When lockdown was imposed in 2020 many artists began streaming performances from their own homes. In response, pianist Francesco Piemontesi and director Jan Schmidt-Garre launched a concert series to showcase artists living in Berlin. This collection of performances is a testament to the resilience and solidarity of these artists during the pandemic. (Naxos)

Latvian Radio Choir’s new album conducted by Sigvards Kļava marks the international debut of composer Alfred Momotenko (b. 1970). Momotenko was born in Lviv, Ukraine, in 1970. He studied at the Sochi College of Arts and later percussion at the Moscow State University of Culture and Art. In 1990, the political situation having changed, Momotenko moved to the Netherlands where he continued his studies at the Brabant Conservatory and at the Royal Conservatory in the Hague. Momotenko’s timeless choral works continue the centuries old great tradition of choral works combining them with contemporary language, a blend most recently exemplified by the likes of Alfred Schnittke.

Surrounded by choral music in his youth, Momotenko has returned to the world of choral music at a relatively late period: all the works on this album have been written between 2017 and 2022. Many of his enigmatic choral works are religious and could be described as poems or chants – larger than a miniature but less extensive than a fantasy, a narrative, a ballad or a story. Often there are two contrasting musical languages that are present: the ancient, pristine Znamennyj Chant and the modern one. Besides liturgic texts, Momotenko’s choral works include settings to poems by Boris Pasternak and Joseph Brodsky. The largest work, Na Strastnoy (On the Passion), is a companion piece Rachmaninoff’s All-Night Vigil.

REVIEW:

The recital is cleverly structured. We start on familiar ground with Creator of Angels – a setting of lines from Bella Akhmadulina (distilled here into a shorter whole) that supplicate for mercy. Threads of Znamenny chant run through thick vertical textures, always rooted in widespaced bass parts. The effect is ancient, but softening into 21st-century lyricism. We hear flickers of Silvestrov, Tavener and E≈envalds, but also of Chesnokov, Grechaninov and their ilk.

Then we start to push off from land – gently at first in the short Three Sacred Hymns, with their modal harmonies and sinuous lines that always seem to tug back to the fixed point of unison, and then more rhapsodically in Lullaby: upper voices an endless flat horizon, harp ripples and sound-bursts silhouetted against them. We’re in another world by the time we reach On the Passion. This setting of Pasternak’s poetry from Dr Zhivago (this time intended as a companion for Rachmaninoff’s Vespers) is a trove of imagery. Birdsong, bells, Holy Week processions and folk dances draw a musical ‘essay’ from Momotenko that extends the composer’s harmonic and textural vocabulary with nonsense syllables and stamping – effects as well as melodies. Voices are fragmented down to endless solo strands (the technical challenge is immense), intersecting and coming together with Ives-like sonic cinema.

Kl,ava marshals his singers with unobtrusive precision. The 24-strong group are shape-shifters, slipping imperceptibly from chorus to soloists, from knitted web to filigree strands. Balance, not dynamics, is the principal expressive force here. Kl,ava pulls details and lines forwards or pushes them back flush, creating the depth and play of light that really makes this debut sing.

-- Gramophone

Robert Trevino’s first album together the Basque National Orchestra featuring orchestral works by the great French-Basque composer Maurice Ravel (1875–1937) received an excellent response. The program in this second volume is perhaps more ‘French’ in nature, but the Basque orchestra is giving dazzling performances of these works by their own national composer. While the first album was focused on some of Ravel’s most popular orchestral works, this album includes some rarities, including Ma mère l’Oye (Mother Goose) in its complete ballet version, as well as one world première recording: Pierre Boulez’s orchestration of Ravel’s World War I-era piano work, Frontispice.

REVIEW:

Can we ever have enough Ravel? Certainly not when the performances are this good. For the second disc in his traversal of Ravel’s orchestral works, Robert Trevino and the Basque National Orchestra offer an enticing mix of familiar and unfamiliar items. You get an aptly crystalline performance of the elusive Valses nobles et sentimentales, fortified by an appealing lightness of rhythm, followed by the zillionth version of the unkillable Menuet antique. Frontispice, a tiny “avant-garde” work originally written for piano five-hands, and here orchestrated by Pierre Boulez, comes off sounding very much like, well, Pierre Boulez. So now we know where he got much of his own inspiration.

