Dario Salvi continues his exploration of Marschner’s overtures and stage music in this second volume in an ongoing series. Salvi conducts the Hradec Králové Philharmonic Orchestra in its first recording on the Naxos label. Volume 1 is available on 8574449. Discover the missing link in the German Romantic opera tradition, between Weber and Wagner, via this album of world premiere recordings.

Learn more about these operas on the Naxos Classical Spotlight podcast!

James P. Johnson is renowned as the father of stride piano but he also flourished as a composer of opera and of show tunes in the 1920s and 1930s. The Dreamy Kid and De Organizer offer contrasting stories of African American life at that time, set to an eclectic and powerful mixture of jazz, swing, blues and ragtime. These two works were reconstructed by the renowned musicologist, composer and bandleader, James Dapogny, before his untimely death in 2019. The Dreamy Kid is a world premiere recording.

REVIEW:

Both works are one act operas. De Organizer is labelled a ‘Blues opera’ and is, moreover, a choral opera, where there is, apart from a few longer solo portions, constant dialogue between the chorus and individual solo voices. The story takes place on a plantation in the South in the 1930s, i.e. contemporaneous to when the opera was written. A group of Afro-American sharecroppers are waiting for a union organizer and his companion is handing out leaflets. De Organizer appears and explains the advantages of forming a union. Then the Overseer interferes, threatening, with a whip in hand, but the croppers overpower him and the union is formed.

The opera is compact, just over thirty minutes, and packed with drama. The music is permeated with jazz rhythms and blues feeling – it is really A Swingin’ Affair! OK, If I want to be pernickety, there is a great deal of over-vibrant solo singing and some wobbly choristers, but this is easy to wink at in view of their enthusiasm, conviction and vitality, and the chorus Plantin’, plowin’, hoein’! just a couple of minutes into the opera is very moving. Though the score is divided into numbers, it is performed continuously and the whole opera is only one track.

The Dreamy Kid is quite different. It is a chamber play with no chorus and only four characters, and structured more in the European tradition, but musically with an American twist. While the orchestra in De Organizer is a jazz combo, here we have a traditional symphony orchestra. Even though this also is a one-act-opera, it is a bit longer – by how much I don’t know, as we get only seven excerpts, and they amount to 34 minutes. The libretto is an adaptation of an existing play by O’Neill about an old Afro-American woman lying on her deathbed, and her grandson, Dreamy, who has killed a white man in a quarrel. The police are on his heels but he risks his life to visit his grandma, persisting in spite of the knowledge that they could turn up any time. This, too, is a tightly knit drama, but there are several good solo arias. In the first scene (track 2), Irene, Dreamy’s woman, has a long solo and further on Mammy sings a beautiful, tender song to Dreamy. There are also lots of highly dramatic quarrels, including one which turns into a love duet between Dreamy and Irene – though the police’s arrival at any moment is constant threat. I only wish the opera had been recorded complete.

It should be mentioned that both operas had been reconstructed by James Dapogny, who unfortunately didn’t live long enough to experience the issue of this CD, but was present at the recordings and the staged performances back in 2006. In the notes, he writes at length about his extensive restoration work, without which we wouldn’t have been able to hear this music and the world would have been much poorer.

So, dear reader, grab the opportunity and give this disc a listen. Whether you like it or not is less important than that you should be made to think about to what degree the world for African-Americans has since changed

-- MusicWeb International

The latest instalment in this popular series takes us through the life and times of Franz Schubert. Written by Davinia Caddy, narrated by Leighton Pugh, and featuring a wide selection of musical excerpts from the Naxos catalogue and affiliated labels.

César Franck's only symphony came at a time when the French music world was seeking to rival the great Austro-German tradition. The 'darkness-to-light' narrative of the Symphony in D minor owes a debt to Beethoven and there is a unique power within its distinctive themes, innovative cyclic form, and general gravitas. Franck's student Ernest Chausson was no doubt inspired by his teachers thematic metamorphoses, but the anguished influence of the ever-present Wagner is also ever present.

The published score of Chausson's Symphony in B-flat includes many errors which conductor Jean-Luc Tingaud meticulously corrected after careful study of the composer's autograph manuscripts.

This album brings together all of Kodaly's extant pieces for organ, plus works by his contemporaries. They are performed on the Chancel Organ at Peachtree Road United Methodist Church, Atlanta by the acclaimed Welsh organist Iain Quinn, professor of organ at Florida State University.

