Amid the abundance of French miniatures, the Jeux d'enfants, Petite Suite, Dolly and Ma mère l'Oye cycles stand out in a class of their own: these four collections for 4 hands have become some of the most famous works by their respective composers. Arthur Ancelle and Ludmila Berlinskaia explore the melodic, harmonic and sonic richness of these works while revealing their depth and ingenuity. A veritable treasure chest that deserves to be opened by all listeners, young and old alike.

Friedrich Gulda was born in Vienna on May 16, 1930. He began his musical education at the Grossmann Conservatory and subsequently took private lessons from Felix Pazofsky. From 1942 to 1947 he studied piano at the Vienna Academy of Music under Bruno Seidlhofer and Music Theory and Composition under Joseph Marx. He gave his first public performance in 1944 and, two years later when just 16 years old, won the Geneva International Music Competition. Starting after the Second World War, as a 20-year-old, Gulda established himself as a piano soloist with an excellent international reputation and even performed at Carnegie Hall in New York City in 1950. In the 1950s he was celebrated and considered the leading interpreter of Beethoven in his generation. He founded his own Klassische Orchester Gulda for chamber music with members of the Vienna Symphony Orchestra.

In addition to Beethoven, Gulda’s repertoire encompasses works by Johann Sebastian Bach, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Franz Schubert, Frédéric Chopin, Claude Debussy, Maurice Ravel and Richard Strauss, whose Burleske in D minor and lieder are included in this release, with Gulda accompanying soprano Hilde Güden. Gulda was essentially an out-and-out contrarian who showed that a great genius can sometimes be only a step away from a certain madness. While Karl Böhm or Rubinstein admired him as a magnificently talented interpreter of Bach, Mozart and Beethoven, Gulda could also be provocative – including inciting his fellow concert pianists. Asked about Vladimir Horowitz, Gulda once responded: “Horowitz is a master. Because he is able to do – whatever he wants,” but also added: “But what he is after doesn’t interest me” (Joachim Kaiser).

REVIEW:
Friedrich Gulda (1930-2000) was certainly never a conformist pianist. But he was less flamboyant in his youth than in his later years, and he did present new perspectives at the beginning of his career, which helped to provoke a change in thinking. The recordings in this CD box set date from this period.

He recorded the freshly perky Mozart Sonata K. 576 in 1948, and both Concertos K. 503 and 537 in 1955 with the New Symphony Orchestra under Anthony Collins. Gulda’s fresh yet nuanced playing compensates for the weak orchestra’s playing. The Beethoven sonatas Nos. 4, 7, 8 and 19 show the still searching Gulda of 1955 on his way to the 1967 complete recording. The 3rd CD includes the concerto piece by Carl Maria von Weber and the Strauss Burlesque, as well as a set of Strauss songs that Gulda recorded with Hilde Güden in 1956. These are wonderful interpretations of rare freshness and suppleness. Güden’s silvery timbre and her confidently controlled, light vocal line coupled with Gulda’s spontaneous and sensitive playing make for an uncommonly natural performance.

Recorded in 1954, Chopin’s compositions, the 4 Ballades and the 1st Piano Concerto, are among Gulda’s ‘immortal’ recordings. In the 1st Piano Concerto, Gulda collaborates with the more traditional Adrian Boult, but it is precisely the contrast in temperament that leads to special tension and dynamics. This recording has been available several times on various labels, but here it definitely sounds in the best quality so far. Also very exciting are the four ballads, which he plays dramatically and narratively.

Debussy and Ravel, the composers represented on CDs Nos. 5 and 6 of this box, have been Gulda’s recurring preoccupation. The early recordings from 1953 and 1955 may not yet be as stylistically tested on the hard, sharp and pithy of jazz as the late recordings, but their analytically modern style, with clear, precise lines and contours and good transparency, shows the intellectual brilliance of these interpretations.

The bottom line is that this encounter with the young Gulda is a very important one that should help one understand the older musician and could help bring respect to Gulda among those who did not appreciate his later work as much.

