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

A 2020 GRAMMY nominee for Best Choral Performance!

Alexander Kastalsky was a student of Tchaikovsky and a mentor to Rachmaninov, becoming director of the Moscow Synodal School until the Bolshevik regime banned all sacred music, including the extraordinary Requiem for Fallen Brothers which consequently lay forgotten for over a century. The Requiem is a rich and varied mosaic that honors those who perished in the First World War, poignantly combining Orthodox and Gregorian chant with hymns from the allied nations, even including Rock of Ages. This unprecedented and peerless monument to those who made the ultimate sacrifice was acclaimed on its 1917 premiere as a ‘uniquely Russian requiem that… gave musical voice to the tears of many nations.’ This is a world premiere recording.

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REVIEW:

One of Russia’s foremost composers of Orthodox church music, Alexander Kastalsky (1856-1926) is remembered for assisting Rachmaninov with his All-Night Vigil. During World War I, Kastalsky composed his Requiem for Fallen Brothers in honour of Russia and her allies: using a full orchestra, and mingling texts and melodies from the Orthodox, Anglican and Catholic Churches, Kastalsky also included textless tributes to the Indian and Japanese forces. Most of the music is clearly steeped in the Orthodox tradition, infused with memories of Mozart’s Requiem, but includes disquieting elements such as the Musorgsky-like funeral bell chord which makes ominous reappearances, like the bell in Britten’s War Requiem. After its 1917 premiere, Kastalsky added a further three movements including one honouring Russia’s new ally, America. The October Revolution precluded their performance, and the work was not heard again until 1977 when Yevgeny Svetlanov conducted the earlier 1917 version, its liturgical texts inevitably replaced with Soviet-style sentiments: this was recorded, but is currently only available as part of an expensive 11-disc Melodiya set.

Leonard Slatkin and his first-rate team of musicians now present the first complete recording. The ‘new’ post-1917 movements include a ‘Beati mortui’ sparkling with sleigh bells and piano figuration; a sombre bass solo ‘Kakaya sladost’, which for a moment enters a hellish region with shadowed smears and slitherings from the orchestra; and the American hymn ‘Rock of Ages’ bizarrely yet touchingly combined with Chopin’s Funeral March. Slatkin, who admits a deep belief in this work, draws a touching performance.

- Daniel Jaffé, Choral & Song

REVIEW:

Alexander Dmitrievich Kastalsky was born in Moscow on 16 November 1856 and died there on 17 December 1926. A student of Taneyev and Tchaikovsky at the Moscow Conservatory, his works stood to one side from the secular musical world. Rachmaninov saw Kastalsky as his teacher and was influenced by the older man whose presence can be sensed in the Vespers and in the Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom—also recorded by Charles Bruffy and his Kansas choir. Kastalsky became a leading light in a nineteenth century renaissance of the liturgy of the Russian Orthodox Church. With Smolensky and Grechaninov, Kastalsky was part of fresh passion for Russian devotional music. Tragically for Kastalsky, this was to collide with the Bolshevik ban on sacred music. The extraordinary imaginative strengths of the choral-orchestral Requiem for Fallen Brothers were disregarded. Even so it is reported that the Kastalsky Requiem travelled far and wide. It was, for example, performed in Birmingham by that city’s Festival Choir on 22 November 1917 conducted by Henry Wood, a fervent Russophile.

The towering Requiem lay in oblivion for more than a century despite its fresh and tragic inspiration: it recalled those who perished in the First World War. The score is affluent in ideas, both vocal and orchestral. Across seventeen segments (here separately accessible) the work accommodates a range of well-recognised spiritual references. Without falling into the trap of a variegated collage it finds a place for Orthodox and Gregorian chant and mixes in material from the allied nations. In tr. 14 Kastalsky weaves Chopin’s ‘funeral march’ and the hymn ‘Rock of Ages’ with the same mastery we find in Bridge’s Sir Roger de Coverley and Holst’s Fantasia on The Dargason. The more one experiences this major work, whether through this fine recording under Leonard Slatkin or in the hands of Evgeny Svetlanov, the more one places it alongside other known Great War humanist monuments like Delius’s Requiem and John Foulds’ World Requiem. To this group, can be added John Ireland’s These Things Shall Be and perhaps also a work quite unknown, Julius Harrison’s Great War tribute Requiem of Archangels. Kastalsky’s commitment towards church music spread to a work kindred to the Requiem but this time for unaccompanied choir. It was a short version; only 40 minutes as against the 64 minutes of the present Requiem. This a cappella work came under the title Memory Eternal to the Fallen Heroes.

