Soprano Mary Bevan writes: In 1975, the original Bevan Family Choir released their debut album on vinyl, featuring an eclectic programme of sacred choral works, Welsh folk songs, and piano music. The Choir consisted of 11 of the 14 Bevan siblings and was conducted by their father, Roger. Later on the Choir was taken over by the second eldest son, David, who was to go on to become Assistant Director of Music at Westminster Cathedral. The musical tradition continued to flourish within the family until, in 2013, some of the second generation of cousins decided to create their own version of the family choir, naming themselves the Bevan Family Consort so as to distinguish them from their parents’ generation. The Consort has since ranged in size from 15-22 of the 53 first cousins. To honour David and the influence he had over us all as musicians, this disc consists of music that was introduced to us by him during his years at the Holy Redeemer Church and that have since become beloved by us as a choir.

REVIEW:

The Bevan Family Consort are particularly good at strongly textured works such as Croce’s In spirito humilitatis, tinged with Venetian monumentalism, or Holst’s Nunc dimittis with its ecstatic ending. This last piece was not discovered until 1979, some 45 years after Holst’s death. Other rarities include the Dignare me by Fernando de las Infantas, apparently a Spanish nobleman working in Rome – so obscure as to be practically confidential. The works with intricate polyphony are pleasingly performed, though in the Kyrie and Gloria of Victoria’s Missa Vidi speciosam the upper voices are a little sharp and the overall acoustic seems rather distant. Breath control and phrasing is always musical and is apparent even in the plainsongs (Ave Maria). The most beautiful work here is Alonso Lobo’s Versus est in luctum. The voices of the Bevan Consort are slightly too disparately coloured to match the magical poise of this work achieved by the group Tenebrae (also on Signum) which shares an album with Victoria’s Requiem.

-- BBC Music Magazine

The familiar in a new guise – Tatjana Masurenko and the Yaruss Quartet are therefore in good company when they clothe the music of the Russian Romantics in novel acoustic garments. Using viola, soprano domra and alto domra, accordion and double bass, they play 19th century works in their own arrangements, using gut strings for all of their instruments, the domras sounding somewhat like Italian mandolins. In this guise, compositions by Rimsky-Korsakov, Musorgsky, Borodin and Glazunov seem lighter, more open and agile, their music expressing a fresh elegance with different colours, taking on a completely new character.

Born in Prague in 1979, the composer, conductor and chorus master Ondrej Adámek, who studied in his Czech hometown and in Paris, has already won numerous prestigious awards for his orchestral, chamber, vocal and electro-acoustic music. In his musical language, which also repeatedly incorporates elements of distant cultures, he creates unusual musical narratives. He seeks the authenticity of his interpretations by combining voices and movements, gestures and theatricality, phonetic and semantic aspects, and his own specially developed musical instruments. The premieres of Ondrej Adámek's "Where are You?" and "Follow me" were distinctive for their excellent casts, featuring stars such as Magdalena Kožená, Isabelle Faust and Simon Rattle. In Adámek’s "Follow me", a three-movement concerto for violin and orchestra, the melodies are divided between the soloist and the orchestra along the lines of the late medieval hocket technique, whereby the composer seeks to connect a single individual with a (human) crowd. The first performance of Adámek’s "Where are You?" for mezzo-soprano and orchestra was an outstanding event in Munich's concert programme this year. In the eleven-part, approximately 35-minute-long kaleidoscope of sound, dominated by constant motoric movement – ranging from everyday sounds such as the monotonous ticking of a clock to the sweeping, electrifyingly rhythmic pounding of the orchestra tutti – the composer embarks on a search for the human ("Where do we come from and where are we going?") and the divine.

Review

This is music that grabs the listener by the ears and doesn’t let go. I found it completely exhilarating.

Nothing about either score included on this recording is remotely derivative or even predictable. If I were to say that it is as if Adámek had smashed up all previous music into tiny pieces and then reconstructed them into something marvellous and new, that might give the impression that he is some kind of arch post modernist. He is nothing of the sort. Almost miraculously he manages to be both uncompromisingly modernist and yet intensely communicative. Try his setting of what, in effect amounts to St Theresa’s ecstatic, religious orgasm in the seventh song of Where Are You? and what you’ll get is music that verges on the demented but which manages to be deeply spiritual and very sexy! Both scores are full of such wild, rude, exultant moments.

