His parents, Italian immigrants to Brazil, named Radamés Gnattali after the male lead in Verdi’s Aida, and his mother began to teach him the piano at the age of six. But even though he did become a highly skilled pianist, performing Tchaikovsky’s piano concerto in B flat at Rio de Janeiro’s Teatro Municipal at the age of 23, it was as a composer (and arranger) of music of a distinctly Brazilian cast that he would make his name. Gnattali developed an individual style, which today might be called cross-over, by infusing inflexions of popular music into a classical framework, over a fluid harmonic technique. Jaunty rhythms and striking melodic lines appear in a wholly uncontrived manner: they formed his everyday working material, as an arranger of popular music for record companies and radio stations. When composing concert music Gnattali usually did so for musicians that he collaborated with in popular music, such as the guitarist Laurindo Almeida, as well as for himself. A large production includes works for a great variety of scorings, but for this disc Franz and Débora Halász have chosen to present chamber and solo works for guitar and piano, inviting the cellist Wen-Sinn Yang to join in for the composer's Sonata for guitar and cello. As reflected in some of the titles, Brazilian dance forms (samba, batuque, choro) play an important role in this music, which for a long time was disregarded by a musical establishment suspicious of its great fluency and popular appeal; music which in every bar expresses the soul of Brazil – Alma brasileira.

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.

One of the New York Times' 5 Classical Albums to Hear Now

Shortlisted for the Gramophone Awards

Perhaps nobody since John Barbirolli has been able to make strings sing like the brilliantly talented John Wilson.

Following their critically acclaimed album of English Music for Strings, Sinfonia of London and John Wilson turn to Germany and three outstanding works for string orchestra. Franz Schreker’s Intermezzo, the oldest piece here, was composed in 1900, before Schreker’s rise to fame in the opera houses of Germany and Austria, but shows strong indications of what was to follow. Korngold composed the Symphonische Serenade following his return to Vienna from Hollywood after the Second World War, and shortly before he wrote his Symphony in F sharp. Korngold effortlessly conjures a vivid range of colors and textures from his large forces (32 violins, 12 violas, 12 cellos, and 8 basses) in a work that explores the virtuosity of the players to the full. Composed in 1945, as a reaction to the horrors of the war, and the desecration of German culture, Richard Strauss’s Metamorphosen for 23 solo strings seems to look backwards to the German Romantic tradition (a trait even more evident in his Four Last Songs, of 1948). The moving final passage, marked ‘In Memoriam’, leaves the listener to contemplate in silence.

"Wilson’s release wins hands down. Part of the victory is due to the conductor and string players’ panache…whatever the mood, the Sinfonia’s tone stays full-blooded and refulgent, just like Chandos’s recording." -Times of London

REVIEW:

What a fine and stimulating recording this is. Perhaps nobody since John Barbirolli has been able to make strings sing like the brilliantly talented John Wilson. Franz Schreker’s “Intermezzo” here has a sheen to it that is intensely delicate one minute and impossibly sumptuous the next. Strauss’s “Metamorphosen” has rarely had such an agonizingly drawn out, lovingly burnished performance as this. Even better is the rarity that accompanies it: Korngold’s Symphonic Serenade, a disfigured, difficult recollection of all that poignantly easygoing light music in the Austrian tradition, written when he returned to Vienna from Hollywood. The hush that Wilson finds for its slow movement is indescribably haunting.

-- The New York Times

Although most widely remembered for his operettas in partnership with W.S. Gilbert, Sir Arthur Sullivan was the most famous of all British composers of the nineteenth century. He was revered as a composer of oratorios, and was urged by Queen Victoria to compose a grand opera. The result, Ivanhoe, achieved 155 consecutive performances (in an opera house especially built for it). Achieving equal success in his lifetime, his substantial legacy of songs fell into neglect in the twentieth century, but as this album demonstrates Sullivan's endlessly fertile melodic gifts withstand comparison with those of any other song composer. David Owen Norris and his quartet of outstanding young British singers deliver this fascinating programme with terrific style and panache.

