Sony Classical is pleased to announce a new batch of reissues from the CBS/Sony and RCA Victor/BMG back catalogues. This latest instalment of the popular series showcases Mozart and Chopin along with conductor Robert Craft’s pioneering Webern recordings and the global journeys of that irrepressible musical explorer Yo-Yo Ma.

Between 1966 and 1974, Glenn Gould paid repeated visits to Columbia’s New York studio to record the piano sonatas of Mozart. Often revelatory, sometimes quirky, but always stimulating, these controversial readings tell us as much about the performer’s own endlessly fascinating musical mind and his conflicting attitudes to Mozart as they do about the composer’s genius at the keyboard. But no other classical sonatas – not even Beethoven’s – were paid the tribute of an integral recording by Glenn Gould. His delight in playing them can be heard throughout this set. Sony Classical is now reissuing the 18 sonatas and two fantasias in a remastered 4-album box.

REVIEW:

Every time I return to Glenn Gould’s set of the Mozart piano sonatas, I’m both aghast and, in some weird way, inspired. Take K310, where the central Andante cantabile rises to an awesome central climax, played staccato, but where the first movement is less Allegro maestoso than Allegro frenetico! Or there’s that strangest of beasts (in Gould’s hands), K331, the opening theme taken so slowly that it sounds as if a (very) young Glenn is tackling it for the first time, head buried in the music, humming away. Yes, things do return to a semblance of normality, though the finale is less ‘alla turca’ than a proud ‘cock o’ the walk’ Turkish trot. Then there are the two Fantasias, K397 in D minor taken at a deathly slow tempo filled with pregnant pauses, a spooky enactment with dark shadows lurking around every corner. Gould’s approach to Mozart in many respects courts extremes but I challenge you to sample any of it and not want to return, if only for a handful of spot checks. It may be outlandish but it’s also utterly fascinating.

--Gramophone (Rob Cowan)

The pianist Anna Zassimova offers us a musical journey through most of Chopin’s creative periods, bringing together miniatures and some larger scaled, highly structured works. We can thus follow the composer’s stylistic evolution: slightly whimsical at first, then works that are often tragic and violent, evolving in his final years towards great luminosity and relative calm.

Highlights of this recital include the Ballades Nos 2 and 4, the Mazurkas, Op. 41 and Op. 50 and the Scherzo No. 4 in E major. The mazurkas can be seen as a kind of diary that Chopin kept throughout his life as an artist, reflecting his deep-rooted attachment to Poland. In them, folklore was entirely recreated and stylized. Considered the finest of Chopin’s creation and among the most representative of romantic music, the Ballads are pure music in its finest form. Without any specific programme, they are said to have been inspired by the poetic ideas of one of his friends, the poet Adam Mickiewicz. Finally, the Scherzo has an almost fairy-tale, luminous atmosphere, although there are more passionate and intense moments, and it thus appears close to the character of the scherzo as it was once conceived.

Nearly all of Daniel Purcell’s surviving solo harpsichord music consists of arrangements, the only clear exception being the short Toccata, a brief essay in the style of the preludes from Henry Purcell’s harpsichord suites. The Suite is a simple but effective arrangement of movements from the composer’s own suite

Along with Vivaldi’s ‘Seasons’ or Beethoven’s ‘Fifth’, Bach’s Brandenburg Concertos belong to those works that are so well-known that we risk taking them for granted. In order to (re-)discover the special qualities that can inspire us today, in 2001 Thomas Dausgaard and the Swedish Chamber Orchestra decided to contact six contemporary composer, asking each of them to compose a companion piece to one of the concertos. Seventeen years later, in 2018, it was time to present the result, with a performance at the BBC Proms of all the works – new and old. Recorded over a period of 18 months leading up to this event, the present boxed set provides a unique opportunity to experience six very different musical minds and idioms entering into conversation with Bach: Mark-Anthony Turnage, Steven Mackey, Anders Hillborg, Olga Neuwirth, Uri Caine and Brett Dean. Bach’s concertos are remarkable in that they are all scored for different instrumental combinations, and part of the brief to the group of composers was to reflect this. In her Aello, Olga Neuwirth has for instance used several ‘instruments’ to stand in for Bach’s harpsichord, including a synthesizer, a milk frother and a typewriter. Brett Dean, on the other hand, has stayed very close to Bach’s instrumentation, but has chosen to write his work as a preparation for Brandenburg Concerto No. 6 – an Approach to Bach’s extremely tight canonic writing. In performing the twelve works the orchestra and Dausgaard are joined by leading soloists including Clare Chase, Mahan Esfahani, Håkan Hardenberger, Pekka Kuusisto and Tabea Zimmermann.

