Despite her tragically early death at the age of 25, Vítězslava Kaprálová left a portfolio of more than 50 works of the highest craftsmanship and inspiration. this selection of her orchestral music, recorded at the Kaprálová Festival in Michigan, includes the work that won her international esteem in 1938, the Military Sinfonietta. abounding in youthful energy and brilliant colors, the Piano Concerto marries virtuosity with lyricism, while the orchestral songs are both atmospheric and striking.

REVIEWS:

Handsomely recorded, Kenneth Kiesler conducts the University of Michigan Symphony Orchestra in convincing, invigorating and satisfying accounts which, I’m sure, will win these compelling scores many friends. A deep love and commitment to this composer conveys itself throughout. The booklet contains Czech texts and English translations of the two vocal items. I urge you to explore.

-- MusicWeb International

Despite her tragically early death at the age of 25, Kaprálová left a portfolio of more than 50 works of the highest craftsmanship and inspiration. this selection of her orchestral music, recorded at the Kaprálová Festival in Michigan, includes the work that won her international esteem in 1938, the Military Sinfonietta, abounding in youthful energy and brilliant colors and the 23-minute piano concerto of 1935 which marries virtuosity with lyricism, while the orchestral songs are both atmospheric and striking.

-- Records International

This is a poignant memento of lost talent—but one well worth hearing for what we have as well as for what never came to be. These recordings have their roots in a Kaprálová Festival at the University of Michigan in September 2015, but the recording dates suggest that most, if not all, of the performances were recorded later in the academic year. And while the University of Michigan Symphony Orchestra would never be mistaken for a major orchestra, the enthusiasm is palpable. Nicholas Phan…sings with an infectious ardor, and Amy I-Lin Cheng knocks off the Piano Concerto with aplomb. Through it all, conductor Kenneth Kiesler shows commitment to the cause.

-- Fanfare

In this third volume of Liszt's Schubert song transcriptions, which includes some rare versions, the composer’s prodigious capacity for colouration, shifting textures and use of myriad pianistic devices brings refinement and beauty to each song. Follows Volume 1 (8.553062, Volume 5 in the Complete Liszt edition) and Volume 2 (8.554729, Volume 17 in the Complete Liszt edition) of the Schubert Song Transcriptions series. Goran Filipec also contributed to Volumes 42 (8.573458), 49 (8.573705) and 55 (8.573794) of the Liszt Complete Piano Music series.

Most of the pieces on this album have been designated ‘WoO’ (Works without Opus Number) or bear the numbering from the Hess catalogue of unpublished or unfinished pieces. These include the piano transcription of the topically programmatic Battle Symphony (Wellington’s Victory or The Battle of Vitoria) and the genial variations on Rule Britannia and God Save the King. The Marches, Menuets and Ecossaises derive from a variety of sources, while there is a strangely tragic aspect to the Waltz in C minor.

The final volume of Percy Grainger’s complete music for wind band once again respects his precise instrumental demands in pieces that span the breadth of his career, from his first large work in the genre, ‘The Lads of Wamphray March,’ to ‘The Power of Rome and the Christian Heart,’ his largest such work and one of his last. Also to be heard are ‘A Lincolnshire Posy,’ one of the genre’s most famous and beautiful works; ‘The Immovable Do,’ which contains “the most long-held pedal note in all music”; and the revolutionary ‘Hill-Song No. 1,’ which Grainger considered the greatest of all his compositions. All of the scores in this series follow, to the letter, Grainger’s specific instructions as to the instrumentation. The Royal Norwegian Navy Band have starred for Naxos before, not least on some Sousa albums. Bjarte Engeset has been music director of the Tromso Symphony Orchestra and The Norwegian Wind Ensemble, artistic director of Northern Norway’s Northern Lights Festival and Opera Nord, as well as permanent guest conductor of the Flemish Radio orchestra. His discography includes more than 30 best-selling recordings, including an eight-album set of Grieg’s complete orchestral works on Naxos.

Argentinian guitarist and composer Jorge Morel’s long and distinguished career has made him a legendary figure amongst guitarists, renowned as “a consummate and virtuoso artist” (Guitar Magazine) whose music is favored for its blend of colorful Latin American vibrancy and North American sophistication. From gently lyrical pieces such as the Milonga del Viento to the life-force of the dance in works such as the Giga Criolla, to the more classical Sonatina, deeply descriptive Pampero and much more besides, this program is a true reflection of the amazing variety of Morel’s creative output.