The Shéhérazade Overture, Ravel’s first big orchestral work, seldom gets played and the reasons aren’t surprising. It’s long (14 minutes here), kind of formless, and lacking in memorable ideas, but of course the orchestration is marvelous and it’s good to have such a vivid new recording and performance. Finally, there’s the complete Mother Goose ballet, one of Ravel’s major masterpieces. This version is gorgeous, nicely flowing in the main numbers, and full of atmosphere in the evocative interludes between them. Trevino wisely refuses to sentimentalize the concluding “Fairy Garden,” which sounds so much more touching for just that reason. In short, this is a lovely, interesting program that offers far more than the “same old Ravel.” It’s a keeper.

-- ClassicsToday.com (David Hurwitz)

Born in 1946, Vladimir Martynov is one of several composers from the former USSR whose music taps into a vein of perpetual memory and farewell. Literally so in the case of Der Abschied, an eight-movement cycle for small ensemble which stands on the threshold like a guest at a gathering of friends, unable or unwilling to shut the door behind them and venture out alone. One of Martynov’s most distinguished contemporaries was the Ukrainian composer Valentin Silvestrov, who talked of a ‘genetic aural well’ for Russian music which, like Orthodox prayer, cannot be learnt as a text, but which exists beyond any text. Silvestrov explicitly recognized his own output as ‘meta-music’ or even ‘post-music’, and the same could be said of many pieces in Martynov’s output. Tiny motifs and gestures are layered and expanded across a meditative space in a distinctively Russian form of Minimalism that bears certain similarities with the better-known outputs of Pärt and Schnittke but pursues a consciously more austere path: both the Requiem and Stabat mater are imbued with the timeless qualities of chant and ancient melisma. Martynov’s music began to attract a certain cult following in the West during the 1990s with performances and recordings made principally by the violinist Gidon Kremer and his former partner, Tatiana Grindenko. As both a violinist and conductor, Grindenko has continued to keep Martynov’s flame burning, and she leads most of the performances here, which were made mostly in Moscow over the course of several years and in several cases receive here their first international release.

To mark their 30th Anniversary, Britten Sinfonia and Thomas Adès are releasing their acclaimed Beethoven and Barry cycle as a box set. The works were recorded between 2017 and 2019 at Barbican Hall, London and Theatre Royal, Brighton. Thomas Adès: “This collection is the fruit of two parallel passions. After twenty years of performing and often premiering Gerald Barry’s works, I was frantic to record as much of it as possible. I had also loved working on Beethoven Symphonies with Britten Sinfonia, and suddenly an idea was born: why not dare the two firebrands to join hands? As soon as this idea took hold, everything fell into place. I believe Ludwig van Beethoven must be treated as a living composer, and I find Gerald’s music to be entirely classic. So the two complement each other ideally.” Gerald Barry: “Tom Adès decided on this pairing. It startled me. The first record I bought when I was about 13 was Beethoven’s Emperor Concerto. We didn’t have a record player so all I could do was study the cover and advertisements on the back. I could look and see but not hear. I would take the record out and smell it. I used my nose as a stylus going round and round.”

Armenian pianist and composer Stephan Elmas was a child prodigy who met Franz Liszt and became closely acquainted with Rubinstein and Massenet. Elmas’s life was darkened by illness and the tragedy of his homeland, but his music reflects the ease and facility of his technique, harking back to the Romanticism of Chopin, Liszt and Schumann, rather than the challenging times in which he lived, and with a quality of craftsmanship that gives his music a magnetic attractiveness. Mikael Ayrapetyan continues his acclaimed exploration of rediscovered Armenian piano repertoire with the first in this series of Elmas’s complete works for piano.

REVIEWS:

All in all, this was a highly enjoyable recital…What Elmas, and in turn Ayrapetyan, prove throughout this recital is that there is still quite a bit to say in these styles and musical language.

-- Fanfare

this first volume in a complete series is to be welcomed. Mikael Ayrapetan’s performances bring this music to life and make for a very enjoyable collection. This volume places the Seven Nocturnes together with a number of Ballades, Barcarolles and Romance in Eb Major.

-- Lark Reviews

Ravel's status as one of the most popular composers of all time rests to a large extent on the phenomenal success of Bolero. Yet there is much more to this endlessly intriguing man's work than the "seventeen minutes of orchestral tissue without music": childhood fantasy, Spain, the Orient, American jazz, the theater, clockwork toys and all the things mechanical, preoccupied Maurice Ravel throughout his life, and echoes of each can be found in all corners of his music.

