‘This West Indian tragedy has remained the sole dramatic work of a heroic world in pre-Columbian times that, after a flourishing heyday, was abruptly terminated by foreign violence.’ Egon Wellesz (1925). In musical terms, the Opferung shows Egon Wellesz at the zenith of his creativity. In this music, Wellesz’ emancipation from his mentor Schoenberg and his aesthetics has progressed even further, as throughout his life Egon Wellesz was interested in evolving his own, unmistakable musical diction. The events of 12 March 1938 put a sudden end to this so successful career: As a Jew, monarchist and the writer of ‘degenerate music’, the 53-year-old musician was immediately removed from all of his posts and wanted by the police after ‘the seizure of power’. Following a long illness, Egon Wellesz died in Oxford in 1974.

In Voyages, prolific American composer James Lee III takes the listener on a colorful journey through his endlessly creative orchestral music; painting biblical imagery in Beyond Rivers of Vision and celebrating the joyous Feast of Tabernacles in Sukkot Through Orion's Nebula, using well-known spirituals to celebrate the life of abolitionist Harriet Tubman (Chuphshah! Harriet's Drive to Canaan) and reflecting on the ongoing fight for freedom through his grandfather’s personal experiences in WWII (A Different Soldier’s Tale). His music is played here by the renowned ORF Vienna Radio Symphony Orchestra conducted by Marin Alsop.

REVIEW:

Although there may be some in the audience who may be skeptical of music by composers who are pretty much unknown to them, especially contemporary composers, they are in for a treat, for Chuphshah! is an entertaining, very listenable piece, as are all the compositions on this remarkable AVIE recording. From the opening measures of Sukkot Through Orion’s Nebula, with their snare, bass drum, brass, and percussion excitement, you know right away that this is going to be a fun recording for both musical and audio reasons. In his liner note essay, Lee describes Sukkot as “a festive work for orchestra,” and it is certainly that. Next up is the longest composition on the program, the four-movement A Different Soldier’s Tale, based on stories that Lee’s grandfather told him about his experiences in World War II. As you might expect from such a description, it contains some passages of drama and turmoil, as well as passages of pathos and reflection. Beyond Rivers of Vision is in three movements, of which Lee observes “for the most part the form in these pieces is fantasia-like or rhapsodic.” The music has an otherworldly characteristic to it at times that stands in contrast to the drama of the Soldier’s Tale. The CD closes with the afore-mentioned Chuphshah! Harriet's Drive to Canaan, which is based on aspects of the life of Harriet Tubman. His liner note essay is insightful and helpful in understanding what he is attempting to do in all four compositions, but especially so for this one.

As I indicated at the outset, this release is a treat both musically and sonically. The music is energetic and assertive, with plenty of orchestral effects that will show off a good audio system. The engineering team has done a good job, Alsop and the orchestra sound as though they are having a good time playing this mostly extroverted music, and the end result is a highly recommendable release from an exciting young composer.

-- Classical Candor (Karl W. Nehring)

Despite their different musical languages, all works by the Polish composers Karol Szymanowski and Krzysztof Penderecki presented on this album have in common the inherent character of a lament: Szymanowski’s Stabat mater, which was completed in 1926 and is based on a Polish translation of the Latin medieval poem, is considered as one of the most important compositions of the 20th century. Penderecki’s three-part oratorio Dies Irae was commissioned for a commemoration day in remembrance of the murder victims at the former concentration camp in Auschwitz, and hence carries the epithet “Auschwitz Oratorium”. The album closes with a Threnos for 52 string instruments dedicated to the Victims of Hiroshima. The final haunting bars of this composition present a tutti cluster, starting in a triple forte and fading out to quadruple piano.

Hector Berlioz‘ Lélio, ou Le retour à la vie was a sequel to his Symphonie fantastique, the second part of the Episode of the life of an artist, which had premiered in 1830 at the Paris Conservatory. The piece that is made up of six sections was written and composed during his travels to and in Italy; for this he made use in part of material that he had already prefabricated for the prestigious Rome Prize. Berlioz and the Irish Shakespearean actress Harriet Smithson, whose rejection he had tried to compensate in the Symphonie fantastique, got married in 1833. (It should be noted that marriage by no means turned out to be the fulfillment of all dreams.) In his memoirs about Lélio’s premiere performance in December 1832 at the Paris Conservatory, Berlioz noted the following phrases about his future wife: “... the passionate character of the work, its ardent melodies, its exclamations of love, its outbursts of anger [...] must have made an unexpected and deep impression on her sensitive nature and poetic imagination. [...] When in the monodrama the actor Bocage, who recited the role of Lélio (that is, myself), pronounced the following words: ‘Oh, if I could only find her, the Juliet, the Ophelia for whom my heart is searching!’ […] she thought to herself: ‘My God! ... Juliet, Ophelia ... there’s no doubt, he means me ... And he still loves me as before …’” Michael Gielen conducts the Vienna Radio Symphony Orchestra and the Wiener Singakademie with Herbert Lippert and Geert Smits as highly acclaimed soloists and Joachim Bissmeier as narrator in an absorbing live capture that took place on 7 Dec 2000 at the Vienna Concert Hall.

