Born in a town on the shore of Lake Garda, Marco Bossi has a foothold on the catalogue thanks to his organ music: he was born into a family of organists and studied and worked in northern Italian cities including Bologna and Milan before taking up a post as teacher of harmony and organ at the conservatoire in Naples. He made contributions to the Italian operatic traditions, which have largely been forgotten, but organists still play his sonatas and dramatic evocations of the Passion and the Transfiguration of Christ. With Giuseppe Martucci and Giovanni Sgambati, Bossi also led a revival of thenative tradition of chamber music, which had been neglected in Italy after the string quartets of Donizetti. This new recording of his piano trios joins Brilliant Classics albums of piano trios and string quartets of Martucci and string quartets and piano quartets of Sgambati. Both works are generously proportioned four-movement works in Classical form, the first of them dedicated to Martucci. The slow movements are especially novel: the Larghetto of the first is designated a dialogue, which unfolds in long, unwinding melodies; the Adagio of the Second is overtly elegiac in mood, though it is dedicated to German musician Georg Goehler, who outlived Bossi for almost 30 years; the career of the Italian musician came to a sudden and tragic end with his death by drowning in the mid-Atlantic, returning to Europe in February 1925 from a visit to New York. This album forms an engaging introduction to the impassioned idiom, too little known, of a significant figure in fin-de-siècle Italian music.

Hungarian composer Ernst von Dohnanyi was also an accomplished pianist. This new release features his works for piano, including his Passacaglia, Op. 6, Four Rhapsodies, and Three Singular Pieces. Accomplished pianist Daniel Rohm has won multiple prizes at international competitions, including the Mozart Foundation of Stuttgart and the Richard Wagner Society.

Max Reger has remained a controversial composer, in a way perhaps comparable to Wagner, Hindemith and Shostakovich. Even today, the presence of his oeuvre is by no means a matter of course in concert life or on recordings. There are still numberous musicians, including serious ones, who reject Reger's work, at times with good reason. Even a trained, experienced listener may find his works difficult to grasp, let alone comprehend. This release does a great deal to compensate for the gap in knowledge of Max Reger.

With the talent of young pianist Cassandra Wyss, this Wilhelm Stenhammar and Jean Sibelius compilation emerges as a gateway into the world of Nordic musical gems. With her artistic courage to be stubborn – to be understood in the spirit of Hermann Hesse – namely to select precisely those works that suit her as a pianist, Ms. Wyss enables the careful listener to take a new and very personal view of the rich repertoire of Scandinavian music. “... she plays with a smile. Charm is a critical element of this music, and Wyss conveys that winningly“ - Fanfare on Stenhammar CD (C5117)

The Messa di Gloria belongs to the period before Cavalleria Rusticana: the lack of a choral or a fugue as well as the simple, almost ingenuous tonalities reveal the dominance of the operatic style over the religious one. Only a careful listening can disclose in the operatic melodies of the Messa di Gloria some kind of references to church music. Echoes of Guglielmo Ratcliff can be heard in the Gratias, and the Incarnatus clearly recalls Turiddu’s “resta abbandonata” from Cavalleria. Before a modern audience the Messa, made of “pray, all love and passion”, as the composer described it, still retains its character. The lyrical element, vehement in the Gloria or tender in the Elevazione, is soaked with Mediterranean feelings, like in a deep and touching popular songs.