“Living people can dance, the dying cannot”, Prokofiev wrote to explain the problems he faced when writing music for the ballet Romeo and Juliet. His original score was rejected as ‘undanceable’ by the Bolshoy Theatre and his initial scheme for a happy ending for the lovers was, fortunately, vetoed. The revised score, however, proved a masterpiece of expressive beauty and drama, with melting love music and huge bravura, and it remains one of the most loved ballet scores of the twentieth century.

This release couples Gian Francesco Malipiero’s two contrasting violin concertos with the world premiere recording of his kaleidoscopic orchestral work Per una favola cavalleresca, evoking legendary scenes of love, tournaments, battles, moonbeams and heroes. Malipiero’s First Violin Concerto is one of his most beautiful and joyful works, a remarkable achievement for a composer who is said to have played the violin badly in his youth. His Second Violin Concerto, written 30 years later, sounds astonishingly different on a first hearing, but reveals itself to be inspired by the same lyrical impulse as the earlier concerto.

Review

Naxos/Marco Polo have been staunch allies of Malipiero of yore. Their example has been all the more admirable since their advocacy dates from a decade or more after the composer’s death. First, they recorded all the symphonies - and there are lots of them - in Russia on Marco Polo. These were done largely with the far too easily overlooked Antonio de Almeida (1928-1997). That multiple-CD series has been reissued on Naxos.

His First Violin Concerto (1932) is in the accustomed furiously confident three movements. There’s no hint of neo-classicism or museum-rigid “Alte Stil”. This is fast-flowing music where the orchestra keep pace with the ardent solo, here played with unblinking skill by Paolo Chiavacci. The writing is juicy and its probing ardour continues into the central Lento and the nicely rounded finale. This is a work and performance that, for me, never descends into tedium.

Per una favola cavalleresca (For a chivalric tale) is in four movements and is the earliest piece here. It is claimed to be inspired by legendary scenes of love, tournaments, battles, moon-beams and burials of heroes, possibly with links to a Malipero opera Lancelotto del Lago. It’s the longest work here, in four unnamed movements, across half an hour. It’s masterfully orchestrated with no strata of the orchestra wasted. Romantic to the hilt and occasionally voluptuous in the familiar manner of Respighi, as in his Ballad of the Gnomes. Even within these bounds it is a full-lipped piece yet with plenty of nocturnal facets as in parts of the third movement. Written at about the same time as Sibelius’s Suite mignonne which, at least in its titles, has its chivalric overtones, it is a very different. The Malipiero is more head-on and drips with juice as you can hear with the no-holds-barred brass fanfaring of the highly coloured finale. One can easily read into this the betrayal of Arthur and his anger, even if the work and the movement does end in a romantic glow.

Malipero wastes nothing - no time beating of useless filler material - both this and the second concerto are over and done with in about twenty minutes. The second - quite a short piece at 19:35 - is cooler. It was written a decade before the composer’s death and confronts a very different world order from the First. It is by no means devoid of passion. Even so, darker emotions are in play. The soloist has to make speedy headway. Disillusion inflects the central non troppo lento which is lichen-hung. The finale is another work of testing virtuosity, but brusque.

Another point to make is that these works, especially the First concerto and the Cavalleresca at times seem wrung from the same harmonic material as Vaughan Williams’ The Lark Ascending but always stand in their own right.

A Malipiero genre admirably tackled by the familiar La Vecchia and his orchestra. They have been most agreeably performed and recorded.

--MusicWeb International (Rob Barnett)

In the first volume of this series (Naxos 8571382), Matthew Schellhorn surveyed six decades of Herbert Howells’ compositions for the piano. This second volume reprises the journey, tracing the composer’s stylistic development from the charming poetic miniatures of his youth through to the resonant modal quirkiness of his later dances. The survey includes a centrally important work, the Sonatina of 1971, performed here in Schellhorn’s own edition compiled from the manuscript sources, which includes variants not heard for half a century.

REVIEW:

Howells is renowned for his choral and organ music. His piano music is less well known and these releases are very welcome. As in the first volume Matthew Schellhorn surveys this music over the whole of Howells’ career. Mostly miniatures, there is much to enjoy here and it is interesting to see the development in compositional style throughout. The CD ends with the longest work, his 1971 Sonatina and also includes A Little Book of Dances from 1928. Beautiful performances of this well crafted music in what are, incredibly, almost exclusively world premiere recordings.

-- Lark Reviews (Stephan Page)

With specially made instruments and a range that can emulate that of a whole orchestra, the acclaimed Guitarra a Seis bring us a colorful program that includes works written specially for the ensemble. Opening with a real feast for the ears in Bach’s lively Brandenburg Concerto No. 3, we further encounter the magical moods of Ravel’s Ma mere l’Oye, a blend of Bulgarian folk and modern music from Atanas Ourkouzounov, Tobias Krebs’ jazz-infused Suite Panamericana, and Sergio Assad’s humorous Juan Sebastian’s Bar, which alludes to Bach and Beethoven but is Brazilian through and through.