Ravel grew up in Paris during la belle epoque, the thirty-odd years prior to 1914 when Paris was the unquestioned artistic center of the world. The fin de siecle years saw him enter the Paris Conservatoire. He was an immensely gifted youth, and one by one his early compositions began to show a real mastery of conception and execution-before the 1800s were out, he had produced such assured works as Habenera, Menuet antique, several fine songs, and Pavane pour une infante defunte.

Internationally acclaimed Swedish pianist Peter Jablonski is known as a fervent champion of Polish music. In this album Jablonski returns to some of his dearest piano music – Chopin’s Mazurkas. For Chopin, the Mazurkas became a deeply personal, intimate statement of his feelings as an émigré Polish composer living in Paris. From some of his very first compositions to his last, it is the only form that Chopin composed regularly throughout his life. Similarly, Chopin’s Mazurkas have followed Peter Jablonski throughout his entire career as a pianist in nearly every solo recital.

REVIEW:

Peter Jablonski is no stranger to Chopin’s Mazurkas, having recorded the Opp 6, 24, 50 and 68 groups in 2008. He’s now setting down the complete Chopin Mazurkas for Ondine.

This first volume reveals an authoritative, idiomatic, and individual stylist. He’s generally an epic, large-scale player who favors a wide range of dynamics and articulations. He can be yieldingly lyrical, yet he’s not afraid to get dirt underneath his fingernails.

He playfully inflects the cross-rhythmic phrases in the central section of the B flat Op 17 No 1. While he takes his time over the A minor Op 17 No 4’s decorative tracery, his grounded tempo is fluid and flexible.

Each of Op 30 No 2’s echoed phrases has its own character and color, words that succinctly describe Jablonski’s edgy way with No 3. The tension and release of No 4’s trills wouldn’t be out of place in Scriabin. Op 33 No 2 is not especially fast yet it still conveys boisterous lilt, and with very little sustain pedal for the most part. Jablonski’s effectively understated Op 33 No 3 sets the stage for a strikingly contrasted and personalised B minor No 4. An angular, questioning take on the short and swift B major Mazurka stands out in the well-played Op 41 group.

Needless to say, I look forward to this excellently engineered and annotated release’s follow-up volume.

-- Gramophone (Jed Distler)

This six album boxed set comprises Tanya Ekanayaka’s Twelve Piano Prisms performed by the composer (GP785); works by Valentin Silvestrov performed by Elisaveta Blumina (GP639); Philip Glass’ piano music played by Nicholas Horvath (GP692); and Haro Stepanian’s Preludes (GP760) and Baal HaSulam’s Melodies of the Upper Worlds (GP808) performed by Mikael Ayrapetyan, alongside the pianist’s own A Whole in 12 (GP809). These contemplative contemporary piano miniatures have been expertly curated from the Grand Piano discography, and are sure to leave listeners and critics alike extremely satisfied.

Past praise for previously released volumes included in this set:

Stepanian: 26 Preludes for Piano / Ayrapetyan

Haro Stepanian was a fellow student of Aram Khachaturian. Stepanian himself was certainly a fine composer, based on this collection of preludes written between 1947 and 1965. There are three sets of eight here, completed in 1947, 1948, and 1956, plus two individual preludes written near the end of his life. His style is consistently folk derived, nothing one could call revelatory, but simply well-crafted work across a broad spectrum of emotional expression. The young Armenian pianist Mikael Ayrapetyan is a very fine advocate for this decidedly obscure music.

-- Fanfare

Ekanayaka: 12 Piano Prisms

Tanya Ekanayaka certainly hits her musical mark with these piano pieces. At times contemplative, sometimes raucous, these works have been injected generously with beauty and Rachmaninoff-like technique and drama. These works are certainly recommended to pianists to program for recitals: not only do they take the audience on a lovely, dark journey through the music of different cultures via the lens of a classically-trained pianist, but they sound enjoyable to play.

-- American Record Guide

Silvestrov: Piano Works / Blumina

Silvestrov seems well served by pianist Elisaveta Blumina. All is played and recorded with close and calmingly fervent engagement. Silvestrov’s surprising but pleasing commitment is to a vocabulary chronologically distant from the predominance of the twentieth century, let alone the twenty-first. If he occasionally sounds briefly like Einaudi it is only to remind us that once we listen for more than a couple of minutes Silvestrov is not a minimalist. In this context he is just a composer, one strand of whose creativity is inextricably in thrall to a style that, while familiar, serves his expressive needs better than any other. It is one dimension of the man.

