The conductor Ulf Schirmer has a special knack for the light Muse – as his regular operetta performances with the Munich Radio Orchestra, many of them documented on cpo, have shown over the years. Munich was also the site of the 1906 premiere of Die vier Grobiane / I quatro rusteghi by Ermanno Wolf-Ferrari, a work answering to the description of a modern comic opera and displaying this composer’s typical combination of marvelously chatty parlando and charming melodicism. There are two sides to the conflict fueling the plot: four curmudgeonly husbands who believe that they can and should exercise absolute rule over their wives and children and female characters who engage in intrigues. The action of the opera is set in Venice and elaborates a source text by Carlo Goldoni (1760). The composer scores his points with a tone of considerable lightness, a small orchestral ensemble entrusted with the presentation of a famous intermezzo, and spirited melodies in part based on folk songs. The wealth of ideas developed in his harmonic scheme remaining within tonal limits is also surprising.

FonoForum termed Vol. 1 in our series with Henri Marteau’s works for string quartet “a highly welcome addition to the as yet much too small Marteau discography.” At long last we now are following up with Vol. 2, which includes the Clarinet Quintet op. 13 ranking as his best-known work and the String Quartet No. 1. In his first quartet Marteau presents an ambitious work in which he explores how to bring his personal style into harmony with this genre. He draws on German and French Romantic tradition and on his great models from music history and experiments with compositional-technical forms and structural elements. To date, not a single renowned quartet ensemble has risen to the challenge of recording this work, and in the concert literature it is also practically not at all represented. It is hardly a coincidence that Marteau had the clarinet quintets of Mozart and Brahms very much in mind when he wrote his Clarinet Quintet op. 13. From the very beginning Mozart and Brahms played an important role in his career. Here too the Belgian clarinetist Jean-Michel Charlier and the Isasi Quartet show Marteau’s French and German sound worlds in perfect harmony.

While composers like Schumann and Brahms held fast to the classical concept of the symphony, it was composers of the New German School, such as Wagner and Liszt, who preferred the tone poem as a modern means of expression for orchestral music. It tries to convey non-musical topics, like legends, tales, myths, and sometimes novels, in musical terms: programme music in its best sense. Strauss’ boisterous self-confidence allowed him the conviction that a different ‘formula’ would enable him to roll out his musical imagination with inimitable style. His success in doing so has ensured the popularity of these works to the present day. The SWR Sinfonieorchester Baden-Baden and Freiburg under the baton of its former chief conductor François-Xavier Roth recorded all ten tone poems, as well as Strauss’ musical epitaph Metamorphosen, between 2012 and 2016. These recordings are now re-released as a collector’s item in an exquisite 5-album box set .

REVIEW:

With music as wonderful as this, we are all liable to develop our personal favourites that we will always remain loyal to. But it is hard to imagine a conductor and orchestra who could bring greater commitment and sheer intensity to a collection such as this. As you can see from the dates above, the CDs were issued over a period of four years or so; but the standard of playing and direction is high from the first to the last; a tremendous achievement by all involved.

-- MusicWeb International

This superpowered set of Richard Strauss’s ‘Complete Tone Poems’ with the SWR Symphony Orchestra of Baden-Baden and Freiburg under François-Xavier Roth (recorded 2012-15) makes its mark right from the lunging first bars of Ein Heldenleben and carries through a series of performances that for drama, energy, and commitment, has few if any equals, certainly not in the post-Fritz Reiner era.

Just listen to the timps in Also sprach Zarathustra—the way they hurtle towards us at Sunrise—and Till Eulenspiegel, or Roth’s skill at holding Aus Italien together, his affectionate yet energetic handling of Symphonia domestica, the epic aural vistas of his Alpine Symphony and an account of Metamorphosen that because of Roth’s sense of urgency sounds swifter than it actually is.

The recordings are spacious, full-bodied and pretty aggressive (the brass especially) but do the music and its performers proud. This now surely has to be the top-rating digital set of Strauss’s tone poems. Tod und Verklärung, Don Juan, Macbeth, and Don Quixote, all superbly played, complete the deal.

-- Gramophone

Arnold Schönberg founded the Society for Musical Private Performances in November 1918 “to give Arnold Schoenberg the opportunity personally to carry out his intention of providing artists and art lovers with a veritable and precise knowledge of Modern Music”, as Alban Berg described in a leaflet in 1919. Chamber music, solo pieces and songs saw performance, and to a great extent, properly arranged for the available means, original large-scale orchestral works of topical and artistic high-quality were also produced. In the autumn of 1921, Schönberg embarked on an arrangement of Mahler’s Das Lied von der Erde, which, however, he broke off in the middle of the first movement. The continuation was to be taken over by Webern, but this did not happen, evidently as a consequence of the end of the society. It was only in 1982/83 that the German composer, conductor and musicologist Rainer Riehn (b. 1941) was prepared to continue what had been begun.