Follow Me is simultaneously a violin concerto and someone having a lot of fun with what a violin concerto might mean. I am not aware of another concerto that concludes with what amounts to a musical lynching of the soloist by the orchestra. One of the characteristics of Adámek’s writing is his absolute command of even the most outré material. Every note delivers an aural punch. He is of course capable of writing music of great delicacy, as in the concerto’s Bach derived slow movement but even here every note makes its point.

The opening movement features orchestral soloists echoing the opening phrases by the solo violin (the ‘follow me’ of the work’s title), phrases the composer explains in his joyous, quixotic note that were inspired by the exaggerated vibrato of a singer in Japanese Noh theatre. The orchestra, in a sense, gathers round the soloist, repeating her phrases. Isabelle Faust is at her imperious best here. This then subsides into silence before the soloist starts again with more seductive phrases. As Adámek puts it, these phrases provoke the orchestra “eventually driving them mad”. This builds and builds as the various motifs combine and recombine. The tension generated by the gradually gathering of tempo and volume is quite ferocious before Adámek pulls the rug from under the expected eruption and the movement ends with weird whistlings and scrapings out of which the slow movement evolves. A great strength of Adámek’s music is to unsettle the listener whilst keeping them on the edge of their seat.

One of the unifying techniques across all three movements of this concerto is what Adámek likens to a kind of musical ping pong where melodies are split, in alternate notes, between soloist and members of the orchestra. This effect plus an extreme elongation of material taken from Bach is most noticeable in this slow movement. It is a strange and mysterious movement that subsides into the uneasy calm from it emerged.

On a purely technical level, the finale combines all the elements of the previous two movements but that scarcely does justice to the effect it has on the listener. The shadowing of the soloist which gives the work its title is allowed finally to work its way from a hushed, fugitive opening all the way to the mighty climax that the opening movement was robbed of. As in that movement, the following of the soloist by the orchestra becomes more combative- a wry nod I think to the lion taming tradition of the 19^th century virtuoso concerto – and the music, dominated by a rogue trombone, constantly threatens to swamp the soloist whose final phrases are delivered off stage before a final thrilling orchestral stampede rounds things off. Is that a tongue in cheek reference to the final sacrificial dance of the Rite of Spring I hear in this final passage? What this description may not capture is that this is all immensely diverting and colossal fun. The world of Adámek’s music may be capable of great seriousness but it never takes itself too seriously.

Follow Me is, in many ways, the curtain raiser for the even more remarkable Where Are You? My earlier comments have probably already given some indication of what it is like. Written for mezzo soprano and orchestra, it is a song cycle on spiritual themes with texts from the Bible, the Gita and the autobiography of St Theresa. None of this is handled in a conventional manner. The opening section revels in the vowel sounds of the opening line of the Lord’s Prayer in Aramaic. A later movement sets possible Czech translations of those Aramaic words. It’s that sort of piece! The theme that unites these disparate elements is the way in which the spiritual quest for the divine however how high it can raise us comes down to earth with the question ‘Where are you?’ left unanswered. It has to be said that the piece celebrates the quest as much as it illustrates its ultimate failure and it does so with affection and good humour as well as profundity and anguish.

The vocalist is required to adopt a huge range of singing styles from breaths and rolled r’s to folk singing to outrageous coloratura. As in most of his other scores that I’ve heard, Adámek can find music in almost anything and make no mistake – this is a musical event above all else. The composer isn’t advancing some obscure musicological idea but making maddening, frenzied, bewildering, exuberant music. Ultimately, like the spiritual quest it describes, words fail to do justice to this piece. You are just going to have to listen to it.

--MusicWeb International (David McDade)

Around Baermann sees historic clarinet specialist Maryse Legault spotlight the early 19th century clarinet virtuoso Heinrich Baermann, who was one of the most important yet overlooked clarinetists in the history of the instrument.

Born in Potsdam in 1784, Heinrich Baermann honed his skills under the tutelage of virtuoso clarinetist Josef Beer, who was a key figure in the development of the clarinet and its repertoire. B Baermann went on to tour extensively and significantly impacted the clarinet's role in classical music, particularly in France. Around Baermann is Legault’s tribute to Baermann; a giant in his field and one of the more important developers ofthe clarinet’s style, technique, and repertoire.