This disc is a double tribute. The first work, Pictured Within, is a collective effort conceived as a major project to mark the 60th birthday of conductor Martyn Brabbins, whose reputation in new music and British music is beyond reproach.

Following the pattern of Edward Elgar’s Enigma Variations, Pictured Within is a series of 14 variations on a theme, each of which takes up the character of the equivalent variation in Elgar’s work, the difference being that here 14 different composers have each contributed a variation in tribute to Brabbins.

Also on the SACD is Jaakko Kuusisto’s Symphony, a fitting tribute to the composer, conductor, and violinist who passed away in 2022. Illness left Jaakko no time to complete his work, so it fell to his brother Pekka – who conducts here – and Jari Eskola to finish it. The result is a powerful piece, full of familiar themes and melodies derived from Jaakko’s existing compositions, to which are added autobiographical extra-musical elements. The moving conclusion is a collage of fragmented phrases inspired by the signals emitted by lighthouses and ships, as if Kuusisto’s spirit had been sent out to sea.

The legendary conductor Neeme Järvi celebrated his eighty-fifth birthday in the summer of 2022, in Tallinn, giving a series of concerts with his beloved Estonian National Symphony Orchestra. This album serves not just as a commemoration of those wonderful concerts, but also as a personal calling card for this remarkable musician. The concert overture Polonia, published in 1836, may well have been inspired by Wagner’s encounters with defeated Polish nationalists in Leipzig in 1832. Wagner wrote several concert overtures during this period – whilst plans for his revolutionary operatic output were developing – including Christoph Columbus and Rule Britannia!!

Max Reger composed the Serenade in G major in 1905 – 06; it demonstrates the style and talent of this too-little-heard composer. Brahms set Schicksalslied (Song of Destiny), a poem by Friedrich Hölderlin, in two movements with chorus, but then added a third, an orchestral postlude. Ave verum corpus, possibly Mozart’s best-known setting for chorus, rounds off the program.

REVIEWS:

The quality of choral singing of the Latvian State Choir is rightly celebrated, and this is a beautifully shaped performance [of the Schicksalslied], with vocal warmth and blend, and the orchestral postlude bringing a radiant conclusion.

-- BBC Music Magazine

This is a marvellous recording...Although Brahms’s Schicksalslied enjoys numerous recordings, Järvi’s is distinguished by the radiance and depth of the first and last sections as well as the vehemence of the central allegro.

-- Gramophone

As well as being a thoroughly attractive concert conducted with characteristic élan by Chandos star conductor Neeme Järvi, this program represents for collectors a very useful way of acquiring a variety of pieces, some unfamiliar, some less so… this is a very tempting disc.

-- CDChoice.co.uk

Still in his twenties, Pétur Sakari studied in his native Finland and in Paris and made his recording début at the age of 18. On his previous disc for BIS, he performed works by five French composers, receiving international acclaim with top marks in Diapason as well as on the Klassik-Heute website. For the present disc, Pétur has chosen to focus on César Franck, performing the composer’s Three Pieces and Three Chorales ‘pour grand orgue’ on an instrument perfectly suited to the repertoire. Completed in 1880, the great organ in the Sainte-Croix cathedral of Orléans is a major – and well-preserved – example of the art of Aristide Cavaillé-Coll, the same maker who had previously built Franck’s beloved organ in Sainte-Clotilde in Paris. (‘My new organ? It’s an orchestra!’ was Franck’s verdict.) Together the two gave the French organ tradition a new impetus with Franck laying the groundwork for a French symphonic organ style while Cavaillé-Coll constructed hundreds of organs capable of producing a sound that was full, homogeneous and modern. The Trois Pièces, which closes with the famous Pièce héroïque, were written for a Cavaillé-Coll instrument built for the 1878 World Fair in Paris. Twelve years later, and only weeks before his untimely death, Franck completed the Trois Chorals. The idea of writing organ chorales was inspired by Bach, but Franck composed them ‘with quite a different plan’: instead of traditional hymns they use an original, freely composed melody which is gradually revealed ‘with great imagination’, as Franck himself put it in a letter to his publisher. Both the Pieces and especially the Chorales have become central works in the repertoire of concert organists.

