In this, the 2011 Latin Grammy‐winning Brazilian Guitar Quartet’s sixth Delos album, the ensemble pays homage to its rich and varied heritage as exemplified by the music of Spain – which, in turn, gave rise to Latin American music. + The album’s eighteen bewitching selections – mostly dances – are derived primarily from piano works by six of the best-known 20th century Spanish composers. + The BGQ offer the richest sonic depth and range of any guitar quartet thanks to the use of two eight‐string guitars.

If it's Hansel-in-English you're looking for, this set clearly is your choice...Here we get a lovely pair of kids in Suzanne Mentzer and Heidi Grant Murphy, their voices so utterly un-alike that the listening experience is vivid for that alone--but besides that, their interplay is credible and they both make wonderful sounds. Mentzer's dark-hued mezzo is suitably boyish, while Murphy's little-girl tone is charming. Judith Forst, hardly in the first bloom of her career, is a vicious Witch, smacking her lips and exuding spite and malice--and her diction is quite good too, unlike Murphy's, just to offer one comparison. Janice Taylor's portrayal of the mother is very fine, but her tone is wobbly; Robert Orth is a sympathetic, burly father; and Anna Christy's double-duty as Sandman and Dew Fairy is impressive. Conductor Andreas Delfs favors slowish tempos, bringing out the rich, symphonic aspects of the score and always making clear that Humperdinck was heavily influenced by Wagner. The Milwaukee Orchestra is excellent, with playing both atmospheric and grand from the brass section in this live performance (no audience is discernible). I guess it's nice to hear the opera in English even if much of it can't be understood, but--not to pick nits--why would a child say toil" when he can say "work"? The sound is better than good--rich and colorful." --Robert Levine, ClassicsToday.com

Following their acclaimed recordings of Schoenberg with Sara Jakubiak and Britten’s Peter Grimes with Stuart Skelton, Edward Gardner and the Bergen Philharmonic turn their attention to the music of Sibelius. Written in 1913 for the diva Aino Ackté, the tone poem Luonnotar draws on text from the Finnish national epic poem, the Kalevala. Its virtuosic demands are ably met here by award-wining soprano Lise Davidsen, who also feature in the Suite from Pelléas and Mélisande, music re-worked by Sibelius from his incidental music written for the first performances of Maeterlinck’s play in Helsinki, in 1905, in Swedish. The tone poem Tapiola, from 1926, is Sibelius’ last great masterpiece and evokes the forests of his native Finland. The programme is completed by a pair of much earlier works, Rakastava (the Lover) and Vårsång (Spring Song).

REVIEW:

Here’s a mostly excellent disc, smartly programmed to offer an appealing mix of familiar and less-known music. Soprano Lise Davidsen seems to be all over the place these days. She’s the real deal, an intelligent and affecting singer with the vocal heft and secure technique to do justice to just about anything she tries. Let’s hope her current popularity doesn’t result in a premature vocal blowout. Her Luonnotar is beautiful, but just a hair too fast. This of course makes it easier to sing, but there’s more mystery and atmosphere in the music than Gardner and Davidsen realize here. It’s my only quibble about this otherwise wholly desirable program.

As for the rest: this Tapiola has all of the eerie strangeness missing in Luonnotar–and let’s face it: Is there a more alien and spooky sounding work out there, by anyone? Gardner is so adept at easing the music from one section to another that you have to wonder why he was in such a rush in Luonnotar? The Pelleas and Melisande music goes splendidly, each of its numbers played to the hilt, with Melisande at the Spinning Wheel and the following Entr’acte especially memorable. Rakastava (The Lover) is an odd arrangement for strings (with triangle and timpani) of an original vocal work. Seldom performed and melodically elusive, it’s good to hear a fresh new version. Spring Song is another rarity. It’s hymn-like opulence sounds strangely un-Sibelian, although it represents perhaps the most extended example of a very characteristic aspect of his musical personality. It’s splendidly done, its successive climaxes especially well-judged by Gardner.

As you might have guessed, the Bergen Philharmonic sounds terrific, as do the sonics. Never mind the unfortunately zippy Luonnotar. This is great stuff.

