Albert Ketèlbey reached such a pinnacle of eminence and popularity that in 1929 he was named as Britain’s greatest living composer, based on the number of performances of his works. His original pieces for solopiano range from serious concert works to salon charmers, always characterized by strong melodies, distinctive rhythms, and unexpected phrases, as can be heard on this album. One of his most well-known pieces, In a Monastery Garden, is featured in its original version for solo piano. The Australian pianist Rosemary Tuckhas performed in the Sydney Opera House, Southbank Centre in London, National Concert Hall in Dublin, and Musikhuset Aarhusin Denmark in the presence of Queen Margrethe II. In 2001, she gave the first official performance in the William Vincent Wallace ‘Millennium’ Plaza in Waterford, Ireland. She has worked closely with Richard Bonynge, AC, CBE, as both soloist with orchestra and collaborative pianist, and in 2020 was both artistic director and soloist for his 90th birthday gala in London.

Joan Tower is widely regarded as one of today’s most important American composers. The works heard here in their world premiere recordings are part of a growing legacy that one pundit has described as “The Power of Tower.” Strike Zones is tailor-made for percussionist Evelyn Glennie’s dazzling technique and impeccable musicianship. The work’s orchestration is crafted to enhance a stage filled with percussion instruments – while in Small they are contained on a single table, the soloist working like a brilliant chef. The piano concerto Still/Rapids was inspired by the glistening beauty and powerful force of water, and Ivory and Ebony, written as a test piece for an international piano competition, is infused with Tower’s “high-energy” signature.

REVIEW:

Another American Classics release features the music of contemporary composer Joan Tower. These fabulous premiere recordings give a good representation of the range of music Tower has been producing over recent years. It is particularly good to hear performances from Evelyn Glennie as one of a cast of top rate musicians here. The earliest work, Strike Zones, dates from 2001 and the latest, Small from 2016. Both these feature percussion. Still/Rapids combines piano and orchestra with the final piece, Ivory & Ebony being a test piece for an international piano competition.

-- Lark Reviews

“The project is inspired by the moment before the realization of something that drastically changes your life, the moment of just being, existing in the moment. That moment in time is free and full, mindfulness-ish and unaffected by misery, sorrow, regret, shame, anxiety and depression. In my mind it is bright and has a sense of nostalgia. The title also refers to a daily tradition on Icelandic radio Ra´s 1, where a song, “last song before the news” would be played just before the news hour at noon. The song would typically be an Icelandic one, sometimes a lullaby, a love song or an ode to scary and gorgeous nature. Or an Icelandic traditional, sometimes an Italian canzone or a Scandinavian sorrow. Jo´runn Viðar’s piece Icelandic Suite sums up all these elements, a piece written for the 2000 years anniversary of inhabitation in Iceland in 1974. The lightness and the longing are with us throughout the program except in the title piece of mine, Last Song before the News, where apocalyptic visions are awfully obvious and take over early on. The album is dedicated to my father, Sveinbjorn Rafnsson, whose lightness and passion for music, poetry and history along with his sense of humor has been a lifeline to many people.” (Una Sveinbjarnardottir)

REVIEW:

The chief attraction of this disc is to be found in the program. There is so much interesting music for the adventurous listener to discover that I can recommend this CD on those grounds. The performances of those works are more engaging.

-- Fanfare

Vast, deep and emotional are apt descriptions of the single-movement, 53-minute-long Symphony No. 2 by Christopher Tyler Nickel. The award-winning Canadian composer elaborates, “One can think of this music as consisting of mirrors between ideas that equally disturb yet entice. Each side of the reflection is in itself conceivably valid, but when facing each other friction and dissonance are created. The exquisitely alluring and the grotesque exist simultaneously. Perhaps another way to understand the symphony is as a meditation on the state of cognitive dissonance.” The entrepreneurial Clyde Mitchell conducts the Seattle-based Northwest Sinfonia on this world-premiere recording.

