Louis Lortie’s Chopin series is achieving landmark status, as confirmed by the increasingly enthusiastic reviews of progressive volumes. This fifth one sumptuously highlights the Polish influences in Chopin’s music, offering gems from among the mazurkas and polonaises. Relatively brief in duration and simple in structure, the mazurkas reveal other aspect of Chopin’s music: quirky melodies, strangely chromatic harmonies, oddly accented rhythms, irregular phrase lengths, and wildly contrasting keyboard textures. They represent a fascinating part of Chopin’s output, for audiences and pianists alike. The vigour of the polonaises featured here, including the first two to be published, confirms Chopin as a radical, yet idiomatic transformer of the genre. The Allegro de concert, which Chopin was said to have kept for his projected return to ‘a free Warsaw’, is another link to his beloved country.

The soprano Louise Alder has been described as 'the brightest lyric soprano of the younger generation' (The Arts Desk),'a born actress' (Opera), and as having 'a voice of sparkling beauty' (Gramophone). In this her debut recording for Chandos, she and her pianist, Joseph Middleton, have devised an unusual but rewarding programme that explores the works of six contrasting composers. As she writes in her booklet note: ‘When Joseph suggested making an album of Russian songs, including Russian composers who set poems in other languages, I jumped at the challenge. The more we discussed the repertoire, the more amazed I was to see how well it fitted with my own family history. In 1916 (the same year that Rachmaninoff composed the Opus 38 songs), huge political unrest forced my great-grandparents and family to flee, shutting up the house in Odessa, travelling 1,687 km north by rail to St Petersburg, and then by sleigh into Finland, through Norway, and back to Britain. It is my pleasure to be able to honor my family’s Russian connection with this meandering sleigh ride through Russia, with songs in Russian, French, and German, into Finland, in Swedish, and Norway, in German, back to the UK for a cycle of Britten songs in Russian.’

This special ‘241’ set celebrates ten years of Gianandrea Noseda’s Musica Italiana series. Recording with both the BBC Philharmonic and the Orchestra Teatro Regio Torino, Noseda has shown a remarkable commitment to championing long-forgotten scores by well-known Italian composers as well as the finest works by altogether neglected ones. Both discs feature excerpts of more substantial orchestral and operatic works by several Italian late-Romantics and early-mid-20th c. modernists.

This is Volume 1 in Imogen Cooper’s new series on Chandos Records, dedicated to the complete works for piano by Robert Schumann. Recognised worldwide as a pianist of virtuosity and poetic poise, Imogen Cooper has established a reputation as one of the finest interpreters of the classical and romantic repertoire. She has dazzled audiences and orchestras throughout her distinguished career, bringing to the concert platform a unique musical understanding and lyrical quality.

The Silesian Quartet sprang to international attention with its award-winning recordings of chamber music by Grazyna Bacewicz. Its latest project – the complete quartets of Penderecki – was started in 2012, but not completed until January 2021. Presented chronologically, the works on the album take us on a journey from Penderecki’s early avant-garde ‘sonoristic’ style of the 1960s – the first and second quartets – to the later neo-romantic style of the third and fourth quartets, composed in 2008 and 2016 respectively. Of all Penderecki’s output, the Quartet for Clarinet and String Trio shows the strongest links to the chamber music of the nineteenth century. Penderecki was inspired to write the piece by the 1992 recording by the Emerson String Quartet and Mstislav Rostropovich of Schubert’s String Quintet in C major, D 956. Here the Silesian Quartet is joined by the clarinetist Piotr Szymyslik.

REVIEW:

The works on this superlative new recording of the Complete Quartets date from 1960 to 2016, and some of his finest music is here. As the Silesian Quartet shows in their chronologically presented survey, the earliest music holds up well.

–BBC Music Magazine (5 stars)