The Requiem strides forward with slight pauses between sections. In terms of sweep and incident it coheres well. Proceedings begin with seraphic choir and tolling bells, all suggestive of Mussorgsky’s Boris Godunov. The Kyrie (2) continues the seraphic treatment but is underpinned with tenderly stabbing strings. The whole rises to a searching intensity that recalls Rachmaninov’s The Bells. As this section closes Kastalsky refers obliquely back to the clangour of the first movement. The dark griping of the brass in the Rex tremendae (4) paves the way for a soprano solo in Ingemisco (4) and for Beethovenian protest and struggle in the Confutatis. Here Kastalsky deploys words from Pushkin’s poem John of Damascus; a text that also drew Taneyev. The Lacrymosa (6) has the two soloists’ voices mingling amid a choral haze. Mixed in we hear tendrils of the Dies Irae. In Domine Jesu (7) the scent of incense is strong against the treble of silvery bells. Beati mortui makes use of the sound of sleigh bells and, not for the first time, fleetingly suggests The Bells—the latter a work dating from four years before Kastalsky started work on the Requiem. The Hostias (9) blends the harp with the rich tone of the choir in a heaven-invoking carol. In the first of two Interludia (10), Japanese music is limned in to represent participation of the Japanese army in the conflict. Trumpet fanfares impel and crown the grand statement that is the Sanctus (11). The coaxing and soothing ways of the Agnus Dei (12) usher in What Sweetness in This World (13) with its commanding piano part and bass-baritone darkness. Its fruity solo trumpet makes you think of Holst’s Dirge for Two Veterans. The Dies Irae returns in mists for the Kyrie eleison (15)—an exercise in slow-stepping serenity. There’s unhurried atmospheric ululation in the second Interludium: Hymn to Indra, calling to mind, if only in choice of subject, Holst’s Sanskrit works. The Requiem ends with the bells: part hugely imposing and celebratory and part seeming to reach out towards apotheosis from the bleak fog of chaos. The superb echoing resonance of the church acoustic is very present as the finale rings out.

This fully-fleshed out Requiem has a tremendously dignified tread, noble grief and imperious ways. Naxos have done well by Kastalsky. This treatment extends to a twenty-page booklet with all the sung text. The layout has the Italian, Latin, Greek and Russian words with English translation in parallel throughout.

– MusicWeb International (Rob Barnett)

Tobias Picker, hailed as “a genuine creator” by The New Yorker, has written extensively for the stage and for symphonic forces, and these two approaches are represented in this album. The Encantadas (an older name for the Galapagos Islands) derives from a novella by Herman Melville. Picker has set it as a melodrama, exploring the enchanted isles in all their quietly menacing and spectacular beauty. In a radical new form, Picker’s Opera Without Words is set to a libretto by Irene Dische that has now been removed, allowing the music alone to bear the expressive richness and intensity of this “secret opera.” Tobias Picker has been commissioned to write numerous works in other genres, including operas, three symphonies, concertos for violin, viola, cello and oboe, four piano concertos and chamber music. His many honors include the 2020 GRAMMY Award for Best Opera Recording (Fantastic Mr. Fox). Picker is a lifetime member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and is artistic director of the Tulsa Opera, a post he has held since 2016.

REVIEW:

The title for The Encantadas (1983) comes from the early name for the Galapagos Islands. In six sections it relates the journey made there by Herman Melville. The work was conceived for narrator and a standard sized orchestra, and, on this recording, the composer is the very articulate voice that relates Melville’s discoveries he made there.

The more recent score, Opera Without Words, was completed five years ago, and had a strange birth. He had hired a librettist, Irene Dische, to conceive the story, and, after many discussions, all was completed, even down to the stage actions and directions for the producer. But in the end Picker deciding to dispense with words. It receives its World Premiere Recording by one of the commissioning orchestras, the Nashville Symphony. They, and their conductor Giancarlo Guerrero, provide a very colourful score, both works instantly enjoyable in pure tonality. The booklet includes the words narrated in The Encantadas and I hope there is more Picker coming from Naxos.

-- David's Review Corner (David Denton)

This new release from Naxos brings together the two poles of Tobias Picker’s output: symphonic music and opera. He brilliantly straddles both worlds, drawing upon each to bring something new to the other.

…The music on this disc is impassioned and adventurous, providing the curious listener a great introduction to Tobias Picker’s output. The recorded sound is excellent, and the Nashville Symphony is in top form. Recommended.