Friends of long standing as well as regular partners in chamber music, Michael Collins and Stephen Hough bring their combined musical insights and expertise to bear on Johannes Brahms’s sonatas for clarinet and piano. Together with the composer’s trio for clarinet, cello and piano and clarinet quintet, the sonatas are among the most treasured works in the repertoire of the instrument – but it is partly down to good luck that we have them at all. When Brahms in 1891 heard the clarinetist Richard Mühlfeld, principal clarinet of the Meiningen Court Orchestra, he had already announced his retirement. He was enraptured by Mühlfeld’s playing and its vocal qualities, however, and made a ‘comeback’: during the following couple of years he composed all four of his clarinet works. These were written especially for Mühlfeld, whose spirit does seem to pervade the two sonatas – we hear an unusually sunny and lyrical Brahms, with plenty of opportunity to sing for both instruments. When the sonatas were published, they appeared with alternative viola parts to replace the clarinet, and soon violin versions prepared by the composer were also brought out. For the opening work on the disc, Michael Collins has therefore taken a leaf out of Brahms’s book, by adapting the composer’s Violin Sonata No. 2, another late work. The amount of adaptation needed is small: a lot of the violin writing fits the clarinet well, and the sonata share much of the songlike quality of the two ‘real’ clarinet sonatas.

REVIEW:

Clarinetist Michael Collins must have lived with the two Op. 120 sonatas for all his professional career. That seems abundantly clear from his superb playing in both of those sonatas. His Brahmsian experience is also evidenced by his highly persuasive and idiomatic adaptation of Op 110. As for Stephen Hough, his Brahms credentials are well known, not least for his splendid recordings of the piano concertos (review) and, more recently, of the late piano pieces (review). It was a great idea to bring these two fine musicians together for this project and the idea has paid off handsomely.

The production values are high. The recorded balance is ideal and the instruments are reproduced truthfully. I listened to the stereo layer of this SACD and was very satisfied with the results. As I’ve already indicated, Stephen Johnson’s essay is excellent.

This is a disc which will grace any Brahms collection.

-- MusicWeb International

During his lifetime, Hugo Alfvén became known as one of Sweden’s principal composers of his time, with works that struck a chord with a wide audience. As a result of his popularity, a nationwide collection was held in celebration of his 70th birthday in 1942, with the proceeds used to build Alfvéngården, the composer’s home during his final years. Now, 80 years later, Elin Rombo and Peter Friis Johansson are releasing their tribute to Alfvén’s 150th anniversary, recorded at Alfvéngården using the composer’s own piano. Alfvén is primarily known for his orchestral music – including the ubiquitous Swedish Rhapsody No. 1 – and as a composer of choral music. As befits the setting, the focus of the present disc is on more intimate works, however – namely songs and piano pieces. Some of the pieces are closely related to the venue – Fyra låtar från Leksand (Four Tunes from Leksand) is a piano version of folk tunes collected from a local fiddler and Så tag mit hjerte (‘So take my heart’), Alfvén’s most frequently performed song, was composed there in 1946 as a present to his wife.

REVIEW:

Soprano Elin Rombo has a lithe voice that suits the songs exquisitely, dulcet in ‘The Evening’ and dramatic in the following Seven Poems by Ernest Thiel. She’s not afraid to modulate her tone down to a nearly Gollum-like whisper to wring all possible expression out of a phrase. Four Tunes from Leksand are folk settings for piano that don’t mind taking advantage of the instrument’s capabilities while steering clear of both over-decorating and obtuse reharmonizations.

Rombo rejoins for Two Lyrical Moods and their warm-blooded charm; the recital ends with ‘Sa tag mit Hjerte’ (So Take My Heart), Alfven’s best-known song. Johansson brings plenty of personality to the piano parts. He plays Alfven’s own Steinway A-188 from around 1908; its sound is a little lighter and tangier than a modern grand. Texts in Swedish and English.