Max Reger (1873-1916) was an astonishingly prolific composer, amassing a total of well over a thousand works in a short career. His earliest compositions were lieder and chamber works, and it was the latter genre that inspired Reger to compose his finest music. His mature output reflected both the Baroque revival and modernist tendencies, with two of the most lasting influences upon his style being Brahms and Bach. Reger has an unfair reputation for complexity and turgidity that by no means defines a large share of his oeuvre. Today his music is rarely played, yet in a 1922 letter Schoenberg described him as a genius, including Reger in the same breath with Wagner, Mahler, Strauss and Debussy. Reger’s Piano Trio in E minor is sometimes described as his ‘Second Piano Trio’ but is in fact the first he composed for the usual three instruments. The first movement is a large-scale extended sonata structure on a seminal E–F–D sharp–E motif that in the manner of Brahms binds not only the movement but the entire work. A spectral pizzicato scherzo in C minor follows, then a Largo sonata–rondo with a beautiful hymn-like theme. The Brahmsian finale includes examples of Reger’s beloved fugal writing, march-rhythms and a chorale-like theme. A propensity for full textures, exemplified in much of this trio, suggests the influence of the organ loft, where Reger was perhaps most at home. The three pieces Op.79d for violin and piano, dating from 1902/4, just a few years before the Piano Trio, reveal Reger the miniaturist, as do the two brief pieces for cello and piano Op.79e. Though relatively slight in the context of Reger’s output, these sets are greatly varied in mood and indicative of the expressive range that characterizes the composer’s musical output as a whole.

The British composer Edward Elgar wrote a great deal more than just his “Pomp & Circumstance” marches: his highly diverse oeuvre encompasses symphonies, concertos, chamber works, piano music and numerous choral works (oratorios, cantatas and partsongs). On this release, partsongs by Elgar can be heard with and without accompaniment as part of a representative selection of live and studio recordings. The album begins with the song cycle “From the Bavarian Highlands” op. 27; its six cheerful numbers were written while Elgar and his wife were on holiday in Garmisch in 1895. Alice Elgar had sketched verses from Bavarian folk melodies, and Upper Bavarian songs and dances can be heard in her husband’s settings. These were happy memories of carefree holidays in a region rich in music and full of fine landscapes. The Bavarian Radio Chorus, conducted by Howard Arman, sings the songs in their original version with piano accompaniment (the orchestral version came later). As a composer of English-language choral songs, Elgar is still little-known on the European mainland; in the United Kingdom, however, the situation is very different. The country has long had a lively choral scene, focusing primarily on English music – from Purcell and Handel to Hubert Parry, Charles Villiers Stanford and Elgar, all the way to Benjamin Britten and today’s contemporary composers. The program on this release has been compiled and conducted by the Englishman Howard Arman, one of today’s most knowledgeable experts on British choral music and artistic director of the Bavarian Radio Chorus, and these recordings should do much to boost the popularity of this highly appealing music on the European mainland as well.

On his fourth recording in two years, tenor Daniel Behle performs Strauss’ lieder: “I am a lyrical Tenor and as such, one just gets introduced to the Schöne Müllerin, later to the Dichterliebe and eventually to the Winterreise (although I allow myself more time for that one) in the course of one’s studies. At the moment I am quite happy to have opened another page besides the lightly lyrical: to dip into the late romantic era and to discover the outgoing, active and hands-on aspects of the period.”

In 2015, when Ruby Hughes discovered Clytemnestra by the Welsh composer Rhian Samuel, the work had not been performed since its première some 20 years earlier. Hughes describes the 24-minute score as ‘sun-scorched and luscious’ as well as ‘intensely visceral’, but in it she also heard echoes of Gustav Mahler and Alban Berg, two of Samuel’s influences. For her first album as soloist with orchestra, she has therefore devised a programme which brings together the three composers but which also spans a wide range of emotions and moods. For his Rückert-Lieder, Mahler selected five highly intimate and subtle poems by the great Romantic poet Friedrich Rückert, using his large orchestral forces sparingly in a chamber music style. Ten years later, in 1911, Berg found his texts closer at hand as he set contemporary poems by Peter Altenberg, one of the main proponents of Viennese impressionism. Berg's advanced harmonic language caused a scandal at the first performance in 1913, and the songs were only performed in their entirety in 1952, sixteen years after Berg’s death. For Clytemnestra, finally, Rhian Samuel assembled her own text, based on Aeschylus' tragedy Agamemnon and focusing Clytemnestra’s deep anguish at the death of her daughter and her need for revenge. Bringing this wide spectrum of human emotions to life, Ruby Hughes is supported by the BBC National Orchestra of Wales and conductor Jac van Steen.