-- MusicWeb International

This new release is the penultimate volume in this acclaimed series of Medtner’s Complete Piano Sonatas performed by series pianist Paul Stewart. Medtner’s 14 piano sonatas, the most significant achievement in this genre by any major composer since Beethoven, span his career. The Sonata-Ballade explores a tempestuous musical allegory – the triumph of Light over Darkness, of Faith over Doubt; while the Sonata in A minor is cast in a single, terse movement, with folkloric elements and frequent use of bell-like features that exude Russianness. By contrast, the ‘Night Wind’ Sonata is a monumental epic of exceptional complexity that stunned Rachmaninov and led composer and critic Sorabji to call it ‘the greatest piano sonata of modern times.’

On his second album with Signum Records, internationally acclaimed violinist Charlie Siem is joined by the Philharmonia Orchestra, conducted by Oleg Caetani to perform works by Beethoven.

Charlie Siem is one of today’s foremost young violinists, with such a wide-ranging diversity of cross-cultural appeal as to have played a large part in defining what it means to be a true artist of the 21st century. Siem has appeared with many of the world’s finest orchestras and chamber ensembles, including: the Bergen Philharmonic, the Camerata Salzburg, the Czech National Symphony, the Israel Philharmonic, the London Symphony, the Moscow Philharmonic, the Oslo Philharmonic, the Rotterdam Philharmonic and the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra.

The Philharmonia is a world-class symphony orchestra for the 21st century, based in London at Southbank Centre’s Royal Festival Hall, resident in cities and at festivals across England, and streaming online.

This is the fourth volume in our The Library EP series. The idea behind it is to explore, maintain and grow our library of close-harmony repertoire. “Close-harmony” is arguably the part of our work for which we are best known, and our library of thousands of pop, jazz and folksong arrangements is one we’re always determined to nurture. The track-listing for each volume in the series is designed to celebrate old favorites alongside brand new arrangements created especially for these recordings, which we hope will become the ‘old favorites’ of the future. The King’s Singers were founded on 1 May 1968 by six choral scholars who had recently graduated from King’s College Cambridge. Their vocal line-up was (by chance) two countertenors, a tenor, two baritones and a bass, and the group has never wavered from this formation since.

A capacious library of Baroque-era works bears the name of the Italian cellist Alfredo Piatti (1822-1901) as an assiduous and pioneering editor, arranger and promoter of music for his instrument. Much less familiar are Piatti’s own original pieces. This is the first modern recording and the only available collection on record of all six sonatas by a man hailed by Liszt as ‘the Paganini of the cello’. Ever true to his word and generous, Liszt presented Piatti with a replacement instrument after the Italian had been forced to sell his cello, having fallen into reduced circumstances. Piatti played with him in concert, as he did with Joseph Joachim and many other luminaries of mid-19th-century Europe. Of all his own music, Piatti was apparently proudest of the sonatas. They were written over an eleven-year period begun in 1885, during the last part of Piatti’s creative life, long established as a celebrity of musical life in Victorian London. He gave the first performances of each one at the series of Popular Concerts, and to huge acclaim. While many virtuosos have written for their own instruments, the cello sonatas of Piatti stand out for their artistic confidence, their balance of extroversion and well-wrought sensitivity to form.

All the Sonatas embody qualities associated with Piatti, especially in the handling of melody, which is distinctly operatic in its lyricism. The slow movements share the passion that Verdi put into the lead characters of his operas. In terms of construction they are also highly varied, while remaining true to the traditions of cantabile and display which underpin his Italian heritage. Born in 1987 in Piacenza, the cellist Lamberto Curtoni introduces this new recording of Piatti’s sonatas with an invaluable survey of the works within the context of their times and their place in the composer’s career.