Between 1791 and 1804, Joseph Haydn arranged some 400 traditional songs for publishers in Scotland and England. Almost all of the songs were Scottish and the most common setting was for voice and piano trio. There have been numerous recordings and performances of the arrangements by these forces, but on this disc The Poker Club Band offer their listeners something quite different. Taking its name from one of the Edinburgh clubs at the heart of the Scottish Enlightenment, the ensemble consists of four early music specialists and a traditional singer. They have retained Haydn’s violin and cello, but the keyboard part has been adapted for harp and guitar following indications that the harp was commonly used for contemporary performances of Scottish traditional repertoire. The Gaelic singer James Graham, with his idiomatic Scottish timbre, and the period instruments – of which Masako Art’s single-action pedal harp from 1809 is known to have been in Scotland around the time – brings us that much closer to what a performance in an Edinburgh salon might have sounded like around 1800. The songs themselves range from the cautionary tale of a girl who married for love and now is doomed to a life of hard and dirty work on her husband’s farm (The Mucking of Geordie’s Byer) to love songs such as Oran Gaoil, with a text by Robert Burns. Providing variety, some instrumental 18th century arrangements of Haydn originals are included while the album ends with the well-known atmospheric Lament by the Scottish fiddler Niel Gow.

This year, we celebrate the thirty-year conducting career of Neeme Järvi with Chandos records, as well as the conductor’s own seventy-fifth birthday. Chandos marks the occasion with this two-disc set of highlights, featuring a varied selection of concert hall rarities and core classics, along with some popular showpieces and examples of Järvi’s championing of Estonian and American music. Gramophone said of his recently concluded Halvorsen series, “Järvis finds in the music a drama and pathos that might come as a revelation even to the composer.”

At the age of 20, Henry Purcell entered his 14 Fantasias and two In Nomines into an autograph bearing the title ‘The Works of Hen; Purcell, A.D. 1680’. Despite his youth Purcell was already making his mark as a composer, writing music for the London theatres and holding posts at Westminster Abbey and at court. But unlike his works for the theatre and the church, which were intended for specific occasions, very little is known about the impulse behind fantasias. Composed for between three and seven parts they are a consciously anachronistic distillation of an old style at a time when the reigning taste was for more modern sounds – for dance-based music with lively rhythms and hummable tunes. It isn’t even clear what kind of ensemble they were intended for: given the association with older music, one might assume that Purcell had viols in mind, but the distribution of the parts is not always in keeping with the standard sizes of the viol consort – nor for that matter those of the violin consort.

Were the fantasias in fact ever performed? None of these questions has a satisfactory answer, and in this respect the Purcell Fantasias resemble Bach’s The Art of the Fugue, because of their quality and inventiveness but also owing to the mysteries that surround them. The collection is here performed by Chelys Consort of Viols, following up on three previous and acclaimed releases on BIS featuring the music of Michael East, John Dowland, and Christopher Simpson.

REVIEW:

The Chelys readings, clean and rather circumspect, merit strong consideration for those interested in these youthful and intellectual Purcell works. Nicely recorded by BIS at Girton College Chapel, Cambridge, they don't overdo the mystery: the sound is clean and the polyphony clear. The pungent dissonances scattered through these works, which were a feature of the tradition (not just of Purcell's pieces), emerge with the proper emphasis, but the Consort does not lean into them unnecessarily.

-- AllMusic.com (James Manheim)

BIS ecopak Yevgeny Sudbin has previously recorded Beethoven’s piano concertos – releases which have received international acclaim, for instance on the website ClassicsToday.com: ‘A Beethoven experience you will not want to miss.’ For his first disc featuring solo works by Beethoven, Sudbin has chosen the two final sonatas and the Six Bagatelles, Op. 126 – late works written between 1821 and 1824, just a couple of years before the composer’s death. There are numerous anecdotes that testify to the fact that Beethoven was highly temperamental. But in his liner notes to this disc, Sudbin writes of another, contrasting side to the composer: ‘warmth, generosity and wisdom – with unexpected outbursts of cheeky humour – are also unmistakably among Beethoven’s qualities and particularly evident in the works on this recording’. If Beethoven’s 32 piano sonatas form one of the most important collections of works in the history of music, then the final ones belong to his crowning achievements. Various musicians and musicologists have commented on them, hearing a hard-won triumph of the spirit in the great fugue of the final movement of Op. 110, and interpreting Op. 111 – and especially its second movement, the famous Arietta – as a last farewell. The set of Bagatelles was composed only months after Beethoven had completed his monumental Ninth Symphony. It became the last work for piano to be published in his lifetime, and together the six brief pieces form a distillate of a lifetime of writing for and playing the piano.