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

This album of 20th-century masterpieces for flute and guitar features works composed especially for this combination of instruments plus arrangements of works by Bartók and Ravi Shankar. Castelnuovo-Tedesco’s Sonatine for Flute and Guitar is considered to be one of the finest compositions for this combination of instruments, contrasting joyfulness with poignant melodies. The warm sound of the alto flute is given expressive range in Takemitsu’s Toward the Sea, while Piazzolla’s Histoire du Tango takes us on a journey from the form’s beginnings in the brothels of Buenos Aires, to its acceptance as one of the most loved musical art forms of the 20th century.

Learn more about this release on the Naxos Classical Spotlight podcast!

Duo Duel, a concerto for 2 percussion and orchestra, is dedicated to the two percussionists who inspired it, Svet Stoyanov and Matthew Strauss. The work is in one continuous movement, but the pacing of the individual sections is: slow, fast, slow, fast-cadenza (one of the fastest cadenzas ever written for percussionists), fast (with dueling timpani).

The soloists sometimes play together, and sometimes they “duel” their way through the music. There is some seriously high-speed playing in this concerto, so don’t blink – you might miss something!

The Concerto for Orchestra is truly a concerto in that it requires virtuosity from the principal players, the individual sections and the entire orchestra. The first movement was the last to be composed. It took writing the other four movements to create a clear picture of what was needed to start this virtuosic tour-de-force. The second movement was written next, inspired by the string sound of The Philadelphia Orchestra. The third movement was written first, and it is this movement that allows each principal player a solo, before moving into section solos. The fourth movement is a tribute to rhythm, and the percussion section of the orchestra. The fifth movement, which begins with the entrance of the violins, highlights the entire orchestra.

This world premiere recording of Wladyslaw Zelenski’s opera Janek draws on local atmosphere and traditional music but also makes use of the emotive Italian verismo style. This concert performance of Janek was part of a series of events in Lublin that celebrated Zelenski’s music, marking the 100th anniversary of his death.

Following on from their widely acclaimed recording of Halka (8.660485-86), the Poznań Opera presents this new recording of Moniuszko’s last opera, Paria, conducted by Jacek Kaspszyk. Although Paria was misunderstood by critics at its premiere, the moving themes of exclusion and the power of social rules now make it an opera for our times.

The two leading operatic composers of their time were Rossini and Auber, one now fêted, the other largely overlooked. In 1831 Auber and his long-standing librettist Eugène Scribe produced Le Philtre, which took the concept of petit opéra to the extreme, even outdoing Rossini’s Le Comte Ory in depicting a rural setting peopled not with Arcadian shepherds but with ordinary country folk. Auber’s Franco-Italian style can be heard in the work’s ensembles, while elsewhere the opera shimmers with rich arias, buffo elements and delightful cavatinas. Le Philtre was an unalloyed success receiving 243 performances and inspired Donizetti’s L’elisir d’amore.

REVIEWS:

The sonorous lyrical tenor Patrick Kabongo as Guillaume achieves a great artistic achievement in every respect. His elegant phrasing, the tones set freely from above, his dramaturgically precise, word-creative ability: all this shows great class.

The Mexican baritone Emmanuel Franco as the dashing militarist Joli-Coeur and the Italian bass Eugenio Di Lieto as the cunning businessman with a weakness for the right medical diagnosis Fontanarose remain sonorous and full of humour, and take advantage of the abundant situational comedy they offer. All three male protagonists succeed in stylistically exemplary fashion in both the French and the Italian influences of the score, influenced by Rossini, with all the rondeaus, cavatinas, cabalettas, strophic airs and brilliant couplets.

-- Merker Online

Maria Kliegel celebrates her 70th birthday in 2022 and this collection brings together some of her most outstanding recordings, personally selected by Kliegel from her vast Naxos discography. Known as ‘La Cellissima,’ Maria Kliegel’s playing is characterized by a warmth, sensitivity and refinement that complements everything she performs. Combining the best from her teachers Janos Starker and Mstislav Rostropovich, and working alongside excellent orchestras and pianists, Kliegel’s inspirational joie de vivre radiates from all of these performances. From her GRAMMY-nominated Bach Cello Suites to a Saint-Saens Cello Concerto ranked among the top 50 recordings of the 20th century by Scala, this collection is a major celebration of Maria Kliegel’s fluent virtuosity and irreplaceable musicianship.