“In addition to working together with living composers, the rediscovery of undeservedly forgotten works is an immense enrichment for us instrumentalists, who all too often find ourselves in the role of reproducing a few well-known pieces. It is for this reason that my joy was all the greater when one day Oliver Triendl told me about a genuine treasure: during his extensive research on composers from the Balkan region, he had unearthed a number of completely unknown works for bassoon and piano and immediately had the intuitive idea of recording them on CD.

However, the result of his research was so extensive that several CDs could have been filled with the works he had found, and so we played through piles of sheet music for half a night until we finally arrived at our selection for this CD. With this CD, I hope to contribute to the expansion of the repertoire of my instrument, and also to promote a wider dissemination of the classical musical tradition of the Balkan region, which has so far been under-represented, and not only in the bassoon repertoire.” Theo Plath

Christopher Glynn continues his series of Schubert in English releases with a new recording of ‘The Fair Maid of the Mill’ (Die schöne Müllerin) with acclaimed Scottish tenor Nicky Spence. Set to a new translation by writer and director Jeremy Sams, Willhelm Müller’s direct and emotionally-charged poetry became the basis of Schubert’s first cycle to tell a complete story over the course of its 20 songs. Nicky Spence is one of Scotland’s proudest sons and his unique skills as a singing actor and the rare honesty of his musicianship have earned him a place at the top of the classical music profession. Nicky won a record contract with Decca records while still studying at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama and then took a place as an inaugural Harewood Artist at the ENO. Christopher Glynn is a Grammy award-winning pianist, praised for his ‘breathtaking sensitivity’ (Gramophone), ‘irrepressible energy, wit and finesse’ (The Guardian) and ‘perfect fusion of voice and piano’ (BBC Music Magazine). He is also Artistic Director of the Ryedale Festival, where he has been praised as a ‘visionary’ and ‘inspired programmer’ (The Times).

REVIEWS

"The Fair Maid of the Mill [is] extraordinary: For the first time, as a native English speaker, I found myself understanding this song cycle on a more intimate and revelatory level...The meticulousness of word-for-word accuracy is traded for emotional accuracy. Playwright and director Jeremy Sams was commissioned to write this new translation, and his background in both opera and musical theater lends itself well to finding the right words to convey poetic, emotional, and dramatic honesty.

Tenor Nicky Spence’s own sense of crossover theatricality heightens the immediacy and intimacy of the cycle and Sams’s new texts with a verdant tenor that blooms and contracts in emotional fits and starts. (These beats are both offset and at times juxtaposed by pianist Christopher Glynn...) As the journeyman’s dream begins to collapse on itself...Spence spits out his pleas in a fit of jealousy and panic. The clarity with which he delivers the words makes it easy to slip into the language of Schubert’s work and tap into the small details that render the story so devastating at the end—try listening to him sing of how his love 'loves hunting green' without your throat catching a bit. It’s these small details that make this English Müllerin so rich and compulsively listenable.

--Van Magazine (Olivia Giovetti)

This is the third in the Signum label’s sequence of Schubert song cycles using an English version of the texts by Jeremy Sams. His is in no sense a literal translation and is never in the least archly “poetic”, but is instead couched in relatively, plain, direct English which captures the spirit and directness of the original German while jettisoning any faux-Romantic or medieval archaisms such as “fain would I”. The translation is vernacular and quotidian but not modish or vulgar – and Sams does a fine job of reproducing the rhyming, strophic form of some songs, finding workable rhymes which do not sound forced, so in “Mine” we hear “sound, round, resound” and “found”, and “shine, wine, intertwine, combine” and “mine” sequentially to reproduce the effect of the German. The freedom of the English into which some songs are rendered might initially take the listener aback but a moment’s reflection will confirm the aptness and fidelity of Sams’ rendering; hence, the opening song begins “A miller loves to sit and dream of somewhere” rather than “To wander is the miller’s delight, to wander” or some such precious transliteration – and I know which I prefer. Sometimes the translation is both felicitous and amusing, as when in “Impatience” (Ungeduld) Sams picks up on the German: “ich möcht es sän auf jedes frische Beet/ Mit Kressensamen” (I’d like to sow it in every fresh bed with cress seeds) and translates that colloquially as “I want to sow the words in watercress” so that it rhymes with “happiness” in the next line, and in “The Hunter” the miller girl’s cabbage patch (Kohlgarten) is transformed into a “strawberry bed” so that “fruit” rhymes conveniently with “shoot”. Certain lines impress themselves immediately upon the mind of the listener by their memorability, such as the alliterative “The sound of rushing water has mesmerised my mind” in the second song.