Seventy years ago, on the 29th July 1951, Wilhelm Furtwängler conducted Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9 at a concert marking the reopening of the Bayreuth Festival after seven years of silence following the Second World War. It was a momentous occasion, and the concert was broadcast by Bavarian Radio and transmitted across the world, for instance by Swedish Radio. Using the analogue mono tape as digitized by Swedish Radio, the present disc reproduces the broadcast as it would have been heard by listeners in Sweden: we have chosen to not change anything, not to ‘brush up’ the sound, not to clean and shorten the pauses or omit audience noises within the music, but to keep the original as it was. In this way we hope to recreate the feeling of actually sitting in front of an old radio in 1951, listening to this concert – a true historical document.

REVIEW:

Nothing else in the realms of recorded music is quite like it and I would urge you to share the experience...I’m not claiming that this performance will suit every mood or even every taste, but if and when it does hit target it will leave you changed for ever.

-- Gramophone (Editor's Choice, March 2022)

Sony Classical is pleased to announce a new batch of reissues from the CBS/Sony and RCA Victor/BMG back catalogues. This latest instalment of the popular series showcases Mozart and Chopin along with conductor Robert Craft’s pioneering Webern recordings and the global journeys of that irrepressible musical explorer Yo-Yo Ma.

The supremely versatile Yo-Yo Ma has been aptly referred to as a musical omnivore. In addition to all the significant classical works written for his instrument, the eclectic cellist has passionately embraced the music of Latin America and Asia as well as American bluegrass and jazz. Seven of his most adventurous and acclaimed musical journeys have been collected by Sony Classical in a CD box entitled “Crossing Borders”. They include Appalachia Waltz and Appalachian Journey with Mark O’Connor and Edgar Meyer (Grammy 1998: “Best Classical Crossover Album”); Soul of the Tango – The Music of Astor Piazzolla (Grammy 1997: “Best Classical Crossover Album”); Obrigado Brazil – traditional songs and compositions by Antônio Carlos Jobim and Pixinguinha (Grammy 2000: “Best Classical Crossover Album”); Silk Road Journeys: When Strangers Meet and Japanese Melodies; Anything Goes: the cellist playing mostly Cole Porter with Stephane Grappelli; and, last but not least: Hush, his famous collaboration with Bobby McFerrin.

Review excerpts of previously released volumes included in this set:

Appalachian Journey / Yo-Yo Ma, O'Connor, Meyer

The Mark O’Connor/Yo-Yo Ma/Edgar Meyer power trio took a while to follow up their 1996 hit Appalachia Waltz, yet, no doubt about it, Appalachian Journey was worth the long wait. I love the gnarly funk of the opening cut, “1B”, with hard swinging fiddle and cello lines anchored by Meyer’s earthy, off-center pedal points. The less driving, more reflective reels, and lyrical Duet for Cello and Bass fuse bluegrass, wistful folk tunes, and stark Copland-esque landscapes into organic wholes that sound better with each rehearing. The deliciously virtuosic Caprice for Three proves that players of this caliber can channel their super-chops toward listening out loud. Guest vocal stints by James Taylor and Alison Krauss add the spice of variety to the mix, along with a potential wider audience. And why not? The arrangements are judiciously varied, perfectly paced, and exploit the violin/cello/string bass configuration in ingenuous ways. One wonders how this trio might approach certain pieces over a looser, more extended improvisational time frame. I hope we won’t have to wait another three and a half years to find out. If you’re in a blue mood, this disc will provide an antidote with long-range positive side effects. Fun, fun stuff.

-- ClassicsToday.com (10/10, Jed Distler)

Obrigado Brazil / Yo-Yo Ma:

The music on this enchanting, flavorful CD varies from classical to samba to bossa nova; the combinations range from guitar, flute, and cello to female voice (the remarkable Rosa Passos), cello, guitar, percussion, piano, and bass; to simple cello and piano; to cello and two guitars. The overriding element is rhythm; each selection has a beat which is both infectious and sensual, but the contexts are splendidly varied. It's impossible to get bored or tired listening to this creative CD; it's unique--just like Yo-Yo Ma himself--and endlessly surprising. It may not be quite what we'd call "classical" music, but it is many kinds of music, and they all will delight. The other musicians are as impressive on their instruments as Ma is with his cello, and that's saying a great deal.