In Gustav Mahler's first four symphonies many of the themes originate in his own settings of folk poems from the collection Des Knaben Wunderhorn (The Boy's Magic Horn). A case in point, Symphony No.?4 is built around a single song, Das himmlische Leben (The Heavenly Life) which Mahler had composed some eight years earlier, in 1892. The song presents a child's vision of Heaven and is hinted at throughout the first three movements. In the fourth, marked ‘Sehr behaglich’ (Very comfortably), the song is heard in full from a solo soprano instructed by Mahler to sing: ‘with serene, childlike expression; completely without parody!’ The symphony is scored for a typically large, late-romantic orchestra (though without trombones and tuba) and an extensive percussion section which includes sleigh bells as well as glockenspiel. However, Mahler mostly deploys his forces with a transparency and lightness more akin to chamber music or eighteenth-century models like Mozart or Haydn. The Fourth has become one of his best-loved symphonies and is here performed by Minnesota Orchestra and Osmo Vänskä, joined by the angelic voice of English soprano Carolyn Sampson.

REVIEWS:

This is a difficult symphony to hold together and far too many performances are let down by indifferently realised finales. Vänskä connects it very well to the closing mood of the third movement, but an immense responsibility lies on the soprano soloist in the closing Das himmlische Liebe from Des Knaben Wunderhorn. The Klemperer studio recording was fatally undermined by Elizabeth Schwarzkopf’s too-knowing, overly sophisticated, rendition: the work needs a mixture of radiance and simplicity – this is a child’s vision of heaven, with Saint Martha in the kitchen. I have never heard the piece as I hear it in my head, but Carolyn Sampson captures very much of the radiance, despite some darkness in the lower register and some indifferent articulation. Perhaps the ideal voice would be that of a younger Emma Kirkby, and she certainly performed the piece, notably with Norrington at the Carnegie in 2001, but, to the best of my knowledge, never recorded it.

The first two movements are splendidly realized, combining poetry with a sense of momentum, and just the right touch of the spectral in the soloist’s tuned-up violin in the second movement.

The quality of recording is beautifully clear – as one expects from BIS – and I like very much their robust, bio-friendly, slim packaging, a huge improvement on easily-broken jewel cases.

Make no mistake: this Mahler 4 ranks with the very best, and I shall return to it very often.

– MusicWeb International

This cast does not generate as dreamy, airy, wafting textures as those of Szell and Bernstein; the textures here are plainer but make something no less convincing: the matter-of-fact clarinet, the barely-poco-vibrato string tone, and Sampson’s warm but never sugary tone.

Some will complain that Vänskä still doesn’t conduct Mahler as we know and love; judging by only the second movement, I would agree. But for the rest, I find his approach perfectly subjective and cinematic. The outstanding recording quality and superb musicians combine with Vänskä’s light touch to make a wonderful addition to this cycle.

– TheClassicReview

Praised for her “impeccably pure and iridescent voice” (Financial Times), soprano Adrianne Pieczonka is primarily known for her vocally opulent and interpretively intense Richard Strauss and Richard Wagner opera performances– though her vocal and stylistic versatility enables her to be at home in dramatic operatic roles by Verdi, Puccini and others. Her first Delos release is constituted of a varied program of Richard Strauss and Wagner songs. Strauss created 158 lieder for soprano voice in total; many of the dozen heard here are among his true masterpieces. The opera specialist Wagner, on the other hand, wrote far fewer songs than Strauss. Best-known among them are the five ecstatically romantic Wesendonck-Lieder, a masterpiece among Lieder cycles. Accompanying Ms. Pieczonka is Brian Zeger, a pianist whose technical finesse and interpretive sensitivity mark him as one of the great collaborators of our time.