Although he had initially declined the commission, Delius was persuaded to write the incidental music for Hassan by the actor and director Basil Dean in July 1920, for performances he was planning for His Majesty’s Theatre, London, the following year. Much of the music was drafted within a few weeks, and the score would eventually prove one of the greatest successes of Delius’s career. Dean’s plans for the project encountered significant obstacles and delays, however, and he had to commission additional music from Delius to cover the production’s complex scene changes. The London première eventually took place on 20 September 1923 and was a critical sensation.

Flecker’s play is a sinuous double-narrative that intertwines the twin stories of the lovelorn but worldly-wise Hassan, confectioner at the court of the cruel and vindictive Caliph Haroun al Rashid (called Haroun ar Rashid in Flecker’s play), and the young lovers Pervaneh and Rafi, caught up in the aftermath of a failed uprising and condemned to a terrifying and brutally protracted death. In tone and setting, Flecker’s text drew on nineteenth-century English translations of One Thousand and One Nights as well as other heavily fictionalized accounts and travel literature. Very much a product of the racial and class-based attitudes of its time, the play revels in imaginary scenes of a despotic Eastern court and its gruesomely barbaric practices.

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.

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)

Begun in 2012 with the release of Symphony No. 1, Thomas Dausgaard’s four-album traversal of the symphonies of Johannes Brahms is here brought to a close with the composer’s final work in the genre. The E minor Symphony is sometimes described as Brahms’ ‘elegiac symphony’, and has been called ‘one of the greatest orchestral works since Beethoven’. Typical for the composer is the striking degree of motivic relationships throughout the work. This includes the finale in which Brahms demonstrates his full mastery in a towering Passacaglia consisting of 30 variations and a coda. The smallish forces of the Swedish Chamber Orchestra contribute to a transparency and clarity which bring out the finer details of Brahms’ compositional web. As on previous installments, the symphony is coupled with other works by Brahms. Included on the present release is another late work, Tragic Overture, which concludes the programme. These two ‘serious’ works frame some of the most rousing and ebullient music Brahms ever wrote, namely his Hungarian Dances. Composed for piano four-hands, the 21 dances became immensely popular, and Brahms arranged three of them for orchestra himself. Having made his own orchestrations of the remaining 18 dances, Thomas Dausgaard has recorded the full set for his Brahms cycle, with the final nine dances included here.

The organ of the Badia Fiorentina monastery in the centre of Florence is one of the finest surviving examples of an Italian renaissance organ, completed in 1558 by the Tuscan organ builder Onofrio Zeffirini. The characteristically Italian timbre of the organ and its historical temperament make it the perfect instrument for performing repertoire from the 16th, 17th and 18th centuries. In her own booklet-note introduction to the repertoire on this album, Giovanna Riboli explains that she has chosen a sequence of repertoire to display the organ at its most characteristic, but also to give a guided tour to high-points of European organ music of the late 16th and early 17th centuries. She opens her recital with a pair of toccatas, by the Venetian Gabrieli and the Florentine Frescobaldi, that give voice to the instrument’s most brilliant registers. A variation set by Pasquini enables her to range over the impressive stop-list including rarities such as a Nightingale stop. There are two representatives of the English keyboard school, Byrd and Farnaby, at their most extrovert and virtuosic, and then two substantial pieces by the founder of the North German organ school, Sweelinck, followed by an ‘English masquerade’ by his pupil Scheidemann. Giovanna Riboli rounds off this imaginatively programmed album in reflective mode with the Tiento y discurso de segundo tono by the Spanish composer and organist Francisco Correa de Arauxo. The album’s expressive journey is astutely planned, and her playing of this historic instrument brings out all its antique tone- colors.

REVIEW:

This disc, another in the series that Brilliant Classics is devoting to Italian organs and organ music, upholds the high standards of preceding entries for Renaissance and Baroque music. Giovanni Riboli is the skilled executant on this Cook’s tour of 16th- and early 17th-century Western European organ repertoire. The instrument is rather closely recorded, but sounds well. The English-Italian booklet provides detailed notes by Riboli on the organ and the composers, including specifications, along with an artist bio and photos. This is an attractive recital disc, and recommended accordingly.

– Fanfare

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.

For those who are new to an instrument, the first question is often: where to start? The ‘Best Loved’ series offers an easy answer to that question and a perfect introduction to the wonderful, varied world of classical music. Spotlighting individual instruments in some of the best-loved pieces ever written, and with a mix of solo, chamber and orchestral works, the series provides a convenient introduction to classical music’s infinite variety of instrumental sounds and styles. The focus in these releases is a light and relaxed approach, rather than academic and theoretical: a joyful exploration and celebration of individual instrumental sounds. The present release is a showcase of the horn.