Janácek’s final decade saw an almost unprecedented creative renewal during which he wrote some of his greatest works. Among them were his chamber music masterpieces, the two String Quartets. The first was inspired by Tolstoy’s novella The Kreutzer Sonata, a torrid tale of adultery and murder to which Janácek responded with music of increasingly frenzied passion. The second was subtitled Intimate Letters, a freely evolving work full of yearning and amorous defiance. originally cast for four violins, the two youthful Sonnets date from 1875 and balance the archaisms of the first with the lyricism of the second.

REVIEW:

The scores of the quartets are liberally sprinkled with changes of tempi and dynamics, and nowhere are those more important than when capturing the mood of the ‘story’ being told in the opening two movements of the First Quartet. Maybe recordings from Slovak quartets are the most successful in making those moments really startling, but the New Zealanders offer very well prepared performances, full of well judged nuances, and suitably suave when required in the Second Quartet. There they question, without resolution, the contents of the letters, with undiluted searing moments of pain. In summary, with the impeccable balance between instruments, and squeaky clean intonation, these are among my recommended performances on disc.

– David's Review corner (David Denton)

Following the success of her last album, The Polish Violin, Jennifer Pike now turns to a programme of English music that represents an essential part of her musical make-up. It was the music of Elgar that first drew her to the violin, and The Lark Ascending has featured in her programming - in many versions – throughout her career. Here we have the original version for Violin and Piano from 1914, much less frequently played than the ‘standard’ orchestral version, but fascinating for the new light it shines on such a well-known piece. Writing it against the backdrop of the First World War, Vaughan Williams took both inspiration and the title from a poem by George Meredith. Although his first sketches for a Violin Sonata date from 1887, Elgar’s Violin Sonata is one of the four late masterpieces that Elgar composed in 1918 – 19, at Brinkwells in Sussex in his final creative flush. As with The Lark, this work was composed under the shadow of the Great War. Like Elgar, Vaughan Williams wrote his only Violin Sonata towards the end of his life. Representing a culmination of the development of his compositional style, he weaves fantasy and pastoralism into the strictures of sonata form. Jennifer Pike is joined for this album by one of her regular musical partners, the pianist Martin Roscoe.

The Carpe Diem String Quartet’s first volume of Sergey Ivanovich Taneyev’s string quartets gained critical accolades both for the revival of this important repertoire and for the ensemble’s sensitive and assured interpretations. A gift to musicians and listeners in search of rewarding new repertoire, Taneyev’s Second and Fourth String Quartets are masterfully crafted, the former piece possessing the inner energy of Beethoven, the latter being his most dramatic quartet. Both quartets impress with their unexpected harmonic combinations, wealth of ideas and mastery of form.

In his second solo piano recital disc for Signum, this release further demonstrates Alessio Bax's dazzling skill and flair in performance and interpretation - this time with Rachmaninov's piano works. The programme is centered around the Preludes op.23, but takes in a broad selection of his other studies, etudes, melodies and transcriptions - in performance, Bax describes the programme as being a collection of 'visions and landscapes'.

The first recording by Yannick Nézet-Séguin and the Rotterdam Philharmonic Orchestra for BIS centred on Berlioz' Symphonie Fantastique, a work which stands squarely on the threshold between Classicism and Romanticism. Nézet-Séguin's interpretation brilliantly demonstrated this ambivalence, as the reviewer in CD Review on BBC Radio 3 remarked: 'A Fantastic Symphony that relishes in the transparency and the delicacy of Berlioz's scoring while remaining true to its vivid imagination and dramatic punch'. On the follow-up to that exciting release is another work that straddles a musical divide, namely Richard Strauss' Four Last Songs. Composed in 1948, these late blooms of an unabashed Romanticism stood in the midst of a musical landscape which featured the twelve-tone serialism of the Darmstadt School, John Cage's prepared piano and the first examples of musique concrète. In accordance with Strauss's wish, it was the dramatic soprano Kirsten Flagstad who first performed the songs, but they also became closely associated with Elisabeth Schwarzkopf. On the present recording, it is Dorothea Röschmann, one of today's foremost Mozart sopranos who lends her voice to what is often regarded as an expression of the composer's acceptance of death's inevitability, at the age of eighty-four. We meet Strauss in a completely different mood in the disc's opening work - the large-scale symphonic poem Ein Heldenleben (A Hero's Life) composed fifty years before the songs. By casting himself in the role of the Hero, Strauss managed to provoke generations of music-lovers for years to come. A study of aggressive egotism, the work has been called, as well as the most conceited piece of music ever written. But it is also widely regarded as one of the most brilliant, and virtuosic, orchestral scores in the history of music, displaying the possibilities of a large symphony orchestra to the fullest.