-- Fanfare

Xiaogang Ye is regarded as one of today’s leading Chinese composers, having won prestigious awards for his concert music and for numerous highly successful film scores. The works on this recording share a deep affection for the beauty and power of nature and landscape in China. Mount E’mei eulogises the great spectacle and cultural significance of the mountain, creating a multi-dimensional picture through the use of traditional instruments. Lamura Cuo and The Silence of Mount Minshan describe mystic atmosphere and melancholy silence, while Scent of Green Mango uses vibrant colors and shading to express gratitude for the fruit’s refreshing fragrance.

The twice-Grammy-nominated Lincoln Trio ― violinist Desirée Ruhstrat, cellist David Cunliffe, and pianist Marta Aznavoorian ― offers engaging, rarely heard piano trios by 20th-century Chicago composers Leo Sowerby, winner of the Rome Prize and Pulitzer Prize for music, and Ernst Bacon, recipient of three Guggenheim Fellowships and a Pulitzer Fellowship. Bacon’s Trio No. 2 for Violin, Cello and Piano (1987) receives its world-premiere recording. Hailed by The New York Times as “a Composer Known for Echoing America,” Bacon infuses his six-movement trio with American influences including marches, folksong-like melodies, and jazz rhythms, validating Virgil Thomson’s assessment of Bacon’s music as “full of melody and variety; honest and skillful and beautiful.” Sowerby’s Trio for violin, violincello and pianoforte (1953) is “a work of tremendous integrity” that exhibits an “imposing structure, contrapuntal gymnastics, and a concern for instruments sounding as good as they can” (Classical Net). Sometimes virtuosic, sometimes reflective, the work is distinguished by an ever-evolving rhythmic and harmonic interplay between instruments.

REVIEW:

The works heard here by the "Early Modern" native Chicago composers Ernst Bacon (1898-1990) and Leo Sowerby (1895-1968) have several stylistic commonalities between them: both rich in melodic zest, expressionist on the edge of Romanticism but further afield to the Modern in their arcs of harmonic-melodic movement, winding, and labyrinthian. Working together most impressively, the members of the Lincoln Trio approach both pieces with elan, zeal, and sympathy. If you are up for something well composed and well played, something from the recent past yet unmistakably belonging to that time, grab this and I think you’ll find it worthwhile.

– Gapplegate Classical

“For this recording, I use a modern setup: specifically a 1930 Carl Becker cello made in Chicago, and a modern bow. I admit that such a setup is quite far off from the sound world that Bach must have imagined when composing these suites. I have done my best, however, to balance this modern setup with a thorough understanding of Baroque stylistic principles, particularly in regard to sound production, bow strokes, vibrato, slurring, voicing, and ornaments. 

Australian cellist Richard Narroway has proven himself to be equally at home with repertoire both new and old. He has appeared as a soloist with the Grand Rapids Symphony and the HanZhou Philharmonic Orchestra, and in recital on Chicago’s WFMT Dame Myra Hess Series and the Keys to the City Piano Festival at Chicago’s Symphony Center. In addition he has given performances in Australia, China, Germany, Canada and the United States, in prestigious venues such as the Kennedy Center, Chicago Symphony Center, Preston Bradley Hall and the Sydney Opera House.

This is a program of great choral works, including one work from the 1500s, works from the 20th Century, and one work, Black Pierrot that was commissioned by R. Paul Crabb for the ensembles on this album. R. Paul Crabb, University of Missouri's Director of Choral Activities, earned degrees in Music Education, Vocal Performance and Choral Music Education. His ensembles have performed at state, regional and national conventions and have traveled extensively in Mexico, Germany, Austria, Italy, Hungary, Slovakia, Czech Republic, Russia, Bulgaria and Australia. Crabb served as assistant conductor at the Russian/American Choral Symposium for two years where his choir was invited as the resident American choir at the Moscow Conservatory. He served for one year as a visiting professor in Salzburg, Austria, where he taught and worked with the choir of the Salzburg Cathedral. He has taught conducting in Taiwan, eighteenth-century music in England, and studied sixteenth century polyphony in Italy with the renowned Peter Phillips. More recently he served as Guest Visiting Choral Professor at the Liszt Academy of Music in Budapest, Hungary - the first American selected for that position.

A self-critical composer, Tchaikovsky once said “‘I listened to the Delibes ballet Sylvia... what charm, what elegance, what wealth of melody, rhythm, and harmony. I was ashamed, for if I had known of this music then, I would not have written Swan Lake.” It is ironic that Tchaikovsky’s own words should actually be applied to Swan Lake itself; “what charm, what elegance, what wealth of melody, rhythm, and harmony.”

