Markus Schäfer writes of his new release: "A musical interpretation should always strive to breathe new life into a composer's legacy by making it audible and understandable in accordance with the here and now. In this new recording we have once again dared to open up our performance experimentally to the sort of effects that emerge from spontaneous improvisation. Faithfulness to the original begins with a willingness to decode, decipher, and interpret the score; it is not achieved by staring fearfully in awe at the manuscript. To the contrary: we are fully aware that any confrontation with a masterpiece of the past can only be justified if we recreate it anew while maintaining a fragile balance between faithfulness to the musical work and faithfulness to the "text"."
Schubert: Symphony No. 9 "Great" / Jansons, Bavarian Radio Symphony
BR Klassik
CD
$19.99Aug 03, 2018
The "Great" C major Symphony was the last symphony that Schubert composed – a “Finished” to follow his "Unfinished", the first two movements of which he had just completed before discontinuing work on it (for reasons unknown). In contrast to his far shorter Sixth Symphony, also in C major, it was named "the Great" - and it is indeed a great and magnificent work, marking the culmination of his symphonic oeuvre. It is monumental and representative, and was written with large audiences very much in mind. Schubert began this composition in August 1824, or possibly even as late as March 1825. Most of the work on it took place in the summer of 1825, during the longest Journey of his life. It took him from Vienna via Linz, Steyr, Gmunden (where he found the scenery "truly heavenly"), Salzburg and then up to Bad Gastein, where he saw some magnificent alpine peaks. The first page of the score manuscript is dated "March 1828" – possibly the month in which he finally completed the work. On November 19 of that same year, Schubert died at the age of only thirty-one. The symphony was premiered posthumously on March 21, 1839 in the Leipzig Gewandhaus, and conducted by the Gewandhaus Kapellmeister at that time - the 30-year-old Felix Mendelssohn. This exciting live recording features the special acoustics of the Herkulessaal of the Munich Residenz.
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REVIEW:
Mariss Jansons presides over an uncommonly engaging performance of Schubert’s uplifting ‘Great’ C major symphony. This is great music-making of unshakable conviction.
Danae Dörken wants to show with her production that music is a place where all people are lifted to the same level – no matter what their origin or cultural background is. The focus is on the connecting element of music between all possible cultures and the folkloristic character of the works, emphasizing the peculiarities of each culture that makes it unique. Called “the discovery of the year” by classical music magazine crescendo and “on her way to the very top” by Concerti magazine, German-Greek pianist Danae Dörken is, at age twenty-six, among the elite of internationally acclaimed artists of a new generation, electrifying audiences and peer musicians alike with her stunning technical skills, exceptional charisma and great profundity of her musical thinking.
Schubert: German Dancea, Landlers & Ecossaises / Liu
Naxos
CD
$9.99$19.99Save 50%May 27, 2022
Schubert was known in his time primarily as a composer of songs, but he was also a master of the dance form and wrote prolifically for a middle-class society eager for domestic entertainment. He loved Ländler (triple time country dances), the Écossaises (supposedly Scottish), and the rich variety of genial German dances. Viennese pianos of the day produced a sound that was clear and transparent, very different from modern instruments, and in this recording Yang Liu plays on a Steinway grand and a copy of a mid-1820s fortepiano by Conrad Graf, a maker well known to Schubert.
For this programme, Duo Diversitas has selected or created sophisticated arrangements that embody virtuosity and musical expression. In focusing on great composers of the 18th and 19th centuries, Marisa Minder and Evgeniya Spalinger explore the artistic refinement, lyrical grace and technical sophistication of the guitar and flute. The one original work for this combination is Hans Haug's Capriccio, a modern classic that alludes to Baroque procedure but within the context of exciting contemporary harmonies.
The Danish baritone Johan Reuter often sings leading roles at the New York Metropolitan Opera and is in high demand all over the world. He also loves the lied repertoire, however, and the work closest to his heart is the Schubert song cycle Winterreise (Winter Journey). For this new release, he wanted to record it not with the usual piano accompanist, but in an arrangement for string quartet. Richard Krug from the Copenhagen String Quartet made this highly idiomatic transcription of the piano part and the result is deeper, more moving and with full sound than in the original. This is truly a unique experience. Johan Reuter studied at the Royal Academy of Music and the Academy of the Royal Theatre in his hometown of Copenhagen. He frequented masterclasses of Ernst Haefliger, Anthony Rolfe-Johnson and Richard Trimborn. Since 1996 he has been a soloist of the Royal Theatre in Copenhagen, where he sings a large repertoire.