The trio sonata was one of the baroque period’s most popular instrumental forms. While in its ‘classic’ form it features two higher pitched instruments, a melodic bass instrument and basso continuo, there were several others, including a popular variant for one high-pitched instrument, one bass instrument and continuo, chosen by a substantial number of composers in the 17th century and beyond, and resulting in a significant number of compositions.

In this setup, the writing for the melody instrument is more virtuosic than in a ‘conventional’ trio sonata, and it performs more of a solo role, unlike in the trio sonata, where it is more a first among equals. At the same time, the bass instrument is used idiomatically instead of being relegated to a mere basso continuo. This contributed greatly to bolstering its role as a solo instrument, and it was given ever greater prominence as the second half of the 17th century progressed.

From the numerous Italian composers who wrote for this genre, for this album Mvsica Perdvta have selected the two who had the greatest influence on the establishment and development of chamber music: Girolamo Frescobaldi (1583–1643) and Dario Castello (1602–31). The first edition of Frescobaldi’s Canzoni da sonare a uno, due, tre e quattro, published in Rome in 1628 (and later republished in a slightly different version in Venice in 1634) sits chronologically between the two books of Castello’s Sonate concertate in stil moderno, published in Venice in 1621 and 1629 respectively. While Frescobaldi’s canzoni can be considered the culmination of a genre that was already in decline, Castello ushered in a form that, evolving through countless different variants, would for centuries remain the leading chamber music genre. Castello’s style is faithful to the promise of its title: it still sounds very ‘modern’ for its time, especially when – as in this album – it is paired with the oeuvre of Frescobaldi, the epitome of the instrumental canzona.

Completing the CD is a short work by Giovanni Girolamo Kapsberger (Venice, c.1580 – Rome, 1651), the only sonata that the composer known as the ‘Tedesco della tiorba’, or ‘German of the theorbo’, wrote for this ensemble, taken from Il primo libro di Sinfonie a quattro con il basso continuo (Rome 1615).The sonata à tre was one of the most typical instrumental forms of the Baroque era. While in its 'classical' form it calls for two treble instruments combined with a melodic bass instrument and basso continuo, it had several 'variants' in the ensemble, including the one for treble instrument, bass instrument and continuo, which was very popular. In this formation, to which a substantial number of composers (not only of the 17th century) dedicated an important number of compositions, the part of the treble instrument presents a more virtuosic and soloistic writing than that of the 'conventional' trio sonata. At the same time, the bass instrument, not reduced to the sole function of basso continuo, is treated as an equal melodic counterpart.

This new recording presents the two composers who most influenced the birth and development of instrumental 'chamber' music, namely Girolamo Frescobaldi (1583-1643) and Dario Castello (1602-1631). Whereas Frescobaldi represents the pinnacle of an older style, the works of Castello look forward and form the basis of the chamber music style of centuries to come. The soloist of this recording is David Brutti, playing the Cornetto, a hybrid instrument with the fingerholes of a woodwind and a brass-type mouthpiece. Renato Criscuolo plays the bass violin, and the organ or harpsichord is played by Nicola Lamon.

The German-born Christian Friedrich Ruppe (1753-1826) made his career in the Dutch city of Leiden, where he had originally arrived in 1773 as a student of mathematics and literature. In 1784 he married Christina Chalon (1748-1808), the daughter of the lead violinist the of the Nederlands Theater in Amsterdam. In 1890 he was appointed as music director of the city’s renowned and ancient university, and from 1802 he taught theory of music there, having in 1788 become organist of the city’s principal Lutheran Church. In 1796 an orphanage choir was founded in Leiden on Ruppe’s initiative, consisting of girls and boys from the Holy Spirit or Poor Orphanage and Children's Home near the church. During the following church year he then composed a pair of cantatas on anonymous Dutch texts, designed for the orphanage choir. Despite their musical richness and evident beauties, the scores remained in the archives of the orphanage, only to be rediscovered in 1987. Two centuries after their first performance, they received the recordings reissued here by an accomplished team of experienced Dutch early-music performers. While comparing the cantatas to the music written by Handel for the Foundling Hospital would not flatter Ruppe, his music nonetheless exhibits many charms of its own: unfailingly graceful phrasing, for one, fresh melodic charm and sympathetic writing for voices. There appears to be a clear Haydnesque imprint to both works, but operatic models are more evident in the sinfonia that opens the Christmas Cantata as well as the style of the dramatic recitatives which move along each development of the familiar story. The work concludes with a trumpet-and-drum chorus in the style of oratorios such as Messiah and The Creation, rising to the grand harmonization of an Easter chorale designed for singing by the choir and entire congregation.