Federico Moreno Torroba composed about one hundred works for the guitar, thereby reinforcing his status as one of Spain's great twentieth-century composers. Homenaje a la seguidilla pays lively tribute to that characteristically Spanish song and dance, while the Tonada concertante is in turns playful and introspective. Concierto de Castilla features a free-spirited lyricism evocative of the folklore of Castile, a vast expanse in the middle of Spain with which the composer strongly identified. "You would expect Pepe Romero to excel at the Concierto en Flamenco...The piece is gorgeous, the performance vibrant and passionate...The soloist in Dialogos is Romero's gifted pupil, Vicente Coves, who plays as well as his mentor, and whose brother leads the orchestra vividly and sympathetically." (ClassicsToday.com on Volume 1, 8573255)

An important centre for iron production in 17th-century Sweden, Leufsta Bruk came into the hands of the De Geers, a Dutch family, in the 1640s. In 1730 the young Charles De Geer inherited the estate and the ironworks, and it was here that he kept his extensive collection of sheet music, including many volumes imported from Amsterdam but also works by composers based in or visiting Sweden, such as Hinrich Philip Johnsen and Conrad Friedrich Hurlebusch. Charles played the cello and the harpsichord, and it is probable that much of the music in the Leufsta collection will have been performed by members of the De Geer family themselves. The collection, now housed in the library of the University of Uppsala, thus offers fascinating insights into domestic music-making in 18th-century Sweden. This is the third album to present music from the collection, and the first to focus on vocal music. It also features the famous organ in the church belonging to the estate, built in 1728 by Johan Niclas Cahman. Ranging from Swedish chorales to French opera, the varied selection is performed by soprano Elin Rombo and members of Rebaroque, one of the leading baroque ensembles in Sweden.

Alexey Stanchinsky was considered an outstanding student by his teacher Taneyev, his work anticipating Stravinsky, Prokofiev and others, paving the way towards many aspects of twentieth-century style. His tragic early death and publishing difficulties meant that his music was hidden for decades. Volume 1 of this complete edition contains his entire output until 1910, including several world premiere recordings and revealing his early melodic gift and sophisticated virtuosity. Pianist Olga Solovieva was born in Moscow, graduated from the Russian Academy of Music, Moscow, and took a postgraduate course as an assistant to Leonid Blok. Since 2004 she has been a professor at the Gnessin State Musical College, and has given masterclasses in Ireland and Belgium. Solovieva was a prizewinner of the 1999 Taneyev Competition of Chamber Ensembles, a finalist of the 2000 XX Chamber Music Competition in Trapani, Italy, a 2010 Boris Tchaikovsky Society Award Winner, and was awarded the Best Accompanist Prize at the XII International Tchaikovsky Competition in Moscow. In May 2019 she received the Russian public award for her contribution to the development of the musical art and the Glinka Medal.

Silvius Leopold Weiss (1687-1750) was a German composer and arguably the master lutenist of the 18th century. In addition to being one of the greatest players of all time, he was one of the most important and most prolific composers of lute music in history. He wrote around 600 pieces for lute, most of them grouped into ‘sonatas’ (not to be confused with the later classical sonata, based on sonata form) or suites, consisting mostly of Baroque dance movements. This recital features some of Weiss’s sonatas (he called them ‘Suonate’) for solo lute. They have come down to us in a variety of tablature manuscripts, and many are missing their preludes, which were usually improvised. Weiss’s music is characterised by a unique understanding of the capabilities of his instrument, its strengths and its weaknesses. Like J.S. Bach’s, his music represents the culmination of a high Baroque style a little at odds with the more progressive aspirations of his younger contemporaries. The cantabile style of playing heard in these marvellous performances is directly inspired by the instrument, a lute-harpsichord built for Mr. Rübsam in 2015 by the acclaimed American instrument-maker Keith Hill. It consists of one manual with one set of gut strings at eight-foot pitch, and two sets of jacks which pluck the strings in two different places. One, positioned farther from the nut, produces a flutey sound, and the other, closer to the nut, produces a more nasal timbre. A second set of strings, made of brass at four-foot pitch, produces a halo-effect by resonating with the eight-foot register played by the performer. It gives the rather dry sound of the gut strings a much more singing quality of tone.

Vienna around 1900 was a melting-pot in several ways: a city attracting artists from the entire Austro-Hungarian Empire where bohemian writers and musicians rubbed shoulders with aristocrats and establishment figures, and where late-Romanticism co-existed uneasily with the Wiener Moderne aesthetic of the fin-de-siècle. In the visual arts, Jugendstil (or Wiener Secession) was all the rage: its curlicues, floral patterns and fluid lines were seen everywhere – in architecture, interior design and graphic arts. In music, the term is usually associated with composers such as Mahler, Zemlinsky and Korngold, but also early works by Alban Berg and Arnold Schoenberg. Following on three previous acclaimed recital albums on BIS, Camilla Tilling and Paul Rivinius have devised a programme with songs by these very composers, written between 1898 and 1916. The songs range from the Einfache Lieder by a teenaged Korngold to Zemlinsky’s set of Walzer-Gesänge based on Tuscan folk poems and the much-loved Rückert-Lieder by Mahler. Schoenberg is represented by his Op. 2 collection 4 Lieder and his student Berg by the set of Sieben frühe Lieder, from 1905–08.