Christopher Glynn continues his series of Schubert in English releases with a new recording of ‘The Fair Maid of the Mill’ (Die schöne Müllerin) with acclaimed Scottish tenor Nicky Spence. Set to a new translation by writer and director Jeremy Sams, Willhelm Müller’s direct and emotionally-charged poetry became the basis of Schubert’s first cycle to tell a complete story over the course of its 20 songs. Nicky Spence is one of Scotland’s proudest sons and his unique skills as a singing actor and the rare honesty of his musicianship have earned him a place at the top of the classical music profession. Nicky won a record contract with Decca records while still studying at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama and then took a place as an inaugural Harewood Artist at the ENO. Christopher Glynn is a Grammy award-winning pianist, praised for his ‘breathtaking sensitivity’ (Gramophone), ‘irrepressible energy, wit and finesse’ (The Guardian) and ‘perfect fusion of voice and piano’ (BBC Music Magazine). He is also Artistic Director of the Ryedale Festival, where he has been praised as a ‘visionary’ and ‘inspired programmer’ (The Times).

REVIEWS

"The Fair Maid of the Mill [is] extraordinary: For the first time, as a native English speaker, I found myself understanding this song cycle on a more intimate and revelatory level...The meticulousness of word-for-word accuracy is traded for emotional accuracy. Playwright and director Jeremy Sams was commissioned to write this new translation, and his background in both opera and musical theater lends itself well to finding the right words to convey poetic, emotional, and dramatic honesty.

Tenor Nicky Spence’s own sense of crossover theatricality heightens the immediacy and intimacy of the cycle and Sams’s new texts with a verdant tenor that blooms and contracts in emotional fits and starts. (These beats are both offset and at times juxtaposed by pianist Christopher Glynn...) As the journeyman’s dream begins to collapse on itself...Spence spits out his pleas in a fit of jealousy and panic. The clarity with which he delivers the words makes it easy to slip into the language of Schubert’s work and tap into the small details that render the story so devastating at the end—try listening to him sing of how his love 'loves hunting green' without your throat catching a bit. It’s these small details that make this English Müllerin so rich and compulsively listenable.

--Van Magazine (Olivia Giovetti)

This is the third in the Signum label’s sequence of Schubert song cycles using an English version of the texts by Jeremy Sams. His is in no sense a literal translation and is never in the least archly “poetic”, but is instead couched in relatively, plain, direct English which captures the spirit and directness of the original German while jettisoning any faux-Romantic or medieval archaisms such as “fain would I”. The translation is vernacular and quotidian but not modish or vulgar – and Sams does a fine job of reproducing the rhyming, strophic form of some songs, finding workable rhymes which do not sound forced, so in “Mine” we hear “sound, round, resound” and “found”, and “shine, wine, intertwine, combine” and “mine” sequentially to reproduce the effect of the German. The freedom of the English into which some songs are rendered might initially take the listener aback but a moment’s reflection will confirm the aptness and fidelity of Sams’ rendering; hence, the opening song begins “A miller loves to sit and dream of somewhere” rather than “To wander is the miller’s delight, to wander” or some such precious transliteration – and I know which I prefer. Sometimes the translation is both felicitous and amusing, as when in “Impatience” (Ungeduld) Sams picks up on the German: “ich möcht es sän auf jedes frische Beet/ Mit Kressensamen” (I’d like to sow it in every fresh bed with cress seeds) and translates that colloquially as “I want to sow the words in watercress” so that it rhymes with “happiness” in the next line, and in “The Hunter” the miller girl’s cabbage patch (Kohlgarten) is transformed into a “strawberry bed” so that “fruit” rhymes conveniently with “shoot”. Certain lines impress themselves immediately upon the mind of the listener by their memorability, such as the alliterative “The sound of rushing water has mesmerised my mind” in the second song.

Nicky Spence’s diction is so pellucid as to render the provision of the English texts almost superfluous but such thoughtfulness on the part of the label remains a welcome gesture. [Spence's] beautiful, flexible, easily-produced sound...never falters; his tone encompasses both sweetness and power as required and his knack of placing just the right emphasis or applying a momentary pause in the words without unduly disrupting the vocal line is apparent throughout. I particularly like the way he can introduce a desperate sighing note into his timbre without it turning mawkish. Christopher Glynn supports him with some of the most subtle and sensitive pianism I have even heard applied to this work; his playing is by turns as fluid, sparkling and turbulent as rushing water. He and Spence make an ideally matched partnership – fresh and immediate, presenting it in a manner which could easily win new adherents to this miraculous song cycle but, in Glynn’s words, is also capable of 'offering a new perspective to those who know it well.'

--MusicWeb International (Ralph Moore)