Dawson’s lone symphony merits more attention than it has received.

-New York Times

William Dawson’s Negro Folk Symphony was premiered by Leopold Stokowski and the Philadelphia Orchestra in 1934 to huge enthusiasm. Its traditional form houses a continuous process of variation and introduces less well-known Spirituals in fragmentary form, while the work’s recurring motifs, remarkable transitions and syncopations are enhanced in Dawson’s 1952 revision heard here.

The Fantasy Variations by composer and teacher Ulysses Kay employs dissonance with great expressivity in a work of textural and coloristic variety. Umbrian Scene, despite its pictorial suggestion, is lean and sombre.

Arthur Fagen has conducted at the world’s most prestigious opera houses, including the Metropolitan Opera and Vienna State Opera, and has led acclaimed orchestras such as the Orchestre de la Suisse Romande and Deutsche Kammerphilharmonie. He has recently conducted the London Symphony Orchestra, the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra and the Philharmonia. Fagen has served as principal conductor in Kassel and Brunswick, chief conductor of the Vlaamse Opera and music director of the Queens Symphony Orchestra. From 2002 to 2007, he was music director of the Dortmund Philharmonic Orchestra and the Dortmund Opera.

REVIEWS:

This new recording of Dawson's only symphony, the first in almost 30 years, has plenty of elegance and fire, though. Arthur Fagen deftly conducts the ORF Vienna Radio Symphony and also includes two fine works by Ulysses Kay. He was another African American - slightly younger than Dawson, but more prolific. Kay's music also deserves to be heard more. His "Fantasy Variations" from 1963 is brilliantly orchestrated and deceptive.

–National Public Radio (Tom Huizenga)

Recorded only twice before, the last time some three decades ago, the fresh approach to William Levi Dawson’s “Negro Folk Symphony” by the conductor Arthur Fagen and the ORF Vienna Radio Symphony Orchestra provides us with another crucial look at this complex, vibrant opus. Because exuberance isn’t the only goal of this music, the cooler sheen of the Vienna’s ensemble sound offers an incisive look at Dawson’s experimentalism. Dawson’s lone symphony merits more attention than it has received.

–New York Times (Seth Colter Walls)

John Adams’ City Noir was inspired by the cultural and social history of Los Angeles, with the composer himself calling it ‘an imaginary film score’, while Fearful Symmetries exemplifies his steamroller motor rhythms. The album ends with a capricious ‘Spider Dance’ of memorable rhythmic drive – a work dedicated to Marin Alsop who leads the ORF Vienna Radio Symphony Orchestra in these performances.

REVIEWS:

Marin Alsop has been quietly championing John Adams abroad—and now at the Met Opera conducting his El Nino— for decades. A new Naxos recording with the ORF Vienna Radio Symphony Orchestra demonstrates her flair and feeling for his distinctive idiom. City Noir, premiered by the LA Phil in 2009, is a vivid, multi-textured score inspired by mid-20th century urban California. With its jazz inflections and brooding canvases, the debt to the City of Angels and film noir are equally clear. This is the work’s third recording but well worth acquiring for Alsop’s theatrical bite and detailed interpretation. Punchier than Robertson and livelier than Dudamel (though Robertson’s ravishing sonics make for essential listening), she holds the attention with a sure eye for the work’s architectural twists and turns. The companion piece is Fearful Symmetries from 1988, one of Adams’s most infectious scores and yet only receiving its second outing on disc. Alsop takes the chugging basic pulse a tad faster than the composer’s own recording without sacrificing any of the infinite variety to be found in Adams’s orchestral details. It’s a joyous, carefree work and beautifully recorded. The same goes for the recorded premiere of Lola Montez Does the Spider Dance. Happily rehabilitated after getting the chop from Girls of the Golden West, this six-minute essay in wriggling cross rhythms is laced with sardonic wit.