Grammy Award-winning composer Michael Daugherty explores the relationships between machines, humanity and nature in three unique concertos. ‘Dreamachine’ for solo percussion and orchestra is a colorful tribute to the imagination of inventors who dreamed of new machines, both real and surreal. The flute concerto ‘Trail of Tears’ dramatizes the tragic governmental forced relocation of Native Americans in 1838 and meditates on how the human spirit discovers ways to deal with adversity. ‘Reflections on the Mississippi’ for tuba and orchestra is a musical voyage down the legendary Mississippi River from Iowa to Louisiana. The Albany Symphony, conducted by David Alan Miller, delivers mesmerizing performances by three outstanding women soloists: Grammy Award-winning percussionist Dame Evelyn Glennie, flutist extraordinaire Amy Porter, and Carol Jantsch, the remarkable principal tubist of The Philadelphia Orchestra.

REVIEW:

Not typically known as a composer of virtuoso music hitherto, Michael Daugherty here writes splendid parts for all three soloists in these concertos, but percussionist Evelyn Glennie’s in Dreamachine is simply breathtaking. And yet, there’s more to this album than Glennie. Daugherty has been expanding his characteristic “Stravinsky plus pop culture” musical language, and although all the music here is typically programmatic, you might not guess that he was the composer. The opening flute concerto, Trail of Tears, applies cinematic techniques to that tragic event with unexpected and convincing results, all the while merging those with virtuoso flute writing. And the evocative tuba concerto, "Reflections on the Mississippi" is a much-needed expansion of the concerto literature for that instrument. With fine engineering from a pair of spaces in the Troy, New York area backing capable performances from the Albany Symphony under David Alan Miller, this is an unusually strong Daugherty release.

-- AllMusic.com (James Manheim)

The latest batch of colorfully orchestrated, imaginatively conceived orchestral works by this GRAMMY Award winning composer are concertante pieces from 2010: Trail of Tears, which is a meditation on the brutal 1838 relocation of Native Americans and the flute a fittingly haunting commentator; 2013's Reflections which goes down the famous river in four movements (“Mist”, “Fury”, “Prayer” and “Steamboat”) and the big, 34-minute Dreamachine of 2014, the most stylistically heterogenous work here from the eerie and impressionistic “Electric Eel” movement which sounds like the aquarium movement from Carnival of the Animals on acid or peyote to the rock-band drum solo in the “Vulcan’s Forge” finale.

-- Records International

The Philadelphia-based baroque orchestra Tempesta di Mare here reveals an unparalleled musical legacy, presenting long forgotten works by the German baroque composer Johann Gottlieb Janitsch, confined for centuries to unexamined archives. The works formed part of an enormous music collection which belonged to Sara Levy, the great-aunt of Felix Mendelssohn. She was a distinguished harpsichordist, collector, and influential figure in the musical life of late-eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century Berlin. Removed from the Berlin Sing-Akademie towards the end of World War II, her musical library was for many decades considered lost or destroyed. It was unearthed in Kiev only in 1999 and returned to Germany in 2001, where it is now again accessible to the public. While there can be no doubt that the instrumental oeuvre of Janitsch matched the diversity of that of some of his more prominent Berlin colleagues, the emphasis of his compositional output lay on chamber music, especially Quadros, four of which are featured here. The typical, prevailing dialogic structure of the Ouverture grosso highlights the influence which thematic play had on the rest of his work.

Bernard Herrmann was famous for his film scores, but he was also a leading figure in music for radio, to which he brought his inimitable palette of mood and sonority. Whitman, whose subject is Walt Whitman’s collection of poems Leaves of Grass, was a 1944 radio drama, a genre now much neglected but revived in this newly restored version. Psycho: A Narrative for String Orchestra is not a suite or excerpts from the film but a concert work, re-ordered and re-composed, while Souvenirs de voyage is one of the most polished and seductive of all American chamber works.

-----

REVIEWS:

Gil-Ordóñez and the PostClassical Ensemble have plenty of experience with Herrmann and perform the music with the proper heated quality. The result is an album that will be essential for Herrmann fans but also of great interest to general listeners.

