This new album by the Helsinki Baroque Orchestra and Aapo Häkkinen together with the Audi Jugendchorakademie and bassoonist Jani Sunnarborg featuring late works by composer Bernhard Henrik Crusell (1775–1838) makes an important addition to the recordings of Nordic Classical period works and of early Finnish music. Highlight of the album is the world première recording of Crusell’s Viking-themed ‘The Last Warrior’ (Den sista kämpen) from 1834, the composer’s last large-scale composition.

The Brodsky Quartet here turns to the sunshine, bright colors, and deep passions of the South, performing Latin-inspired music for string quartet by composers who all possessed a strong connection to the “South” -- whether the Mediterranean or South America. Favorites and rarities are arm-in-arm, from Paganini’s famed Capricci to chamber gems from composers we think of today only in regard to operatic works. The expert and passionate ministrations of the Brodsky Quartet bring these works to dazzling life.

Kalevala, the Finnish national epic, begins with the creation of the world – from a duck's egg – and goes on to relate a series of tales of magic and adventure. One of the most memorable characters is Kullervo, a flawed hero whose tragic story is told in the course of six songs or runos. These describe multiple murders, rape, incest and finally suicide – a powerful brew that has inspired several Finnish artists. Among them is Jean Sibelius, who in 1891 was a young music student in Vienna. At home in Finland a wave of nationalism was gaining momentum and the Kalevala was an important symbol in the struggle for independence from Russia. Sometimes called a choral symphony, Sibelius's Kullervo was premiered in 1892, receiving a mixed reception and the work was soon overshadowed by the First Symphony. Only in the 1970s did it became more widely known, at which time the score caused something of sensation. Faithful to the urgency and brutality of the score, the present recording was made at live performances at Symphony Hall in Minneapolis, with Osmo Vänskä directing the forces of the Minnesota Orchestra, joined by their Finnish guests Lilli Paasikivi, Tommi Hakala and the eminent YL Male Voice Choir.

Continuing their series of orchestral works by Sir Eugene Goossens, Sir Andrew Davis and the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra turn to the Phantasy Concerto for Violin and the Second Symphony. Goossens was born in London in 1893, into a family of Belgian conductors and musicians. He trained in Brugesand at the Royal College of Music (studying composition under Stanford), played violin in the Queen’s Hall Orchestra under Sir Henry Wood, and became Sir Thomas Beecham’s go-to stand-in because of his ability to conduct the most demanding programmes on little or no rehearsal. Goossens gave the first UK concert performance of Stravinsky’s Le Sacre du printemps, in 1921, and in 1923 became the first music director of the newly formed Rochester Philharmonic, before succeeding Fritz Reiner, in 1931, as chief conductor of the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra. He spent nine years in Australia, as chief conductor of the Sydney Symphony Orchestra, and was instrumental in the planning of the Sydney Opera House. Both works recorded here were composed towards the end of his life. The Second Symphony, dating from 1942–45, is a vivid and personal response to WWII. The Phantasy Concerto for Violin and Orchestra was originally promised to Heifetz, who never performed it. Having returned to London, Goossens gave the work’s premiere in a BBC broadcast in July 1959, and this was followed by a Proms performance in 1960; on both occasions the soloist was Tessa Robbins. Sir Andrew Davis and his Melbourne forces perform these rarely heard works with care and finesse, and Tasmin Little shines as the soloist in the Phantasy Concerto. The album is recorded in Surround Sound.

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

Ondine celebrates Beethoven’s 250th anniversary of birth by re-issuing Olli Mustonen’s Beethoven cycle with the Tapiola Sinfonietta. The three volumes were originally released in three separate volumes from 2007-2009. Mustonen, described by The Sunday Times as “living dream of pianism”, is known for delivering fresh and visionary approach to standard works – this is evident in these masterful recordings of Beethoven’s concertos. Mustonen is a particularly fitting exponent for Beethoven’s music as the composer himself was also both visionary and revolutionary in his approach to tradition. The recording of Piano Concerto No. 1 includes Mustonen’s own cadenzas. Beethoven’s own Piano Concerto arrangement of his Violin Concerto is also featured – one of Mustonen’s signature pieces.

REVIEW:

Mustonen plays the five concertos of a piece, not starting out with Mozartean elegance in the first two and building up to mature Beethoven somewhere in Concerto No. 3. He attacks every bar vigorously and with decisive intent. In my experience, no one since Mikhail Pletnev’s highly original and at times eccentric cycle on DG has sounded so personal in music that too often trips off the fingers with glib sameness.

My overall defense of a cycle that will strike other listeners as totally arbitrary comes down to Mustonen being a composer, not a touring pianist playing subscription concerts. These are a composer’s responses to Beethoven, and Mustonen has the fingers to express them with confident assurance and at times with dazzling flourishes. In my corner this release is one of the most refreshing of the Beethoven year.

– Fanfare

Few performers are more familiar with the musical language of the French composer Olivier Messiaen than the American conductor Kent Nagano. Nagano has had Messiaen's orchestral works and oratorios in his program for several decades now, and he also participated in the world premiere of “Saint François d'Assise”, Messiaen's only opera. During the year 1982 Nagano spent his time with Messiaen in Paris, where not only an artistic relationship but also a close personal one developed between the two musicians.