-- American Record Guide

Composed in feverish bouts interrupted by long periods of inaction, Hugo Wolf’s Italienisches Liederbuch was brought to completion in 1896. The 46 songs are settings of poems in German by Paul Heyse, after Italian folk songs – miniatures with a duration of less than 2 minutes in most cases. Heyse’s collection numbered more than 350 poems, but Wolf ignored the ballads and laments, and concentrated almost exclusively on the rispetti. These are short love poems which chart, against a Tuscan landscape, the everyday jealousies, flirtations, joys and despairs of men and women in love. Heyse’s translations often intensify the simple Italian of the original poems, and in their turn, Wolf’s settings represent a further heightening of emotion. Miniatures they may be, but many of the songs strike unforgettably at the heart. When Wolf’s songbook is performed in its entirety, it is usually done by a male and a female singer, although this is not specified in the score. It is not uncommon for them to be transposed, but the songs are written for high voices, and are here performed by a soprano and a tenor – Carolyn Sampson and Alan Clayton – with Joseph Middleton at the piano. The performers have chosen to present the songs in the order they appear in the printed collection, dividing them between themselves.

REVIEWS:

The Italian Songbook consists of two groups of songs. The first group, consisting of 22 songs, was set in 1890 – 1891 and the second group with 24 songs in 1896. Strictly speaking it isn’t a cycle, and in some recordings the interpreters have opted for their personal order of the songs, but many stick to the order in which Wolf published them, and this is also the case with the present issue. The two singers are well-matched. Carolyn Sampson has been an avid advocate for baroque music for many years, but she has also ventured into art songs...Tenor Allan Clayton‘s career has focused on opera – his Peter Grimes at Covent Garden recently was a resounding triumph – but he has also frequently given song recitals...So, I had high expectations when I set to work with this disc.

The first thing I observed was the sensitive playing of Joseph Middleton, pliable and perceptive. Secondly I noted Carolyn Sampson’s girlish tone in Auch kleine Dinge, and her soft and inward reading. This was a recurrent feature throughout the programme.

When Allan Clayton made his entrance, he at once convinced me: here he displayed his armoury of nuances that had enthralled me on the Liszt disc, his beautiful pianissimo – listen to the end of Gesegnet sei (tr. 4) or the mastery half-voice in Der Mond hat eine schwere Klag’ erhoben – but on the reverse side of the coin his dramatic capacity was just as telling: Wenn du mich mit den Augen streifst und lachst (tr. 38) is just one instance. And Carolyn Sampson has the same sense for drama: so agitated and energetic in Wer rief dich denn? (tr. 6). Looking back on my notes, I see that the pad is littered with positive remarks and exclamation marks, but printing them here would surely be rather tiresome reading – and I rather leave it to those who buy the disc to find all the felicities these two well-endowed Liedersänger indulge in. The prestige word for all singing of Lieder is nuances, and from the above I believe that readers have understood that Carolyn Sampson and Allan Clayton are masterly in that respect.

How do they stand up against the competition from other recordings? Very well, I would say...Sampson and Clayton are certainly among the top contenders.

-- MusicWeb International

After many acclaimed releases on BIS, most recently ‘Sounds and Sweet Airs – A Shakespeare Songbook’ (BIS-2653), Carolyn Sampson’s latest recital with Joseph Middleton lives up to its name: it is an eloquent testimony to the English soprano’s love of her art. This programme artfully blends well-known and lesser-known lieder by German and Austrian masters such as Schubert, Mendelssohn, Brahms, Richard Strauss and Hugo Wolf with French songs by Gounod, Poulenc and Franck, as well as works by Anglo-Saxon composers such as Hubert Parry, Samuel Barber and Ivor Gurney. Female composers are not forgotten, with rarely-performed songs by Rita Strohl based on slightly risqué poems by Pierre Louÿs, music by Cheryl Frances-Hoad, Kaija Saariaho – who has recently passed away – and Deborah Pritchard, whose song presented here was composed especially for Sampson. And while Leonard Bernstein’s comically cheeky song ‘I hate music’, appears to be a call not to let music take itself too seriously, Errollyn Wallen’s ‘Peace on Earth’, which concludes the album, invokes calm and encourages us to find peace, a message that seems more relevant today than ever.