-- Musical America (Clive Paget)

John Adams’s City Noir has been pretty well represented on disc in the fifteen years since its 2009 premiere: Marin Alsop’s new recording of the score with the ORF Vienna Radio Symphony is the work’s fourth. In general, this celebration of the city of Los Angeles benefits from her approach. It’s swift and characterful...its structure emerges nicely intact in Alsop’s hands. The central “The Song is for You” boasts a series of idiomatic solos (especially from alto saxophone and trombone), at times seeming to channel Gershwin. [The] ORF’s woodwinds, trumpets, and jazz drummer really shine here. By about any measure, this is some brash and chill Adams.

Even more welcome is the pairing’s account of Fearful Symmetries, a half-hour-long study in rhythm and texture that’s only been recorded once before. Granted, that earlier release was led by the composer and it’s aged well. But Alsop’s new take is downright invigorating. The conductor brings a strong sense of drive to the music, drawing out a beautiful blend of colors – from invitingly swooning saxophone quartet playing to unexpected synthesizer colors – from her forces. What’s more, hers is a reading that manages to vigorously illuminate the sophistication of Adams’s compositional language, circa 1988. It’s a keeper.

-- The Arts Fuse

Among Bruckner’s Symphonies, the Fifth is his contrapuntal masterpiece; the grandest until the Eighth. The tour-de-force of a finale gives us an idea of what the finale of the Ninth might have been like. Its magnificent dark and halting opening with the descending bass line – so effectively recalled in the finale – is inimitable. Although long available only in a disfigured version by Franz Schalk, it is also distinct for never having been the subject to revision or, perhaps, even doubt on the part of Bruckner – who never heard it performed with an orchestra. And yet, when Bruckner wrote this masterpiece, he was still far from establishing himself as a composer in Vienna and his spirits were as low as ever, writing a friend that “my life has lost all joy and delight – in vain and for nothing.” A radiant pinnacle from amid darkness.

Clarinetist Anthony McGill and violinist Rachel Barton Pine are featured soloists on a new recording of two concertos composed in response to societal injustices by Syrian composer Malek Jandali, performed by the ORF Vienna Radio Symphony Orchestra and led by Marin Alsop, a champion of the composer’s work.

Malek Jandali, called “deeply enigmatic” by Gramophone, has been praised for writing “heart-rending melodies, lush orchestration, clever transitions and creative textures” (American Record Guide). His repertoire, which ranges from chamber music to large scale orchestral works, integrates Middle-Eastern modes into Western classical forms and harmony. Rachel Barton Pine, “an exciting, boundary-defying performer” (The Washington Post), performs Jandali’s Concerto for Violin and Orchestra (2014), a work that honors “all women who thrive with courage” according to the composer. Jandali’s concerto is in recognition of the women of Syria, continuing his aim to preserve the cultural heritage of his homeland.

The Violin Concerto incorporates Syrian melodies and idioms into Jandali’s Western-inspired harmonies and forms. Jandali calls upon an array of Syrian and Arabic music forms and folk melodies including multiple sama’i and bashraf (instrumental pieces), and longa (dances), from different maqam (modes). He also makes use of the oud (Arabic lute) in his symphonic scoring to infuse the work with the authentic sound and feeling of Syria. A particularly notable sama’i inspired by traditional Syrian folk music from the area along the Silk Road Is used for a “Women’s Theme.” This theme is representative of the folk music that is a source of comfort and healing for unjustly detained, peaceful Syrian activists and other women and mothers living in fear.

Jandali’s Concerto for Clarinet and Orchestra (2021) is dedicated to its performer Anthony McGill (“the total package… stylish, passionate and limitlessly fluent on the clarinet,” Bachtrack), “in memory of all victims of injustice.” McGill says of the work, ”In the midst of the pain and the violence and injustice in the world all we are left with is the ability to pour our hearts and our souls into something more beautiful, into something more powerful, so it can communicate throughout all time and live on.” Like all of Jandali’s works, the clarinet concerto is infused with ancient themes from Jandali’s homeland as a means of preservation. Jandali explores variations on themes from old and traditional Syrian musical forms and modalities, with striking musical effects and wide ranging highs and lows in the orchestral writing.

Watch our Live Roundtable with Marin Alsop, Malek Jandali and Anthony McGill!

REVIEW:

The soloists shine, and Alsop and her Vienna Radio Symphony Orchestra accompany them faithfully through every mood.

Jandali’s Violin Concerto has a long and thoughtful opening moment, an introspective middle section and a dancelike finale. He uses the Arabic oud in conversation with the violin, as plaintive voices crying out with dignity and restraint. (Kudos to oud soloist Bassam Halaka.) And maybe that buoyant feeling in the finale represents not exuberance but defiance, as a protest against suppression.

The 25-minute clarinet concerto operates mostly on a mysterious plane, one we associate more obviously with Arabic elements. Some of the subtle, sinuous playing and percussive rhythms would not be out of place in a good Hollywood soundtrack – that’s a compliment – as Jandali slowly brings us into his sound world.