BR-KLASSIK has now released three masterpieces by the French composer with the magical sound, presented by Kent Nagano to the Munich concert audience in recent years as conductor of the Symphonieorchester des Bayerischen Rundfunks: the oratorio “La Transfiguration de Notre Seigneur Jésus-Christ" (The Transfiguration of Our Lord Jesus Christ) for chorus, seven solo instruments and orchestra, the song cycle "Poèmes pour Mi" for soprano and orchestra, as well as "Chronochromie" for large orchestra. These three live recordings document outstanding artistic events from the Munich concert program of June 2017, July 2018 and February 2019.

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.”

With this new album the award-winning Latvian Radio Choir conducted by Sigvards Kļava is turning its attention to the music of Alexander Grechaninov (1864–1956), one of the masters of Russian liturgic music. Grechaninov’s All-Night Vigil is a fitting continuation to the choir’s albums of sacred music by Sergey Rachmaninov and Pyotr Tchaikovsky. Together with the two latter names, Grechaninov’s All-Night Vigil, completed in 1912, belongs to the central repertoire of Russian liturgic music. Unlike the Vigils by Rachmaninov and Tchaikovsky, Grechaninov’s work was written primarily for concert use. Grechaninov’s All-Night Vigilis a bright, optimistic work full of light. Grechaninov used old traditional Slavic chants as the basis of this work and selected the uplifting, solemnly glorious chants to emphasize the character of joy, exultation and jubilance.

The Latvian Radio Choir (LRC) ranks among the top professional chamber choirs in Europe and its refined taste for musical material, fineness of expression and vocal of unbelievably immense compass have charted it as a noted brand on the world map. The repertoire of LRC ranges from the Renaissance music to the most sophisticated scores by modern composers; and it could be described as a sound laboratory –the singers explore their skills by turning to the mysteries of traditional singing, as well as to the art of quartertone and overtone singing and other sound production techniques.

REVIEW:

While there is no mistaking the urgency of the composer’s calls for mercy in his ‘Great Doxology’, or the joy unleashed in the final hymn to the “Victorious Leader”, the overall tone of the work is gentle, soothing, and altogether loving. As the composer told us, his aim was “to create a harmonic dress for our simple church songs”. For Slavic fire and brimstone, then, you’ll have to look elsewhere.

The Latvian Radio is one of the world’s finest choirs and sounds it here. Informative notes, texts, and an English translation round out an offering that any choral aficionado would be proud to claim.

-- American Record Guide

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.

Conductor Robert Trevino’s fourth album release on Ondine is focused on the late works of composer Einojuhani Rautavaara (1928–2016), one of Finland’s most celebrated composers after Sibelius and known worldwide for his Neo-Romantic, even mystic compositions. Together with violinist Simone Lamsma and the Malmö Symphony Orchestra the artists are presenting four final orchestral works by the celebrated composer.

Two of the works are world première recordings. In his late period, Rautavaara received several communications from the world’s leading violinists requesting him to write works for them. He was able to oblige them, creating several extensive works featuring solo violin. Fantasia (2015) for violin and orchestra is a work of soft Neo-Romantic harmonies and soaring melodic lines. In 2014, Rautavaara was asked to write a new Violin Concerto. This commission resulted in Deux Sérénades for violin and orchestra which remained unfinished at Rautavaara’s death: the second movement was sketched out, but only its beginning was orchestrated. Kalevi Aho, an accomplished composer of symphonies and concertos who studied composition with Rautavaara at the turn of the 1970s, fleshed out the orchestration in 2018. Lost Landscapes (2005/15) was originally written as a violin sonata, but Rautavaara began orchestrating the work in 2013. The first movement was premiered at the contemporary music festival at Tanglewood in July 2015, but the full premiere of the work took place in Malmö in March 2021, with Simone Lamsma as soloist. In the Beginning (2015) is a concise overture-type work commissioned for a concert opener. The titles of his works were important for the composer, forming part of the ‘aura’ of the work and often even constituting the initial impulse for writing the piece in the first place.

REVIEWS:

There is a transcendent intensity to Rautavaara’s music which is heightened by this writing for strings. All of the music here is relatively recent, the earliest from 2005, but here rearranged for these forces. Lost Landscapes, Fantasia, In the Beginning and Deux Serenades (completed by Kalevi Aho, after the composer’s death) are the four works here. Music to be immersed in and a fitting presentation of some of Rautavaara’s last work.

-- Lark Reviews

All these violin concertante works are attractive, but they are also all rather similar, and there is a preponderance of slow music. So they are best not listened to all at the same time. In the Beginning is different: it shows another side of the composer and perhaps has the best music on the disc.

We have a cosmopolitan team here. The soloist, Simone Lamsma is Dutch, has performed widely and already made a number of recordings. Robert Trevino is American and is a rising star. The Malmö Symphony Orchestra is one of Sweden’s leading orchestras. They all provide assured performances. The recording is sympathetic and the booklet informative. The Fantasia and Deux Sérénades have each been recorded by their commissioners but coupled with different composers, so the Rautavaara fan will find this the most convenient way to collect these works.

-- MusicWeb International

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