– ClassicsToday.com (David Hurwitz)

Eero Heinonen has long been a champion of the composer’s neglected output for piano. With this recording he continues to make the case for music that does not easily give up its secrets but, in the right hands, sings with Sibelius’s unique voice. Sibelius was not himself an accomplished pianist, but he wrote for the instrument – at which he composed – throughout his career, and maintained that, while often overlooked, its time would come. In recent years his prophecy has come true, especially with the Op.75 suite of five pieces which he composed in 1914 and titled ‘The Trees’. They move from a Tchaikovskian melancholy common to much of his earlier piano output, through impressionist studies of light and darkness, to the kind of sombre, dissonant harmonies in the final piece (‘The Spruce’) which call to mind orchestral masterpieces such as En Saga and Tapiola. Rather than cherry-picking from a considerable output, Eero Heinonen has chosen to present four complete opus numbers which nevertheless encapsulate the range of Sibelius’s piano writing. In the Six Impromptus Op.5 of 1890-93 he successfully integrates elements of Finnish folk music within the idiom of fantasy inherited from Schubert and Chopin. The 10 Pieces Op.24 were written between 1895 and 1903 – formative years for the composer, in which he moved away from his German-influenced training and discovered for himself a more distinctively Finnish voice, but in this context still within the genre of salon pieces. These are the works most directly comparable with Grieg’s Lyric Pieces. Then, before the Op.75 masterpieces, he wrote a trio of Sonatinas Op.67 in 1912, around the same time as the troubled Fourth Symphony. The first of them, as played here by Eero Heinonen, shares some of the symphony’s austere idiom and introvert nature.

This second volume of Trombone Travels (Volume 1 is on 8.574093) continues with Matthew Gee’s exploration of three great cycles of early 20th-century British song. Elgar’s Sea Pictures evoke lullaby and turbulence alike, Vaughan Williams’ Songs of Travel chart a wanderer’s lonely journey through the landscape, and in Songs of the Sea Stanford’s music embraces both the somber and the exhilarating, with Gee joined by a trombone chorus to emulate the male voice choir. Throughout the recital Gee lavishes coloristic effects, the use of mutes, and subtle inflections that reinforce the trombone’s unique ability to mimic vocal techniques.

The Finnish Radio Symphony Orchestra conducted by Hannu Lintu presents Mahler’s Symphony Nr. 1 with the original 2nd movement Blumine restored which Mahler excised after a few performances of the symphony. To this day, there is much discussion of Mahler’s decision to drop this lovely movement with many theories attached to the discussion. Nonetheless this recording performs a valuable cultural service with its inclusion, especially in the hands of the very capable FRSO.

With well-received albums of his piano trios, piano music and music for chamber orchestra, Brilliant Classics has expanded the horizons of many listeners to Ermanno Wolf-Ferrari (1876-1948). Previously known principally for his operatic and dramatic works such as I Gioelli della Madonna, Wolf-Ferrari built up a body of instrumental music that was played across Europe during his lifetime. Association with Mussolini’s Fascist regime cast a shadow over his postwar reputation and only in recent years have listeners been able to rediscover the music of an inveterate Romantic. The First Violin Sonata was written while the 19-year-old Wolf-Ferrari was still studying with Joseph Rheinberger in Munich. However, its long-breathed melodies and grasp of large-scale form bely its composer’s relative inexperience. All the same, the Brahmsian contours of the First Sonata are succeeded in the Second by a more personal idiom, one that more successfully integrates Wolf-Ferrari’s lifelong allegiances to both German and Italian schools of composition. Dating from 1901, it sings with a stern, almost austere passion rather in the manner of the composer’s Belgian contemporary Cesar Franck; the second of the sonata’s two movements has an especially sacred character and ends in a mood of serenity. The Third Sonata is a very late work, dating from 1943, while Wolf-Ferrari was giving concert tours through Axis countries. In parallel with the evolution of the trio of sonatas by Brahms, this E major work has a neoclassical character maintained throughout the suppressed passion of its four compact movements: there is even an excursion into strict counterpoint in the first movement’s development section, and the finale returns to the work’s opening theme, now touched by both irony and tenderness.

Franz Schmidt’s Third Symphony was composed in 1927–28, dedicated to and premièred by the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra, winning a first prize from the Columbia Graphophone Company of New York for the best symphony in the spirit of Schubert’s ‘Unfinished’ Symphony as part of the centenary commemorations of Schubert’s birth. Schmidt’s symphony is lyrical, includes a set of variations, a Ländler-like Scherzo and finale rich in thematic invention. In 1931 Schmidt added wind and percussion instruments and a large body of strings to his monumental Chaconne for organ, in which form it too was premièred by the Vienna Philharmonic.

