Founded in 2009, Trio Shaham Erez Wallfisch is made up of three of the best classical musicians performing today: violinist Hagai Shaham, pianist Arnon Erez, and cellist Raphael Wallfisch. Alongside the trio, performs the Staatsorchester Rheinische Philharmonie, conducted by Daniel Raiskin. For this two disc release, the works of Brahms have been chosen.

Saint-Saëns’ operatic works contain instrumental music of vivacity and charm but have been undeservedly overlooked. Ascanio contains a substantial and elaborate divertissement that fellow composer Reynaldo Hahn termed ‘the entire Renaissance in a few pages’. Les Barbares, a tale of conquest and revenge, includes a vivid Prologue and joyful ballet, while La Princesse jaune with its pentatonic writing, and La Jota aragonese laced with Spanish vitality, show the composer at his most generously carefree. Jun Markl is a highly-respected interpreter of core Germanic repertoire and has become known for his refined and idiomatic explorations of the French Impressionists. His long-standing relationships with the state operas of Vienna, Berlin and Munich, the Semperoper Dresden and the Metropolitan Opera have been complemented by his music directorships of the Orchestre National de Lyon and the MDR Leipzig Radio Symphony Orchestra. In recognition of his achievements in Lyon, he was honoured in 2012 with the Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres. Märkl has an extensive discography – among the over 50 albums he has recorded are the complete Schumann symphonies, works by Mendelssohn and Wagner, Ravel, Messiaen, and a highly-acclaimed Debussy set with the Orchestre National de Lyon. He is currently working on a cycle of works by Saint-Saëns and Hosokawa.

REVIEW:

Of Camille Saint-Saens's eleven operas only one, Samson et Dalila, still enjoys a place in the international repertoire. That was premiered in 1877, three years before Ascanio. That opera's thirty-minute ballet suite contains much that is pleasingly tuneful and suitably pictorial. The Les Barbares Prologue included here has the length and content of a movement from a very serious symphony. There is still more more music here, and all of it is played with the high quality of performance we have come to expect from the Malmo orchestra.

– David's Review Corner (David Denton)

Vladimir Feltsman, one of the most versatile and interesting musicians of our time, presents an insightful recital of famous and rarely heard works by Franz Liszt:

1 Liebesträume, No. 3 in A flat major (1850) 4.53
2 Ballade No. 2 in B minor (1853) 14.47
Six Consolations (1850) 16.20
3 I Andante con moto 1.11
4 II Un poco piu mosso 3.08
5 III Lento placido 4.01
6 IV Quasi adagio 2.31
7 V Andantino 2.37
8 VI Allegretto sempre cantabile 2.52
9 Bénédiction de Dieu dans la solitude (1853) 17.26
10 Berceuse in F sharp major (1876) 3.34
11 Elegia (1874) 5.19
12 La lugubre gondola (2nd version) (1885) 8.34
13 En rêve, nocturne (1886) 2.25

Total playing time 73.16

The operatic overture is the composers “hook” to enthrall the audience immediately as the house lights dim and the first notes sound from the orchestra pit. Some of the most popular overtures are featured here, and come from powerhouse composers like Strauss, Smetana, and Verdi. William Boughton conducts the Philharmonia Orchestra for this recording. He has been with the ESO since he founded the ensemble in 1980. Since its inception, the ensemble has built an extensive discography with Nimbus Records.

A celebrated student of Beethoven, virtuoso pianist Ferdinand Ries established an innovative technical approach to the interpretation of the fortepiano. The decade he spent in London (1813-24) was his most successful. The majority of the variation sets, fantasies and rondos on this recording were composed then. The emergence of the new square pianos created a hunger for domestic music-making and Ries responded with catchy variations on popular themes and technically challenging fantasias that gave full rein to his musical imagination. They add another dimension to the appreciation of the man Robert Schumann praised for his "remarkable originality".

Karel Mark Chichon leads the Deutsche Radio Philharmonie through a passionate, colorful and meticulously prepared interpretation of Dvorak's Symphonies Nos. 3 & 4. This release is the third installment of SWR Klassik's Dvorak Symphony Cycle.

Claire Huangci went from being "clearly a pianist to follow" to the status of internationally established and acclaimed young pianist even before winning the Mozart Prize at the Concours Géza Anda in 2018. Following on from four successful solo albums from arrangements of Russian ballet music through Scarlatti to Chopin's complete Nocturnes and all of Rachmaninoff's Preludes she now releases her first orchestral album with Berlin Classics. Together with the aspiring young South Korean conductor Shiyeon Sung and the Deutsche Radio Philharmonie she plays Chopin's Piano Concerto No 1 and contrasts it with Paderewski's concerto. Chopin's Piano Concerto No 1 is well established on the world's concert platforms. Huangci is well aware that there are two sides to Chopin the man who composed the piano concerto and the creator of the Nocturnes In comparison to Chopin, Paderewski is relatively unknown, yet he was an intensely interesting man and his piano concerto is rich in ideas and resources. The configuration of the recording is ideal- two artists who composed their works early in their careers, interpreted by an equally young pianist. Huangci perceives the youthful verve of the compositions:"Both composers exude a true joie de vivre, a love of life, attributable to their youth. The concertos were clearly written by men who looked with hope to the future." She brings the same youthful elan to her interpretation.