Chandos has been attentive in promoting the orchestral works of Alexandre Tansman, who due to the vagaries of fashion has to a great extent been ignored. We now embark on the piano music and a deeply personal project for soloist Margaret Fingerhut. 'My curiosity about the piano music of Tansman began over 20 years ago when I encountered the delightfully languid Berceuse he wrote for the album of Hommages to Roussel, and which I recorded for Chandos. The fact that he was born in Lodz, Poland, where my great-grandparents also came from, spurred me on to find out more about him, and since then I have been assiduously collecting his piano works - quite a task as it turns out that in the course of his long composing career Tansman was nothing if not prolific!' 'I feel his music deserves to be revalued and heard by a new generation of listeners, and so I wanted to create a CD to present an overview of his unique style and musical language. While the influences of Ravel, Poulenc, Milhaud and Stravinsky are apparent, along with jazz-inspired techniques, he himself professed his music to be rooted in his native Polish culture. So the starting point for this disc had to be his Mazurkas - after all, he wrote more of them than almost any other composer except for that other famous Polish exile-in-Paris, Chopin! Listen to his 2nd Mazurka to be transported to a world filled with gentle sweet melancholy. For me his piano music abounds in lyrical expression, tenderness, elegance, grace, good humour and exuberant virtuosity (he loved writing on three staves with huge leaps at great speed!). It seems such a shame that the forces of dogma and experimentalism which ruled Paris since the Second World War left so many casualties in their wake, composers like Tansman who determinedly stuck with neoclassicism and who were not afraid of melody. It is my hope that his individual voice can speak to us afresh'. Margaret Fingerhut displays her special artistry and élan to Tansman's music. Also Available: CHAN9887 Bloch Piano Sonata CHAN9818 Bainton Piano Works CHSA5041 Tansman Orchestral Works, Vol.1

Paganini’s violin, the legendary ‘il Cannone’, made by Giuseppe Guarneri del Gesù in 1743, is one of the most important musical instruments in the history of Western music. Paganini was the greatest virtuoso of his time, acclaimed throughout Europe and an inspiration to performers and composers alike. On his death, he bequeathed ‘il Cannone’ to his home city of Genoa, where it is permanently housed under high security in the Town Hall. It has been heard on record just a handful of times. Francesca Dego was given the honor of recording with it after the success of her first performance on the instrument, in October 2019, when she was invited to play Paganini’s First Violin Concerto at the Paganini Celebratory Concert at Teatro Carlo Felice, in Genoa. Francesca Dego comments: ‘Spending a few enchanted days recording with this priceless treasure was unforgettable. I was overwhelmed when I was first handed the instrument that had caressed the ears of Schumann, Schubert, Goethe, Rossini, Bellini, Berlioz, Chopin, Heine, and so many more. I remember standing in that very room as a young girl, hypnotized, staring at history behind glass, fingers tingling at the thought of touching it. And suddenly there I was, holding Paganini’s violin. I feel so privileged to be able to share the soul of ‘il Cannone’ in a new recording. I remember thinking long and hard about the ideal programme and carefully selecting a series of works paying homage to Paganini. The ‘Cannon’ has pretty much only ever been used to record music by Paganini, so the idea of its celebrated tone teaming up with composers who idolized the Italian virtuoso throughout history is really exciting to me!’

REVIEWS:

Dego has an expressive touch, skittering over the strings, yet finding plenty of attack in Szymanowski’s Trois Caprices. Corigliano’s Red Violin Caprices are at times spellbinding, descending into a guttural, harried chase. Leonardi accompanies sensitively throughout.

– BBC Music Magazine

If you’re keen to hear Paganini’s favourite plaything (or favourite fourstringed one, at any rate), performed with technical finesse and strong musicality while shown off by suitably polished engineering, then this amply does that job.

– Gramophone

Robert Müller-Hartmann was born in Hamburg, in 1884, the son of the piano teacher and clarinettist Josef Müller and his wife, Jenny. He studied in Berlin for four years, but then returned to Hamburg where he pursued a successful career combining teaching, composing, and writing. His works were widely performed by conductors such as Karl Muck, Carl Schuricht, Richard Strauss, Otto Klemperer, and Fritz Busch, and regularly played on German Radio. With the advent of National Socialism, in 1933, Müller-Hartmann was forced to resign from his teaching posts at the University and Conservatory. He continued to teach at Hamburg’s Jewish girls’ school, and was an active contributor to the Jüdischer Kulturbund (Jewish Cultural Federation).

In the mid 1930s, Eugenia and Jacob (Yanya) Hornstein, Hamburg friends of the Müller-Hartmanns, moved to the town of Dorking, some twenty-five miles south of London, and in 1937 the Müller-Hartmanns followed them. The thirteen years Robert spent in England saw the country scarred by the losses, destruction, and privations of war. There was very little time or opportunity for him to secure a place in his adoptive country’s musical life, and despite his considerable success in Germany during the 1920s and ’30s, his reputation had failed to cross the English Channel. A general antipathy to the inclusion of German musical exiles and his modest, rather retiring personality ensured that he would soon be forgotten.