Albert Camus once wrote ‘when I describe what the catastrophe of modern man looks like, music comes into my mind – the music of Gustav Mahler’. If asked to specify a particular work, it is quite possible that Camus would have proposed Symphony No. 6 in A minor – the symphony that Bruno Walter claimed portrayed ‘a terrifying, hopeless darkness, without a human sound’. Nevertheless, the period during which Mahler wrote his Sixth was one of the most successful and happiest of his life – prior to any marital difficulties, at the time of the birth of his second daughter Anna, his professional reputation growing. Alma Mahler, in her memoirs, suggested that the symphony was in fact predicting instances of future distress in the composer’s own life, and she and various commentators have proposed various interpretations of different elements. Most famous of these are possibly the hammer strokes in the Finale, falling, according to Alma, like ‘blows of fate’ on the ‘hero’ of the symphony. But Osmo Vänskä has a reputation for engaging with even the most iconic scores at face value, avoiding preconceived ideas and ‘time-honored’ traditions.

His and the Minnesota Orchestra’s recording of Mahler’s Sixth follows upon the 2017 release of the composer’s Fifth Symphony. Nominated to a 2018 Grammy Award, that interpretation has been described as ‘at once committed and detached, intense and transcendentally timeless’ (Norman Lebrecht) and ‘an exceptional performance that promises great things to come’ (allmusic.com).

REVIEWS:

The Finnish maestro opts for the revised order of middle movements, the searing andante preceding the scherzo, with its “old fatherly”, Ländler-like trio. The Minnesotans shine in the eerie sonorities of the finale, building to another allegro energico, but ending, movingly, in the minor tonality.

– Sunday Times (UK)

The interpretation here is intensely focused and utterly compelling, and the playing is impassioned and unnervingly vivid in the multichannel format, so listeners who loved the exceptional analog versions by Solti and Tennstedt or modern digital recordings by Abbado, Tilson Thomas, and Pappano can be sure that Vänskä's audiophile version ranks just as high in quality. The integrity of the performance and the expressive heights that are achieved carry the day and make Vänskä's recording essential for Mahler buffs.

– All Music Guide

In an effort to arrange the first performance of his Seventh Symphony, Gustav Mahler declared it to be his best work, ‘preponderantly cheerful in character’. His younger colleague Schoenberg expressed his admiration for the work, and Webern considered it his favorite Mahler symphony. Nevertheless, it remains the least performed and least written-about symphony of the entire cycle, and has come to be regarded as enigmatic and less successful than its siblings. One reason for this has been the huge – even for Mahler – contrasts that it encompasses: from a first movement which seems to continue the atmosphere of the previous symphony, the ‘Tragic’ Sixth, to a finale that has been accused of excessive triumphalism, and which Mahler himself once described as ‘broad daylight’. Between these two poles, he supplies no less than two movements entitled Nachtmusik (‘night music’) framing a scherzo to which the composer added the character marking schattenhaft (‘shadowy’). Mahler famously said that ‘a symphony must be like the world. It must embrace everything.’ The Seventh is as true to this dictum as any other of the symphonies, offering a wealth of emotions, moods and colours. The composer makes full and imaginative use of the orchestra’s extended wind and percussion sections – including cowbells, whips and glockenspiel – as well as a mandolin and a guitar, adding a troubadour-like aspect to the nightly serenade of the fourth movement.

All of this is brought to life by the players of the Minnesota Orchestra under Osmo Vänskä, as they continue a cycle praised for the performances as well as the recorded sound.

REVIEWS:

I might have predicted that this of all the Mahler symphonies would chime with Osmo Vänskä’s very particular gifts as a conductor. The brilliance and clarity of this performance (and recording – BIS’s technical prowess much in evidence), to say nothing of Vänskä’s way with rhythm and articulation, is in itself the source of much pleasure.

– Gramophone

Vänskä’s apparent eccentricities here are mostly to accentuate Mahler’s own in his most outlandish ad unpredictable symphony. All the brass do the Minnesota Orchestra proud, and if the strings aren’t of central-European richness, Vänskä usually moulds them to produce the desired effect. The sounds are beguiling to the last, and the essential triumph of engineering in this most testing of symphonies is peerless.

– BBC Music Magazine