-- WDAV (Classical Public Radio, 89.9FM, Lawrence Toppman)

‘The Miraculous Mandarin’ (Op. 19, Sz. 73) is Bartók's last work for the stage. The plot revolves around prostitution, brutality, robbery, murder, being an outsider, (unrequited) love, and finally, as a catharsis, a kind of love-death. The music is relentlessly sharp for long stretches, garishly dissonant, radical—probably the most modern score Bartók created. The premiere (1926) in Cologne was a scandal, and Konrad Adenauer, then Lord Mayor of Cologne, immediately cancelled the performances.The Violin Concerto No. 2, Sz. 112, was composed between August 1937 and December 31, 1938, shortly before Bartók's emigration to the United States in view of the increasingly oppressive political and social climate in Hungary. Unlike the ‘Mandarin,’ the work quickly established itself after its premiere in Amsterdam in 1939 as one of the central violin concertos of the first half of the 20th century, and at the same time, as one of Bartók's greatest creations.

In the course of his long career, Michael Gielen has been Music Director of the Royal Opera in Stockholm, the Belgian National Orchestra in Brussels, the Dutch Opera, and the Frankfurt Opera. He was also Principal Guest Conductor of the BBC Symphony Orchestra and the Staatskapelle Berlin, as well as Chief Conductor of the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra and the Südwestfunk Symphony Orchestra.

Mahler’s cantata Das klagende Lied today constitutes a veritable rarity in concert programmes – in an age that without contradiction recognizes Mahler as one oft he most eminent milestones in the music history of the late 19th and early 20th century. Based on a horror tale written by Mahler himself, this large-scale, vocal symphonic work forms the beginning of Mahler’s more familiar oeuvre. Mahler, at the age of only 20, submitted the score for the Beethoven Prize at the Society of the Friends of Music in Vienna. He did not receive this prize, however, and subsequently made several revisions. It was finally premiered by the composer in Vienna on 17 February 1901 only. The ‚mixed version‘ (also employed for this recording) consisting of the original first movement and the revised version of the other two parts, became customary in the course of the great Mahler Renaissance in the 1960s. The presented live capture with the 2019 deceased Michael Gielen – like Mahler not only a conductor but also a composer – with the ORF Vienna Radio Symphony Orchestra was taken in June 1990 in the Konzerthaus Vienna.

REVIEW:

This performance of Mahler’s youthful horror story realizes every gruesome detail with positively sadistic relish. There are other fine versions in the catalog, but this live version is the most graphic, exciting, and true to Mahler’s youthful vision. Impactful live sound, great singing, great conducting—this is now the one to get.

– ClassicsToday.com

The festival’s co-founder Strauss was a contemporary composer in his time, still capable of writing new and original works more than two decades later, and so the performance of contemporary works remains at the heart of the Festival’s identity, not least as a commitment and a counterbalance to assiduous cultivation of the classics. At a time in which the umpteenth new recording of classical works often seems less than essential, credit is all the more due to the Festival for programming “new music” that is already over a century old. One of this year’s new releases is Krenek’s Orpheus und Eurydike, a work that is several things rolled into one: “classical” subject-matter in the sense of a further reworking – in this case, of the creation myth of opera itself, not just since Monteverdi (1607), but since the primal “big bang” of the operatic cosmos with Caccini/Peri (1600); one of the timeless tales of human existence linking love, longing for the past and their transcendence in art; a bang-up-to-date work of art that nevertheless remains a work of its time, the era in which the Festival was founded; and above all a festal tribute to honour the 90th birthday of a major 20th-century composer. Krenek himself attended the1990 Festival performance documented here. Kokoschka’s stormily Expressionist narrative was put to paper between 1915 and 1917 in the aftermath of a passionate love affair with Alma Mahler, and set to music in headstrong mixed style by Schoenberg’s highly independent pupil between then and 1923. Given the literary standing of the librettist (and of the composer), ORFEO is additionally printing the libretto (from which the title of our text is taken), also bearing in mind that this recording is the first and only one ever to be released.

For this outstanding two-disc set, the RSO Vienna Radio Symphony Orchestra under the direction of Cornelius Meister, brings us two works by Anton Bruckner (1824-1896): his Symphony No. 9 in D minor WAB 109, and his Mass No. 3 in F minor WAB 28. One of the more popular choral works of late Romanticism, the Mass in F minor is said to have been a work of gratitude for the composer’s recovery from a persistent nervous illness. Soloists featured here are soprano Ruth Ziesak, alto Janina Baechle, tenor Benjamin Bruns, and bass Gunther Groissbock.