This recital brings together two established classics from the 20th century with lesser-known works from the repertoire for violin and piano. Alongside Ravel’s Sonata, a work that reveals the influence of jazz on the French composer, and Prokofiev’s wartime Sonata, Op. 94a, an idiomatic arrangement of its original version for flute, we find compositions by Arvo Pärt, Lili Boulanger and Grazyna Bacewicz, which, at times meditative, at times lyrical, at times folk-inspired, testify to the richness of this repertoire. These works are here performed by Johan Dalene, the Swedish-Norwegian winner of the 2019 Nielsen Competition. The present disc is violinist’s fourth release on BIS, following a recording of the Nielsen and Sibelius Concertos named Editor’s Choice by Gramophone and awarded the 2023 Swedish Grammis Award for Best Classical, the Tchaikovsky Concerto described as ‘one of the finest violin débuts of the last decade’ in BBC Music Magazine, and ‘Nordic Rhapsody’, a violin and-piano recital that was awarded distinctions such as Diapason d’or and Gramophone’s Editor’s Choice. As with that release, Dalene is given here the expert support of Christian Ihle Hadland who has also appeared on other much-lauded recordings, most recently one dedicated to Saint-Saëns’ violin sonatas.

REVIEW:

The young violinist Johan Dalene was named Gramo­phone’s Young Artist of the Year in 2022 and has performed with the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra, Czech Philhar­monic, and San Francisco Symphony. He’s also made his mark in Halls Wigmore and Carnegie, and on this brilliantly assembled collection of works by Arvo Part (Fratres), Maurice Ravel (Sonata in G major for violin and piano), Lili Boulanger (Nocturne), Sergei Prokofiev (Sonata No.2 in D major for violin and piano), and four short works by Grazyna Bacewicz.

The collection’s common thread is a pen­chant for piquant harmonies, atmosphere, and mysticism. Bacewicz’s early “Witraz” (Stained-Glass Window), which she com­posed in 1932 at the age of 23, is unforget­table. If you can begin to imagine magical flashes of light and color diffused through a stained-glass window, dancing across the room as they metamorphosize into sound, you’ll get a sense of how special this miniature sounds. Dalene’s Strad whispers, flashes, darts, and whirls as Hadland shines beside him through light and shadow.

Thanks to the iconic ECM New Series recording by Gidon Kremer and Keith Jarrett, Part’s early mystical masterpiece achieved fame just a few years after it was completed. Where Kremer begins with a whisper, Dalene is far more forthright, his tone irresistibly fresh and gleaming, and the recording benefits from superior engineer­ing. The touching poetry of Boulanger’s subtle miniature stands in sharp contrast to Prokofiev’s fabulous scherzo and circuslike finale. Ravel, too, revels in character, humor, amiability, and spice. The finale brings to mind someone chasing a mosquito around the room with a rolled-up copy of Stereophile in hand.

-- Stereophile

Hélène Clément, violist with the Doric String Quartet, is the current holder of the viola previously owned by both Bridge and Britten. Her ambition, quickly formed once she first played this instrument, has been to create a testament to both composers and the instrument that binds them all together. This recording, where Hélène is joined by pianist Alasdair Beatson and Dame Sarah Connolly, is the realization of that ambition. Hélène writes: ‘Frank Bridge owned and played the beautiful viola made by Francesco Giussani, in Italy, in 1843. Benjamin Britten was Frank Bridge’s most beloved pupil, and Bridge gave him the viola as a parting gift when Britten had to embark on a ship’s journey to the United States at the outbreak of the Second World War. The composers were never to see each other again. To record the viola repertoire of both composers, producing the very sound that they would have had in their ears, the sound that inspired their love for the instrument and its special language, became a priority for me.’

REVIEW:

The soul of this beautifully constructed recital is the luminous variety Hélène Clément extracts from the 1843 Giussani viola owned by Frank Bridge and passed on to his favorite pupil, Benjamin Britten. The anguished overlapping of mezzo and viola at the climax of ‘Where is it that our soul doth go?’ is one of many revelations on the disc.

-- BBC Music Magazine