Following her lyrical and witty complete recording of Mozart’s Keyboard Sonatas, issued by naïve in March 2023, Yeol Eum Son invites Svetlin Roussev to join her in enfolding himself in the enticingly subtle harmonic intricacies of Germanic post- Romanticism.

For their second recital as a duo, the Bulgarian violinist and the Korean pianist follow the course taken by works written over a period of slightly more than half a century by composers or famous performers upon whom Richard Wagner exercised crucial influence. They take on almost every genre – cinema, opera, chamber music, transcription – treating it in the lyrical, large-scale manner of the Bayreuth master. During their unexpected, fascinating journey, Svetlin Roussev and Yeol Eum Son chart a variety of pathways, from Waxman to Strauss.

So many different worlds! To begin, two figures who made their indelible mark on the music written for Hollywood. Of German-Polish origins, in 1946 Franz Waxman (Rebecca, Sunset Boulevard, A Place in the Sun, Prince Valiant) wrote, at Jascha Heifetz’s request, a paraphrase on themes from Wagner’s Tristan et Isolde, actually an adaptation of a section of the score he composed for the film Humoresque (Warner Brothers, 1947). In summary, a manifesto in music of an impossible love – to which, at the end of the disc, an extremely rare transcription one of the better known Wesendonck-Lieder, credited to the great virtuoso Leopold Auer, forms a response.

The programme continues with Erich Wolfgang Korngold, a child prodigy in Vienna during the 1910s. The famed Mariettas Lied – the best-known moment in his opera Die tote Stadt – and the sublime nocturne from his incidental music for Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing (the Scene in the Garden) remain as much moments of lyric intensity as truly cinematographic, deliciously intoxicating love scenes. But lovers also know how to frolic, and if already in Korngold they readily do so, the three more light-hearted pieces by Fritz Kreisler will place them in everyday, commonplace scenarios, where laughing reigns.

The keystone of the programme is unarguably the magnificent Sonata for Violin and Piano that Richard Strauss composed in 1887. He was 23 years old, and still heavily influenced by Schumann and Brahms, even Grieg. Svetlin Roussev and Yeol Eum Son make its case with radiant commitment, sensitive to the spirit stirring in the young Richard, then already in love with the soprano Pauline de Ahna, who would become his wife.

Beyond Wagner, this highly original album above all celebrates that moment of falling in love when, overwhelmed, the heart quivers, to the point of being transformed.

One of the New York Times' 5 Classical Albums to Hear Now

Shortlisted for the Gramophone Awards

Perhaps nobody since John Barbirolli has been able to make strings sing like the brilliantly talented John Wilson.

Following their critically acclaimed album of English Music for Strings, Sinfonia of London and John Wilson turn to Germany and three outstanding works for string orchestra. Franz Schreker’s Intermezzo, the oldest piece here, was composed in 1900, before Schreker’s rise to fame in the opera houses of Germany and Austria, but shows strong indications of what was to follow. Korngold composed the Symphonische Serenade following his return to Vienna from Hollywood after the Second World War, and shortly before he wrote his Symphony in F sharp. Korngold effortlessly conjures a vivid range of colors and textures from his large forces (32 violins, 12 violas, 12 cellos, and 8 basses) in a work that explores the virtuosity of the players to the full. Composed in 1945, as a reaction to the horrors of the war, and the desecration of German culture, Richard Strauss’s Metamorphosen for 23 solo strings seems to look backwards to the German Romantic tradition (a trait even more evident in his Four Last Songs, of 1948). The moving final passage, marked ‘In Memoriam’, leaves the listener to contemplate in silence.

"Wilson’s release wins hands down. Part of the victory is due to the conductor and string players’ panache…whatever the mood, the Sinfonia’s tone stays full-blooded and refulgent, just like Chandos’s recording." -Times of London

REVIEW:

What a fine and stimulating recording this is. Perhaps nobody since John Barbirolli has been able to make strings sing like the brilliantly talented John Wilson. Franz Schreker’s “Intermezzo” here has a sheen to it that is intensely delicate one minute and impossibly sumptuous the next. Strauss’s “Metamorphosen” has rarely had such an agonizingly drawn out, lovingly burnished performance as this. Even better is the rarity that accompanies it: Korngold’s Symphonic Serenade, a disfigured, difficult recollection of all that poignantly easygoing light music in the Austrian tradition, written when he returned to Vienna from Hollywood. The hush that Wilson finds for its slow movement is indescribably haunting.

-- The New York Times

Second and last volume of Krongold’s complete String Quartets survey by the Alma Quartets. The disc contains the First Quartet (composed in 1923) and the Piano Quintet (1921). Music from Vienna raging Twenties in flawless performances by one of today leading string quartets. Ideal match between Alma Quartet and a specialist pianist as Severin von Eckardstein. Ritmo (SP) on first volume (CC 72869): The recording offered by Alma Quartet is the best available of these works for its understanding of the expressive world of Korngold; is perfect intonation and reading of these difficult works.

The years 1900-1914 were perhaps the most thrilling period in European music history: the cradle of what we now call musical Modernism. This was the time when the great “avant-garde schools” took shape: in Paris, Berlin, Saint Petersburg, and particularly in Vienna. Music branched out into a multitude of aesthetics, styles, and genres, as we can see in in the variety of terms that attempt to describe art in that period: Impressionism, Expressionism, Art Nouveau, Neo-Classicism, Foklorism, Late Romanticism, Symbolism, and others. Our program selection for this album focuses on two works written in Vienna in 1913 – the “summer of the century”, as author Florian Illies calls a pivotal year that put an end to the long 19th century and introduced the somber 20th century. The two works are Alban Berg’s Four Pieces for Clarinet and Piano op. 5 and Egon Kornauth’s Sonata for Clarinet and Piano. 1913 was the year of several “scandalous” premieres: Schoenberg’s Gurrelieder, Berg’s Altenberglieder, Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring, and others that were less scandalous: Debussy’s Images pour Orchestre, Max Reger’s Isle of the Dead, Sibelius’s Luonnotar, de Falla’s La vida breve, and Richard Strauss‘s Festliches Präludium.

The performers write: ‘Selecting the repertoire for our album Path to the Moon, we wanted to explore a number of possibilities for binding together a programme. To place different works alongside one another is a wonderful way of bringing out new and unusual qualities in each piece. William T. Horton’s fantastic image The Path to the Moon immediately inspired a flurry of ideas, including works on the subjects of both night and the moon, as well as pieces which invoke the exploratory nature of humankind’s voyage to the moon. Britten wrote his Sonata for Cello and Piano only two years after the first object made by humans had touched the surface of the moon, in 1959. Humans throughout history and from all cultures have been drawn to and taken inspiration from the moon and we have tried to reflect this in our eclectic choice of song repertoire: from Toru Takemitsu to Nina Simone and from Lili Boulanger to Florence Price. As we hope you will hear on this album, Walker’s Cello Sonata rings with echoes of the sound-worlds of blues and jazz and is infused with a beautiful lyricism. We really believe that Walker’s Cello Sonata deserves to become a staple of the chamber music repertoire and are absolutely thrilled to offer you a recording of it in the context of our own exploration of a path to the moon.’