MERCADANTE Flute Concertos: No. 2 in e, op. 57; No. 4 in G; No. 1 in E, op. 49 • Patrick Gallois (fl, cond); Snf Finlandia Jyväskylä • NAXOS 8.572731 (57:34)


Saverio Mercadante’s flute concertos are apparently more popular than I’d have thought—the one in E Minor especially—for not a few recordings of them have been previously reviewed in these pages. How memorable are they? Well, for me, they must not have made any lasting impression at all, for it wasn’t until I checked the Fanfare Archive that I realized I had reviewed a two-disc set of the composer’s flute concertos on Dynamic, performed by flutist Mario Carbotta. What’s interesting, though, is that in only three instances, going back to the early 1990s, have these works been taken up by players with names familiar enough to be recognized by general listeners outside of flute circles: James Galway, Jean-Pierre Rampal, and Peter-Lukas Graf. This new release on Naxos thus appears to be the first in two decades to feature an internationally renowned flutist with a name readers are sure to know, Patrick Gallois.


Giuseppe Saverio Raffaele Mercadante (1795–1870) was primarily a composer of operas. No surprise there; if you were a composer in 19th-century Italy, that’s what you did for a living, and Mercadante must have lived well, for his output of operas was prodigious—at least 60 that we know of. He was also long-lived enough to have witnessed the comings and goings of Rossini, Bellini, and Donizetti, and to have been around for a good portion of Verdi’s life. While in Paris at Rossini’s invitation in 1836, Mercadante attended performances of operas by Meyerbeer and Halévy, and is said to have been strongly influenced by the French emphasis on grand, dramatic spectacle. After spending some time in Vienna, Spain, and Portugal, Mercadante returned to Italy, settled in for the long haul, and set to work.


Unlike most of his opera-composing Italian contemporaries, Mercadante seems to have had more than just a passing interest in instrumental music. His flute concertos and chamber works that include a flute can be explained by his majoring in the instrument as a student at the Naples Conservatory, but orchestration became a lifelong passion for him. He took special pains with the instrumental scoring in his operas, and during the last 30 years of his life, while director of the Conservatory at which he’d been a student, Mercandante composed a goodly number of non-operatic works. During his last seven years, from approximately 1863 on, he became nearly totally blind.


Sometimes it’s harder than other times to intuit why one composer’s works survive while another’s lose their appeal. Certainly, in his day, Mercadante rivaled Rossini and Donizetti in the field of opera. But for the very first time ever in these pages, I reviewed an opera in 36:6, and that opera happened to be Mercadante’s Don Chisciotte alle nozze di Gamaccio , categorized as a melodramma giocoso . I didn’t come away from it with a very positive opinion, describing the piece as “an Italian singspiel , and not a very good one, with nary a single memorable tune in this over an hour-and-a-half-long jocularity fit for whistling while you work.” I’m sure it’s not fair to judge Mercadante by this one opus, especially since it may not be representative of his operatic output as a whole, but in a 14: 4 review of Mercadante’s Il reggente , David Johnson wrote: “He was a composer of great gifts, but they were not great enough to survive direct comparisons with the triumvirate of Rossini, Donizetti, and Verdi, whose styles are all reflected in his operas. And he had the unlucky fate of choosing subjects that other composers had or were about to treat more memorably.”


To the extent that Mercadante is remembered today it’s mainly for his seven or so flute concertos, which, in their musical style and virtuoso demands on the soloist, are strongly reminiscent of Paganini’s violin concertos. If the flute could only play double-stops and chords and had the range of a violin, you could almost substitute one for the other. Each begins with an imposing introductory exposition that prepares for the grand entrance of the prima donna. Only in this case, she turns out to be a slip of a thing, a mere mouse, compared to the lioness the orchestral set-up has led us to expect. No disrespect intended towards Patrick Gallois and his brilliant fluting, but there’s something almost comical when the soloist enters twittering and tweeting away after such grandiloquent promises of things to come. It reminds me of the LOL jew’s harp concertos by Albrechtsberger.


Anyway, if you’re a flute fancier, you are guaranteed to find Mercadante’s concertos scintillating entertainment, and Gallois’s performance of them will take your breath away. It’s a miracle they don’t take his breath away, as he twirls and twizzles his way through a seemingly endless triathlon of rapid runs, arpeggios, and register leaps without ever once missing a beat or showing the least sign of strain. This is flute playing on an epic scale, and it’s matched in kind by the 38-member-strong Sinfonia Finlandia Jyväskylä, amazingly well-led by Gallois as he’s playing.


Truth be told, the flute is not high on my list of favorite instruments, but if even I can appreciate the works on this disc and marvel at the execution, think how much you’ll love it if you actually like the flute. A two-thumbs-up recommendation.


FANFARE: Jerry Dubins