Nicky Spence’s diction is so pellucid as to render the provision of the English texts almost superfluous but such thoughtfulness on the part of the label remains a welcome gesture. [Spence's] beautiful, flexible, easily-produced sound...never falters; his tone encompasses both sweetness and power as required and his knack of placing just the right emphasis or applying a momentary pause in the words without unduly disrupting the vocal line is apparent throughout. I particularly like the way he can introduce a desperate sighing note into his timbre without it turning mawkish. Christopher Glynn supports him with some of the most subtle and sensitive pianism I have even heard applied to this work; his playing is by turns as fluid, sparkling and turbulent as rushing water. He and Spence make an ideally matched partnership – fresh and immediate, presenting it in a manner which could easily win new adherents to this miraculous song cycle but, in Glynn’s words, is also capable of 'offering a new perspective to those who know it well.'

--MusicWeb International (Ralph Moore)

Armenian pianist and composer Stephan Elmas was a child prodigy who met Franz Liszt and became closely acquainted with Rubinstein and Massenet. Elmas’s life was darkened by illness and the tragedy of his homeland, but his music reflects the ease and facility of his technique, harking back to the Romanticism of Chopin, Liszt and Schumann, rather than the challenging times in which he lived, and with a quality of craftsmanship that gives his music a magnetic attractiveness. Mikael Ayrapetyan continues his acclaimed exploration of rediscovered Armenian piano repertoire with the first in this series of Elmas’s complete works for piano.

REVIEWS:

All in all, this was a highly enjoyable recital…What Elmas, and in turn Ayrapetyan, prove throughout this recital is that there is still quite a bit to say in these styles and musical language.

-- Fanfare

this first volume in a complete series is to be welcomed. Mikael Ayrapetan’s performances bring this music to life and make for a very enjoyable collection. This volume places the Seven Nocturnes together with a number of Ballades, Barcarolles and Romance in Eb Major.

-- Lark Reviews

The chamber music of contemporary American composer Truman Harris is informed by his experience as an orchestral musician; it is idiomatic, exciting, and frequently cast for unusual combinations of instruments. One such example is the unique Sonata for Two Bassoons and Piano, flavored with jazz, romance, and waltz-like elegance. Rosemoore Suite is a captivating ‘story without words’ moving from nostalgia to vitality, and the two Concertinos explore rich lyricism and playful virtuosity. Vibrant colors and a sense of vivid fantasy suffuse the radiant Aulos Triptych. The Eclipse Chamber Orchestra is well-known for its exceptional performances and diverse repertoire. Founded in 1992, and comprised of 22 members of the world-renowned National Symphony Orchestra, the membership also represents a convergence of instrumentalists from chamber ensembles based in Washington, DC, including the American Chamber Players, the Capitol Woodwind Quintet, and the Chamber Soloists of Washington.

Yale Choral Artists has rapidly established itself as one of the most innovative professional choirs in the world, and its recordings of works by three Yale composers showcase the breadth of contemporary American choral music. They include the powerful ‘statement to the court’ by David Lang, whose ‘the little match girl passion’ won the Pulitzer Prize for Music. Ted Hearne’s ‘Consent’ uses four disparate texts in a complex personal exploration of the role of language in his life, while Hannah Lash’s ‘Requiem’ is an expression of sorrow framed through a re-translation of the Latin text. Lang’s work as well as Lash’s are receiving here their world premiere recordings.