REVIEW:

The disc opens with Ernő Dohnányi’s quite substantial Fantasie in C minor which is listed as a world premiere recording. As is my preference when encountering unknown music, I listen before I read any of the detail, so my surprise as to why this work should sound so unlike this composer’s other music is easily explained, as it is a student work by a fifteen year old. For sure, there is talent and confidence and no little skill but this does sound rather like a test or exercise piece where some Bachian passages jostle with imposing hymn-like melodies and some rather broad-brush Romantic gestures.

Sandwiched between music by familiar composers are a couple of pieces by less well-known names. Bedřich Antonín Wiedermann's Pastorale dorico is another modest, rather unassuming work with a conservative outlook that belies its 1942 composition.

Kodály's set of nine Epigrammák are in fact transcriptions for solo organ made by Gábor Trajtler of songs by Kodály written originally in 1954. These are consciously unaffected and simple pieces. As a sequence they come across as a bit unvaried, but I cannot imagine a better case being made for them than here by Iain Quinn

Just in time the work around which the whole disc was planned arrives. This is Kodály’s quite wonderful Csendes mise. There is an immediate substance and stature to the music here. There is a variety of expressive and musical style that makes for a compelling experience – and this is most definitely a work that benefits from being heard complete.

The disc is completed by another unfamiliar name and work: Miloš Sokola’s Passacaglia quasi toccata na téma B-A-C-H. Dating from 1963 this work makes for an interesting and energetic ‘recessional’ piece for this program

— MusicWeb International

Schumann’s studies into counterpoint during 1845 climaxed in what he described as a ‘Fugenpassion’, with the resulting character pieces becoming a significant cornerstone of the organ repertoire. They are performed here by Tom Winpenny, who has also written the booklet notes, on the historic and recently restored Furtwängler organ in Gronau, Germany.

JoAnn Falletta conducts the National Orchestral Institute Philharmonic in works by four extraordinary mid-20th-century American composers who helped shape the country’s musical destiny: Aaron Copland, Walter Piston, Paul Creston and Ulysses Kay. Includes two world premiere recordings – Paul Creston's Saxophone Concerto and Ulysses Kay’s poignant and elegiac Pietà.

The next instalment in this popular series now focuses on the life and music of Mendelssohn. This insightful biography explores the breadth of his achievements, the complexities of his privileged upbringing, and the reasons for the fluctuating nature of his reputation. Written by Davinia Caddy, narrated by Leighton Pugh, and featuring many musical excerpts include the Violin Concerto, String Octet and Elijah, as well as his choral works, symphonies, sonatas and songs.

The cello was a vital part of Catalan musical expression in the first half of the 20th century. Pablo Casals as composer and cello virtuoso was its revolutionary force, and his student Gaspar Cassadó joined him in writing superb transcriptions and expressive original works with a strong sense of tradition and national melodic flavour. Casablancas’ Cant per a Frederic Mompou ‘Remembrança’ pays homage to another great friend and colleague, while Enrique Granados’s soulful Madrigal is accompanied by delectable arrangements of piano works with cello such as the Goyescas.

Taro’s Wonderful World was conceived by conductor/composer Fabrice Bollon and author Julia Liebermann as an introduction to or initiation into classical music both for children and adults unfamiliar with the genre. A digital-only version with German narration is also available (9.70356); the CD version does not include any narration. World premiere recording.

The String Quartet in E minor by Ethel Smyth, one of the most innovative and original figures in English music, has a masterful coherence and consistency. With eloquent writing for the viola in particular, it is both playful and reverential, and ends with a flourish – forthright, bold and uncompromising, like Smyth herself. Delius wrote the early String Quartet in 1888 but it was rejected for performance and he was later to reuse the Scherzo for his mature Quartet of 1916–19. In 2018 the score of the two opening movements of the 1888 Quartet, long assumed lost, reappeared at auction and have been edited and reunited with the final two in this premiere recording, which adds significantly to our understanding of Delius’s early compositional directions.

REVIEWS:

A Delius discovery is brought to life with compelling musicianship…The Villiers Quartet gives it a fine first recording, captured in warm and well-balanced sound.

-- The Strad

Full marks to the Villiers Quartet for bringing this new and challenging repertoire to life.

-- Gramophone

...what I like about this quartet very much is its questing nature – this is a kind of musical laboratory for Delius to test out ideas, nascent harmonies and textures that would define his mature music in the years ahead.

-- MusicWeb International