On this generous last installment of their Schubert-Brahms pilgrimage, Pieter Wispelwey and Paolo Giacometti serve us three iconic sonatas, including a world premiere. In it's original hue of G Major, Brahms' first violin sonata op. 78 is more scintillating and transparent than the D-major cell adaptation, and much more enchanting in it's opening Vivace. Brahms' third violin sonata op. 108 fuses surprising ebullience with superior mastery of form, in an epic piece which is an undiluted kick in the groin when played on a cello. And thankfully, Pieter and Paolo revisit Schubert's Arpeggione, that gem of intimacy, fragility, frivolity and humbling, unattainable beauty. A fitting final, in all respects.
One can experience with admiration how one of the most important works in chamber music literature lives and breathes when it is awakened to sonorous life. Laureates of the German Music Competition play Schubert's great Octet of 1827 and these young musicians perform at the highest level.
Played with intensively close listening and feeling the inner essence of the music: this is how Japanese pianist Nami Ejiri approaches the late works of Schubert on her GENUIN debut CD. + Alongside the great Sonata in B-flat major, she plays the Four Impromptus, D. 899 and the more rarely played Allegretto in C minor, D. 915. + Winner of the prestigious Vianna da Motta Int’l Piano Competition, Lisbon, amongst other competition successes, Ms. Ejiri has been teaching piano at the Hochschule for Music in Frankfurt, Germany since 2006.
On this unique record, Paul Badura Skoda performs three different versions of Schubert’s final Sontata in B-flat major. Each of these versions is performed with a distinct sound on three different pianos: an 1826 Graf fortepiano, a 1923 Bosendorfer and a 2004 Steinway grand.
Pi-hsien Chen was born in Taiwan and grew up in Germany where she still lives. Among contemporary pianists she is one of the few who are really selfless: for more than half a century she serves the good cause with full devotion, and without prejudices - Bach, the masters of the Viennese Classical School, the romantic heritage, or modern and contemporary music. She has become the latter's prophetic pronounciator with her authoritative interpretations of the piano works by Stockhausen and Boulez, as well as Cage and beyond. But Schubert is - as the new edition of his 'grandes sonates' proves - her 'heart music'. This bold enterprise on three albums presents those sonatas (D 568, 845, 850, 894) together that demonstrate groundbreaking progressiveness and were explicitly intended as 'grandes sonates' and published under that title. Chen underlines Schubert's emancipation from Beethoven as well as his dialogue with the titan in a manner that is discreet and sharp at the same time and herewith leads the listener into Schubert's innermost tonal language that transcends everything and articulates it's own world of real music of the future. To reveal this process until it's climax, Mrs. Chen adds two of the three 'legacy works' that Schubert wrote a few weeks before he died: the sonatas in C minor (D 958) and in A (D 959) with their utmost dialectic tension who built the peak of the iceberg 'future'.... Chen leaves us without this most popular last sonata in B-flat (D 960) that conceals the abysses in enchanting beauty. She leaves us amidst the process, looking openly toward the unknown. In this interpretation Schubert's mediating function between yesterday and tomorrow becomes unmistakable in it's tragedy and greatness.
Schubert: Piano Music for Four Hands / Badura-Skoda, Demus
Gramola Records
CD
$31.99Nov 02, 2018
On this release, recorded in 1978 and 2007, Paul Badura-Skoda and Jorg Demus present works by Schubert for piano four hands. The artists comment: “There are no such things as the two of us - two studious, open-minded young Viennese musicians who want to serve their darling Schubert with all their Four Hands in what is probably the most beautiful chamber music hall in the world, which Brahms loved so much that it later was named Brahms Hall, in the venerable house of the Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde - among the founding members were Beethoven and Schubert - on the most Viennese of all pianos, the Bösendorfer with its singing, downright Schubertian treble. Both of us had just escaped physically and spiritually sound from the turmoil of war; one thought of creating a new world of the beautiful and the good, both of us at least in music. We had a unique generation of great masters to look up to: Wilhelm Backhaus, probably the greatest of all Bösendorf players, Walter Gieseking, Edwin Fischer - we were even granted to study together in Lucerne in 1948; Paul remained connected to him throughout his life. Above all, the wonderful violin sound of the Vienna Philharmonic delighted us, and in Furtwängler the brilliant overall conception: Have you heard "His" Unfinished, or the Great C major symphony? Schubert's songs delighted us with the wonderful voices of Elisabeth Schwarzkopf, Irmgard Seefried, and soon also by Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau. Joseph Krips had just presented the opera with a Mozart style that was fully natural. The whole world seemed to breathe a sigh of relief (it was before the darn Iron Curtain) and Vienna was once again the capital of music. And so we played the piano with our Four Hands, above all Mozart and Schubert, as faithfully as possible to the scores of Schubert, but we were happy to incorporate temperament, feeling and inspiration into our ten fingers.”