These world premiere recordings of works by award-winning composer David Gompper reflect his recent interest in the concerto, as well as his evolution of approach through increasing complexity in time and space, textural landscape and narrative detail. The ‘Double Concerto Dialogue’ covers moods from lyrical to argumentative and inconsequential chatter to deeper reflection, while the ‘Clarinet Concerto’ relates to the energy and skill of the Parkour runner. The explosive colors of ‘Sunburst’ are associated with the star-shaped proportions of the Farey numeric series. Gompper’s exquisite ‘Violin Concerto’ can be heard on a previous Naxos release. David Gompper has lived and worked professionally as a pianist, a conductor, and a composer in New York, San Diego, London, Nigeria, Michigan, Texas and Iowa. He studied at the Royal College of Music in London with Jeremy Dale Roberts and Humphrey Searle. After teaching in Nigeria, he received his doctorate at the University of Michigan and taught at the University of Texas, Arlington. Since 1991 he has been professor of composition and director of the Center for New Music at the University of Iowa.

When Franz Schubert in 1827 invited a friend to the first performance of his Winterreise, he called it ‘a cycle of horrifying songs’. The texts that he had chosen to set were by the poet Wilhelm Müller, whose 24 poems form a psychodrama which starts with regret over a lost love but develops into an inner voyage in which a nameless Wanderer probes for answers to existential questions. There is no plot, no events in the external world: instead, we spy on fleeting emotions and thoughts. In setting these poems to music Schubert was confronting his own probable fate: Winterreise was completed the year before his death in 1828, at the age of 31, and he will have known that the syphilis he had contracted in late 1822 often led to insanity and paralysis before release in death. With this in mind, one understands why Schubert himself said that the cycle had cost him ‘more effort than any of my other songs.’

Originally written for tenor voice, the songs are often heard transposed to other vocal ranges. Here the whole cycle is transposed a minor third down, to suit the baritone of James Rutherford. Primarily active as an opera singer – he is a Wagner specialist – Rutherford also enjoys a long-lasting partnership with pianist Eugene Asti. On BIS the two have previously released a recording of Schubert’s Schwanengesang – a release which received top marks from the German website klassik-heute.de and was described as ‘one of the best recordings of these songs that I’ve heard’ by the reviewer in American Record Guide.

The Norwegian Soloists’ Choir and Grete Pedersen have made acclaimed recordings of music spanning a millennium – from chants by Hildegard of Bingen (1098 – 1179) to the most recent compositions – and in styles ranging from folk songs to Bach motets and Berio’s Coro. On their new album, the focus is on contemporary Norwegian music, with three works which all originate in words and challenge the relation between language and music. For his Lament from 2015, Lars Petter Hagen has chosen to set a short text by E. E. Cummings, written when the poet was 6 years old. The words of the poem are split up and stretched out into pulsating waves of grief, at once mysterious, beautiful and painful. Awarded the Nordic Council Music Prize in 2018, Muohta (Snow) consists of 18 sections, each setting a single word in Sámi, the language of the indigenous people in the north of Norway. The words are all related to snow, and composer Nils Henrik Asheim has found inspiration in how indigenous peoples live with nature, as opposed to seeking to control it.

Songs of Solitude was conceived by the violist Hiyoli Togawa at a time when a virus was forcing people across the world into isolation and she herself needed to find a new rhythm of life as concert after concert was being cancelled. As she relates in the booklet to the disc, playing Bach – music that combines powerful emotions with a crystal-clear structure – became part of her daily routine, along with walks along the empty streets of Berlin. During these, the importance of remaining creative became even clearer to her, along with the idea to offer people the opportunity through music to reflect upon the difficulties of living through a pandemic. Having recently collaborated with the composer Kalevi Aho, she came upon the idea of asking him and a number of other composers to write for her – pieces that would ‘reflect life and work in the time of the coronavirus and that distil isolation in music’. The result is Songs of Solitude – works for solo viola commissioned from 11 different composers and interwoven with sarabandes from Bach’s cello suites. The individual pieces range from the meditative (Toshio Hosokawa reminiscing in his version of the traditional Sakura) to the defiant (Johanna Doderer’s Shadows). Some of them even provided Hiyoli with musical company – Aho’s Am Horizont requires her to play two parts on the viola while singing a third, and the piece by John Powell is written for nine voices, recorded in multitrack. The album was recorded in Berlin during three periods, June to October 2020, as the various pieces arrived and the restrictions in place at the time permitted.