-- Pizzicato

Clair Obscur (Alpha 727), dedicated to German lieder with orchestra, explored the antagonism between light and shadow. Reflet conjures up the nuances and transparencies of French melodies. There is in reflection the idea of an echo, the shadow of a disquieting double, of a plural, diffracted sparkle… A clash of deceptive mirages, a kaleidoscope of senses and flashes of light, it interweaves in strange parallels the score of our lives, adorned with gold and illusions", writes Sandrine Piau. Berlioz, Gauthier, Britten, Hugo, Verlaine, Baudelaire, Duparc, Koechlin, Ravel, Mallarmé... the encounters between these composers and poets"create in me a firework display of colours and shimmers", concludes the French soprano, who is making her 14th recording for Alpha Classics.

REVIEW:

Here is a whole album that makes up a single, sublime musical utterance. One feels that every note is almost foreordained as the program opens with classic orchestral songs from Berlioz, Henri Duparc, and the less common Charles Koechlin, proceeding into darker, more mysterious realms with Ravel’s Three Mallarmé Songs, and ending with the youthful ebullience of Britten’s Quatre chansons françaises. Piau’s voice is delicate, soaring, and richly beautiful; one of the miracles of the current scene is its durability and versatility. Her support from conductor Jean-François Verdier, leading the Victor Hugo Orchestra, is confidently smooth, never intruding on the spell Piau weaves.

-- AllMusic.com (James Manheim)

With Bernd Alois Zimmermann's Monologues, the piano duo Vincent and Sophie Neeb place a rarely performed masterpiece at the centre of their debut recording. The composer describes his work, first performed in 1965, as "dialogues across the ages of dreamers, lovers, sufferers and praying people", which offers a journey through music history with sophisticated collages.
Following this inspiration, the programme is completed with a contrasting selection of compositions quoted there: Works by Bach and Debussy, creatively arranged for two pianos and percussion by Johannes Xaver Schachtner, and a Mozart arrangement by the piano duo Neeb enter into a unique dialogue via this inner context?

Together with percussionists Christian Benning and Patrick Stapleton, the piano duo Neeb explores surreal dream worlds - playfully light and enigmatically profound at the same time.

The ARUNDO quintet shines with virtuosic expressiveness and a variety of sounds in the classical lineup of flute, oboe, clarinet, bassoon, and horn. On its second CD, "Saga," the ensemble brings to life four varied worlds of sound that immediately stimulate the imagination. Claude Debussy's colorful re-creations of a bygone ideal, Carl Nielsen's play with the diversity of human characters, and Lalo Schifrin's reinterpretation of the New Orleans style have long accompanied the ensemble and have become part of its own history as "heartfelt pieces." As with the highly acclaimed debut CD, "Origin," the ARUNDO quintet has commissioned a new work from the American composer Kevin Beavers: The "saga" continues…

With its breathtaking nature and history, Provence in Occitania continues to inspire countless artists. The album "To the Muse", which combines original French works for saxophone and orchestra with transcriptions of music by troubadours for saxophone, hurdy-gurdy, cello and vibraphone, is a result of this inspiration. The album is completed with a tribute to the music of the troubadours, namely Bo Wiget's new instrumentation for saxophone, hurdy-gurdy, cello and vibraphone. The exciting region of Occitania played a formative role in the art of the time of the troubadours. The region was a great centre of attraction for dreamers and idealists.

“Blue stands for a particularly intimate mood,” says renowned Spanish guitarist Pablo Sainz-Villegas. And correspondingly his latest album is titled The Blue Album, which will be released by Sony Classical on 9 June 2023. “Blue symbolizes a mysterious intermediary realm: one thinks of the moment when the sun rises and night slowly withdraws,” Pablo Sainz-Villegas goes on to explain. These are exceptional moments, moments between silence and waking, between heaven and earth, between light and darkness. These are also the moments that spirit us away from the hectic routine of our everyday lives and that create an atmosphere of reverie and relaxation, allowing us time to slow down. All of this is reflected in Pablo Sainz-Villegas’s new programme. Few composers have captured this mood so unmistakably in their music as the French composer Erik Satie, who is represented here by selections from his Gymnopédies and Gnossiennes. Debussy’s “Clair de lune” and “La fille aux cheveux de lin” are almost magical in their expressiveness: this is music that is filled with calm and with the power to enchant.