– AllMusic Guide

With a narrator as Whitman, and a chamber sized orchestra to add impact and color, these many years after the end of the WWII (around the time of its original broadcast), it still carries a profound message. Souvenirs de voyage came towards the end of Herrmann’s life, and was proof of his range of genres that today are overlooked in favor of his film scores. It is a beautiful score, blessed with attractive melodic material and couched in subtle colors. Herrmann was to re-compose music from Psycho years later to form a concert work. It was rediscovered by conductor John Mauceri in 1999.

It would be difficult to imagine finer performances from a number of performers, Whitman, being a World Premiere Recording with the conductor, Angel Gil-Ordonez and the Washington-based PostClassical Ensemble, William Sharp the ideal narrator. Top quality sound, and It comes with an excellent booklet.

– David's Review Corner (David Denton)

A 2021 GRAMMY Nominee for Best Orchestral Performance!

Pulitzer and Erasmus Prize-winning composer John Adams occupies a unique position in the world of American music. His works stand out among contemporary classical compositions for their depth of expression, brilliance of sound, and the profoundly humanist nature of their themes. Adams describes My Father Knew Charles Ives as “an homage and encomium to a composer whose influence on me has been huge.” Harmonielehre was a deliberate move by Adams to expand his musical language beyond Minimalism, keeping its energetic pulse but embracing the rich tonal resources of the past to create a work that has accrued an aura of timelessness. Six-time GRAMMY Award-winning conductor Giancarlo Guerrerois music director of the Nashville Symphony and the NFM Wroc?aw Philharmonic in Poland, as well as principal guest conductor of the Gulbenkian Orchestra in Lisbon, Portugal. He has championed contemporary American music through numerous commissions, recordings and performances with the Nashville Symphony, presenting eleven world premieres of works by Michael Daugherty, Terry Riley, and others. As part of this commitment, he helped guide the creation of Nashville Symphony’s Composer Lab & Workshop initiative.

REVIEWS:

In point of fact, John Adams’ father did not know Charles Ives, but imagined that they had a good deal in common, and that was a springboard to a work that is unlike any other among Adams’ output. It’s not at all clear why My Father Knew Charles Ives has been so neglected. The work gets a detailed, sympathetic treatment here from Giancarlo Guerrero and the Nashville Symphony Orchestra. Guerrero and the Nashvillians have done a major service by reviving My Father Knew Charles Ives.

– AllMusicGuide.com (James Manheim)

Given the difference in ambiance and style between the two works, these brilliantly played and recorded performances might just make an ideal point of entry for those new to the composer.

– MusicWeb International

Contemporary American music for wind band continues to offer a rich combination of color and variety. David Maslanka was one of the most prolific and admired of all wind band composers, and in Liberation he utilizes plainchant in a moving exploration of death, the afterlife and the continuance of hope. Inspired by Walt Whitman, Aaron Perrine’s In the Open Air, In the Silent Lines creates a rich sense of space, while Kevin Walczyk’s moving Symphony No. 5: Freedom from Fear – Images from the Shoreline is unified by its themes of adoption, segregation and immigration. The University of Kansas Wind Ensemble enjoys a long history of excellence and musical leadership in the state of Kansas, across the nation and around the world. The ensemble is at the forefront of the Naxos Wind Band Classics series, having recorded five previous albums on the label. The ensemble is committed to contemporary music and regularly commissions, premieres and records new works.

At long last our successful Reger Edition continues on its way. The critics have been more than enthusiastic about the previous releases, and Musik & Theater even stated: “These recordings number among the best currently available in the field of Reger’s organ music.” This month we are releasing Vol. 7, again with two albums in the best SS, and this time featuring Reger’s five easy-to-play Preludes and Fugues op. 56. Although the composer termed this composition “an organ work of small caliber” in a letter to the publisher Lauterbach & Kuhn, the critics reacted positively, and the organist and composer Robert Frenzel numbered its pieces, which form anything but a secondary work, “among the most poetic phenomena in the most recent organ literature.” And we absolutely have to agree with him. The generic combination of “Prelude and Fugue” is frequently assigned to the realm of so-called absolute music, but Reger’s op. 56 does not seem to belong to this world in which only the musical structure is of significance; instead, particularly the preludes, which mostly practice dynamic moderation – like many of the “pieces” from op. 59 and other works – are distinguished by a pronounced poetic character.