamber ensemble in Poland, it promotes music that has been forgotten or has not been published yet. Thanks to the joint initiative, the members of the ensemble share many years of experience of concerts, festivals, and competitions in Poland and abroad. The album Hommage is a tribute to the output of the composers associated with the Quintette Instrumental de Paris – a formation whose 100th anniversary of the foundation falls this year. The album will feature compositions by artists who were closely related to the ensemble, such as Jean Absil, Jacques Pillois, Aleksan der Tansman, and Jean-Yves Daniel-Lesur. The repertoire is distinguished by its diverse nature: French Impressionism, medieval monody motifs, fascination with East Asian culture as well as the 20th-century idiom of Polish music. The album will feature the world recording premiere of Jacques Pillois’s suite 5 Haïkaï and the Polish recording premiere of Sonatina da camera by Aleksander Tansman.
The ethereal quality of the Celtic harp fosters a sense of contemplation and healing, with a timbre that almost bridges the gap between earthly and heavenly worlds. On SONG OF THE STARS, harpist Rita Constanzi performs a program of Celtic folks pieces and melodies, showcasing the enduring, timeless quality of the instrument. This poignant music holds a special place in Contanzi's heart, as each night she performed for a dear friend in palliative care, lulling her to sleep with the calming, dreamlike sound she masterfully evokes.
With this "colourful" selection of pieces, we intend to give an impression of the diverse repertoire collected in the Turin Tablature. The motets and liturgical works were most likely intended for performance in church, whereas dances and madrigals were intended more for secular settings: at festivals, celebrations, and for domestic music-making. Toccatas and ricercars could be played in both ecclesiastical and secular settings. [In light of the wide variety of purposes of this repetoire, we utilized a wide variety of instruments.] Thus, in addition to the Marx-Gunzer organ, three other stringed keyboard instruments were used: a clavicytherium in southern German design from the 17th century, a virginal after Michael Praetorius (1619), and a harpsichord of a seventeenthcentury Italian design.
First recording of this special collection of very early chamber music. Several pieces are world first recordings. Beautiful acoustics of a church of the time when the music was composed. Very diversified instrumental settings. Use of some nstruments that are nearly unknown today.
That I Did Always Love - Ode to Emily Dickinson / Vanschothorst, Einan
Big Round Records
CD
$8.49$16.99Save 50%Feb 16, 2024
Composer and Harpist Anne Vanschothorst’s music has been described as innovative, minimal, lyrical, cinematic, and touching yet intense. The same rings true in THAT I DID ALWAYS LOVE, the artist’s musical ode to the great American poet Emily Dickinson. Featuring seven of the poet’s works set to music, Vanschothorst fosters an intimate listening space where two art forms reach a soothing synthesis, amplifying the elegance of Dickinson’s texts with the graceful nature of the harp, a perfect pairing.
The original semantic value of re-ligio, therefore considered as a restoration of contacts, as a meeting point of distant but related cultures. Referring to the genesis of the work, the composer herself states: Reading these works has significant inner similarities: contemplation and sophistication. The lines from the work of IV Oganov - "the pain of a flower's test", "... The roar of the singing garden grew", "... The revelation of the rose... ", "... The lotus was set on fire by the music", "... The white garden began to resound again with diamond borders... " - encouraged me to a concrete sound perception of this garden. On the other hand, however, all this ecstatic flowering was expressed naturally in Tanzer's reflections on the world in it's entirety. At the basis of the musical rendering of this piece there is in fact the opposition of the bright and diaphanous timbre of the natural harmonics with the sad coloratura of the intervals of minor second and minor third.
Banks: Vocal & Chamber Music / Duck-Chong, Böhn, Herscovitch et al.
Toccata
CD
$10.49$20.99Save 50%Jul 01, 2022
During his short life Don Banks (1923–80) enjoyed a reputation as the leading modernist among Australian composers. Studies with Mátyás Seiber, Milton Babbitt and, especially, Luigi Dallapiccola helped refine his serial technique, but his music never retreated into academic abstraction, as this recital of chamber and vocal works demonstrates: it retained a keen sense of drama, an ear for atmosphere, a rather angular lyricism and, occasionally, a touch of humor. The works are performed by Ole Bohn, Robert Johnson, Geoffrey Gartner, Rowan Phemister, Daniel Herscovitch, Francesco Celata, Jenny Duck-Chong, Alison Pratt, Daryl Pratt, and Joshua Hill.
The settings heard on this disc meld together the talents of two outstanding creative artists, the composer Paul Honey and the poet Gregory Warren Wilson, producing a collection in which the inner life of the listener is both confronted and empowered. Warren Wilson's metaphysically-infused set of haiku, Earth's Imagined Corners, derives it's title from the seventh of John Donne's Divine Meditations, in an evocative setting for sixteen unaccompanied voices and solo cello. It was conceived as a sequence of four individual movements (Willows, Leatherback, Fireflies, Pomegranates), three of which invoke the fundamental elemental forces at work on our planet - water, earth, and fire. The final constant explored here is time, that boundless exponential continuum within which the human experience itself unfolds.
That there is indeed something of the ethereal, of the timeless, and of the indefinable pervading all of the music heard on this CD instantly calls into question our shared notions of what the term Elegy actually signifies. Here the listener will encounter none of the unutterable despair of, for example, Samuel Barber's great Adagio for Strings, or the tortured valediction of Richard Strauss' Metamorphosen, but rather an introspection and wistfulness of an altogether gentler sort. As the poet Thomas Gray expressed it in his Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard (1751), "Perhaps in this neglected spot is laid some heart once pregnant with celestial fire; Hands that the rod of empire might have swayed, or waked to ecstasy the living lyre
The reputation of Havergal Brian (1876-1972) as a late-blossoming symphonist obscures the fact that he was an early-blossoming composer of choral music for the huge market of amateur choirs thriving in Edwardian England. His choral songs range from simple unison settings for children's or women's voices to harmonically complex essays intended to tax the ability of groups taking part in the choral competitions once popular in many parts of Britain.
The music of Théodore Dubois (1837–1924) has rather been overshadowed by that of other French composers of the same period, not least Fauré and Saint-Saëns. But Dubois does not deserve his relative neglect: not only was he a superlative craftsman, but he could also unfold a fetching melody and had a strong sense of musical narrative. This recital of chamber works for oboe and strings is noteworthy for a further quality, one often underestimated: much of the music is, quite simply, charming.
