Wonderland is full of magic and myth. Containing exclusively works commissioned by The King’s Singers across their 55 years, the album celebrates their trademark musical storytelling, with no shortage of comedy. György Ligeti’s six Nonsense Madrigals, each setting playful children’s poetry or extracts from Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, provide a musical spine to the album, commemorating 100 years since the composer’s birth in 1923. From just over 50 years ago, the fairytale The Musicians of Bremen (1972) – set to music by the Australian composer and Master of the Queen’s Music Malcolm Williamson – sits alongside Time Piece (1972) by Paul Patterson, which tells an eccentric alternative creation story. These myth-based works have recent companions such as Judith Bingham’s extended work Tricksters (2019), which unearths what could happen if miscreants from different world mythologies could come together for the first time, and Ola Gjeilo’s A Dream within a Dream which questions the very nature of perception and reality. The album also features the legendary Japanese film and game composer Joe Hisaishi’s first ever choral work, I was there (2022), focussing on the cultural memory of tragic events such as 9/11 and the 2011 Japan Earthquake. Themes of hope and positivity, centred on the natural world, emerge in Makiko Kinoshita’s Ashita no uta (Song for tomorrow) (2020) and Francesca Amewudah-Rivers’ Alive (2022).

Dora Deliyska: "It was an exciting and challenging process to record the complex structure of 24 études and préludes. Some of the etudes belong to the most difficult pieces in piano literature, and the préludes have intense musical potential. I decided to record the pieces over a short period of time, in order to keep the spontaneity of the interpretation. I am very thankful to the Teldex Team (René Möller and Jakob Bötcher) and the piano technician Gerd Finkenstein for sharing this musical experience together, and creating an exciting recording.“

REVIEW:

Intense, passionate, and impeccable in its musical disciplines, the Berlin-based Artemis Quartet "consistently finds a balance between projecting musical structure and conveying immediacy." Confirming that verdict from the New York Times is this 23CD collection, encompassing all the recordings the ensemble made between 1996 and 2018.

The Artemis Quartet began life in 1989 and developed a particular reputation in the central Austro-German repertoire. If Beethoven justly asserts a powerful presence, the scope of this collection extends as far as Eastern Europe and South America and well into the 20th century. Over the period of nearly a quarter of a century documented in this box, there were changes in the Artemis Quartet's lineup, but as founding cellist Eckart Runge explains, this "brought new inspiration - an opportunity to broaden horizons and introduce fresh ideas."

The ensemble suffered a tragic loss with the untimely death of violist Friedemann Weigle in 2015. Just days earlier, the Artemis had completed a recording of Dvořák's lyrical and poignant 'American' Quartet; it is now released for the very first time. This landmark box is completed by a comprehensive booklet which includes reminiscences from members of the Artemis Quartet and from sound engineers who collaborated with them.

This recording was nominated for the 2000 Grammy Award for "Best Opera Recording.

György Ligeti's only opera, 'Le Grande Macabre,' after a play by Michel de Ghelderode, concerns itself with nothing less than the end of the world. This is promised by the evil Nekrotzar but, despite dire warnings and ominous foreshadowing, the whole thing is something of a bust and in the end the only casualty is Nekrotzar himself. In between are any number of lascivious and criminal goings-on in fictional Breughelland, a place of infinite corruption, socially, morally and politically (and enormously funny in the bargain). Ligeti's brilliant, delightful, infinitely difficult music ranges from preludes and interludes scored for automobile horns and doorbells to the breathtaking coloratura flights of Gepopo, the soprano chief of the secret police. The performance under Esa-Pekka Salonen is beyond praise.

Volume 8 of Sony's Ligeti Edition presents the revised score of 1997, taken from live performances in Paris. There are numerous changes and the opera is shorter by some ten minutes. The revision also changes the language from German to English. The German original is available on Wergo in a fine performance. The Sony recording preserves a performance of even greater brilliance of what is now one of the great comic operas in English.

György Ligeti’s Études redefined the piano’s tonal possibilities and are considered one of his major creative achievements, as well as being one of the most significant sets of piano studies of the 20th century. They inevitably draw on influences from the past such as Chopin and Debussy, but avoid any sense of eclecticism. Ligeti’s often spectacularly virtuoso use of complex rhythms and geometric patterns proceeds from simple core ideas to create music that is ‘neither “avant-garde” nor “traditional”, neither tonal nor atonal’, and always backed by that glint of humour in the composer’s eye.

Ligeti's works on this disc provide an excellent cross-section of the metamorphosis in his compositional technique over a period of 30 years. The Violin Concerto incorporates influences from Medieval and Renaissance music, from late Romantic music and various contemporary styles.

REVIEWS:

Lintu’s Lontano shimmers with ever-shifting colours, he highlights the awe-inspiring grandeur of Atmosphères, and his gorgeously shaped San Francisco Polyphony is vibrant and lyrical—all matched by Ondine’s rich, warm, detailed recording. And Lintu’s vision has the ideal Violin Concerto soloist in Benjamin Schmid, who manages to make Ligeti’s strange, mischievous writing sound sweetly expressive, even touching. His clear sense of line leads the ear effortlessly through the second movement’s eerie microtonal textures, complete with natural horns and ocarinas, and he has superb articulation and rhythmic bite in the tricksy opening movement.

-- The Strad

The selections on this disc are as good a place as any for the newcomer to this composer to get an appreciation for what is so exciting about Ligeti’s way of expressing himself in music. Schmid[’s]…is a committed performance…Lintu and a reduced Finnish Radio Symphony accompany very well and the sound allows much wonderful detail to come through. The performances…are all worthy in their own right. The programme on this CD would seem to be an ideal place to obtain a good sampling of Ligeti’s music.

-- MusicWeb International