-- ClassicsToday.com (Robert Levine)

Silk Road Journeys - When Strangers Meet

Silk Road Journeys is an invigorating, eye-opening ride. To be sure, some pieces fare better than others, but as with any unforgettable trip, you tend to forget the occasional bumps you hit along unknown roads. Our guides are a generally stellar selection of master artists, including the luminary pipa player Wu Man and kemencheh and setar player Kayhan Kalhor. These two musicians in particular can go head-to-head in virtuosity with Yo-Yo Ma any day. Complemented by cleanly articulated sound, Sony Classical has produced a real keeper in its Yo-Yo Ma catalog, but the cellist makes his collaborators the true focus of this album.

For their fourth release with BIS, the United Strings of Europe with their director Julian Azkoul present another innovative programme, dedicated this time to the night, a source of wonder and fascination, rich with metaphorical associations. The ensemble’s varied, tailor-made programme features counterpoint, aching dissonance and chromaticism from across a range of styles spanning nearly 500 years, from the Renaissance to the present day.

The album is built around two post-romantic masterpieces: Richard Strauss’s Metamorphosen (here in an arrangement by Éric Mouret), a work composed during the final months of the Second World War that evokes destruction, mourning, nostalgia, but also hope for progress and transformation, and Arnold Schoenberg’s Verklärte Nacht, based on a poem by Richard Dehmel, which, in a nocturnal dialogue between a man and a woman, shows the power of love that can overcome the greatest challenges. These two major works are joined by arrangements for strings of vocal pieces by Maddelena Casulana, Carlo Gesualdo and Henry Purcell, as well as a new work by Daniel Kidane, Be Still, featuring percussionist Beibei Wang, a reflection on recent years marked by lockdowns during which everyday markers, such as meeting with friends and family, travelling or attending concerts vanished.

Michael Tippett’s oratorio A Child of Our Time was composed between 1939 and 1942 as a direct response to the events leading up to (and including) the notorious Kristallnacht, in November 1938, in National Socialist Germany. Tippet first intended to write an opera, but quickly determined that this would inevitably be too literal, and that the (rather neglected) oratorio form lent greater scope for reflective and meditative interjections to the narrative.

Hoping to persuade his friend and mentor T.S. Elliot to write the libretto, he sent the poet such an intricately detailed plan that Elliot responded by suggesting that Tippett, having thought so carefully about it, prepare the text himself – which he duly did. (He then went on to write his own libretti for all his future large vocal works). Set for choir, orchestra, and four soloists, the work adopts a structure that owes a debt to Handel’s Messiah, which Tippett had studied intensively in the 1930s. In addition, Tippett wanted to incorporate choral interludes much as Bach had done in his passions. Rejecting Lutheran chorals and Jewish hymns, he finally settled on African-American spirituals of which he placed five within the work.

Sir Andrew Davis conducts the BBC Symphony Orchestra and Chorus, with an exceptional quartet of soloists. The album was recorded in Surround Sound in Croydon’s Fairfield Halls following live performances in London’s Royal Festival Hall.

REVIEW:

Bass Ashley Riches shines particularly as the narrator, bringing a terrific clarity and command to the role. The BBC Symphony Orchestra give a fine performance, but the real star of the show is the BBC Symphony Chorus.

— BBC Music Magazine

John Storgårds and the BBC Philharmonic continue their survey of Shostakovich’s late symphonies with this recoding of the 14th, with Elizabeth Atherton and Peter Rose as soloists. Completed in the spring of 1969, and premiered later that year, the symphony is written for soprano, bass and small string orchestra with percussion, setting eleven linked setting of poems by four authors. Most of the poems deal with the theme of death, particularly that of unjust or early death, and indeed all four of the poets had died prematurely and / or in unnatural circumstances – Wilhelm Küchelbecker in Siberian exile for his part in the 1825 Decembrist uprising, Federico García Lorca assassinated during the Spanish Civil War, in 1936, Rainer Maria Rilke of blood poisoning following an accident in 1926 and Guillaume Apollinaire in 1918 during the Spanish influenza pandemic. The Six Verses of Marina Tsvetayeva were composed in 1973, originally for contralto and piano, and subsequently arranged for chamber orchestra (the version we hear here, with Jess Dandy as soloist). The recording was made at Media City in Salford, Manchester, in Surround Sound, and is available as a hybrid SACD and in Spatial Audio.