According to Pablo Sainz-Villegas, “this album brings together some of the most beautiful and most heartfelt melodies that have ever been written. All these pieces create a magical atmosphere, their colours create a mood, a mystery. The guitar whispers an invitation to the listener to explore and go to the most intimate part of your soul. It creates a moment to look inside and have a conversation with the essence of yourself. “ The repertory is correspondingly wide-ranging, extending, as it does, from the German and Italian Baroque – with music by Silvius Leopold Weiss and Domenico Scarlatti – to the present day with music by Philip Glass and Max Richter’s A Catalogue of Afternoons – which, as first single, is out today. Sainz-Villegas also undertakes a foray into the world of film music with the Cavatina from the classic film The Deer Hunter of 1978. And this release inevitably includes the international hit La Paloma, one of the most frequently performed and arranged pieces of the last 150 years. This Spanish work has come to embody the quintessential notion of longing.

In 1910, the Italian poet Gabriele D'Annunzio wrote a play about the martyrdom of St. Sebastian. He enlisted Claude Debussy as the composer and the "Mystère en cinq mansions composé en rhythme français" already premiered in 1911. The text combines and overlaps Christian and pagan traditions, playing with both the flair of antiquity and the fascination of the exotic. The Catholic Church took offense concerning the portrayal of Sebastian, who was played by a female Russian Jew, the dancer Ida Rubinstein, and the audience also reacted hesitantly, so that neither D'Annunzio's play nor Debussy's music to it remained in the repertoire of the concert halls. Debussy himself was very fond of his work and soon put together an orchestral suite, the "Fragments symphoniques", which adapts some of the central numbers of the incidental music for orchestra. Additionally, Désiré-Emile Inghelbrecht created a kind of concert version that radically shortened the text and reduced it to around 15 minutes of recitation in addition to Debussy's music. The same applies to the present recording, which juxtaposes Debussy's original music with texts by the writer Martin Mosebach. These texts do not necessarily reflect the course of D'Annunzio's piece, but rather summarize central aspects of the Sebastian legend, sometimes more directly, sometimes more abstractly.

The present version, a studio recording from 2005, is enriched with (German) text additions by the writer Martin Mosebach, making it thus unique among other recordings of Le Martyre.

Experience a captivating juxtaposition of four distinct and mesmerizing compositions spanning a mere decade on the GENUIN CD recorded by violinist Friederike Starkloff and pianist Endri Nini. The duo has compiled works from 1913 to 1923 by Erwin Schulhoff, Claude Debussy, George Antheil, and Leoš Janácek — echoes of an era characterized by tumultuous innovation and pioneering spirit where artists across all genres laid the foundations for modernity. Starkloff, who embarked on her career as the youngest first concertmaster of a German radio orchestra, and Nini, esteemed internationally as a chamber musician, breathe life into these extraordinary, kaleidoscopic compositions with unparalleled intensity and technical mastery.

The internationally acclaimed pianist Adriana von Franqué takes a musical journey through Paris on her GENUIN debut album. The world-concerting musician, known for innovative concert formats and unusual program selections, focuses on the delicate and poetic aspects of the "City of Lights". With a sensitivity for sound and clarity, she plays music by Lili Boulanger, César Franck, Claude Debussy, Maurice Ravel, and Simon Laks from Warsaw. The result is floating, atmospheric, finely crafted music that seems to incorporate the Tuileries Garden, the banks of the Seine, or the intricate lacework of the Eiffel Tower…

The present collection commemorates the long-standing cooperation between Gary Bertini, born in today’s Republic of Moldova, and the SWR Radio Symphony Orchestra Stuttgart, beginning in 1978 with Hector Berlioz’ 'Symphonie fantastique'. Their last recording featured on this box was Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s Symphony No. 40 in G minor, performed in 1996 in Tokyo. Bertini conducted several Israeli orchestras for many years. Even though he had never wanted to set foot in Germany, he was convinced to travel to Hamburg by the offer to conduct the 1971 premiere of the opera Ashmedai by Josef Tal. He later became chief conductor of the WDR Symphony Orchestra in Cologne, then director and highest-ranking conductor at the Frankfurt opera and in 1998 went on to serve as artistic director of the Tokyo Metropolitan Symphony Orchestra.