In the 2019/20 season Santtu-Matias Rouvali continued as Chief Conductor of Gothenburg Symphony and as Principal Conductor Designate of the Philharmonia Orchestra, where he succeeds Esa-Pekka Salonen as Principal Conductor in 2021/22. Alongside these posts he retains his longstanding position as Chief Conductor with Tampere Philharmonic Orchestra, close to his home in Finland. His international profile continues to flourish. He debuted the season with the New York Philharmonic, Berlin Philharmonic and Royal Concertgebouw orchestras in wide-ranging repertoire. He conducted the New York premiere of Bryce Dessner’s Wires, and at the Concertgebouw he conducted the world premiere of Ariadne by Theo Verbey, as well as Stravinsky’s Oedipus Rex. He has built a loyal following internationally after successful tour concerts last season with Gothenburg Symphony in Vienna, where he returned in December to conduct the Wiener Symphoniker and Nicola Benedetti. In 2019/20 he returned to several orchestras across Europe, including the Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio France and Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester Berlin.

REVIEW:

Rouvali is a most agreeable Tchaikovskian, shaping the Act I Valse with a danceable lilt, and bringing rhythmic verve to the Dance of the Cygnets, and flamboyance to the Spanish and Neopolitan Dances.

– Sunday Times (UK)

Almara is an early music ensemble which was founded by Elisabeth Pawelke during her studies at the Schola Cantorum Basiliensis. The ensemble's musical focus is on the secular repertoire of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Around 1500 Hartmann Schedel (1440 - 1514) was one of the most important polymath of his time. Grown up in Nuremberg as son of a wealthy Nuremberg merchant, Schedel studied liberal arts and medicine in Leipzig and Padua from 1456 to 1566. Being a polymath and a conscientious archivist of his time Schedel collected the contemporary knowledge by compiling a vast collection of books with more than 600 volumes. One of these surviving books is the Song Book bearing Schedel's name. According to sources, Schedel showed no great interest in music. It seems that he wrote down the songs of his compendium primarily out of documentary interest and that with a lasting success as two thirds of the lyrics have been surviving for posterity until today.

The provocative and beguiling Left Coast Chamber Ensemble (LCCE) comprises the crème de la crème of the San Francisco Bay Area’s musicians. Their motto: nothing is out of bounds, and anything is possible. Presenters of all types of music including small ensemble, vocal, orchestral, multi-media and operatic, a select group comes together for this recording of Olivier Messiaen’s seminal chamber work, Quartet for the End of Time. Written during the composer’s confinement in World War II, he maintained hope, expressing, “The abyss is Time with its sadness, its weariness. The birds are the opposite … our desire for light, for stars, for rainbows, and for jubilant songs.” LCCE co-founder and prize-winning composer Kurt Rohde echoes this sentiment in his Messiaen-inspired one wing for violin and piano, heard here in its world-premiere recording.

REVIEW:

I’ve gone from having two or three recordings of this eerie but emotionally powerful work, one of them being Tashi’s, to just having one, and that is the EMI recording made under the composer’s own supervision and featuring his wife, Yvonne Loriod, as the pianist. (Interestingly, Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau’s son Manuel is the cellist in this performance.) But after listening to the Left Coast Ensemble’s new recording, I’m tempted to add it to my collection.

Their performance is a bit brisker and tauter than either Tashi’s or Messiaen’s but not lacking in emotional intensity. Although I felt that the Left Coast Ensemble’s more linear approach gave a more “streamlined” profile to the music, this is sometimes to its favor as it brings out the structure of the work better. And as I say, the individual members of this quartet clearly get the music’s message. Indeed, I found clarinetist Jerome Simas’ long solo in the third section (“The Abyss of the Birds”) to be as forlorn as that of Wolfgang Meyer on the Messiaen-Loriod recording, and better than that of Stoltzman with Tashi.

– Art Music Lounge

Award-winning composer Chang Ping’s Oriental Wash Painting is a set of four concertos that showcases traditional and ancient Chinese instruments, each performed by renowned and influential soloists. The ‘wash painting’ of the title implies a relationship between music and Chinese ink paintings- masterpieces which are magnificent and unconstrained, revealing a noble personality and character. This recording captures the world premiere concert of these remarkable works at the China National Centre for the Performing Arts in Beijing. Chang Ping’s works feature a large variety of musical forms, including opera, symphony, concerto, ballet, chamber music and solo works among others. A prolific composer, his works are performed frequently both international and domestically, winning numerous prizes as well as garnering worldwide critical acclaim.

These two concertos show the increasing importance of the guitar duo on the world’s concert stages. Leo Brouwer, one of the foremost Latin American composers, has written many admired guitar concertos but The Book of Signs is his first for two guitars, a double concerto of great virtuosity, with a majestic, songful theme in its central movement. A crucial figure in the global promotion of Brazilian rhythms for the guitar, Paulo Bellinati deploys luxurious harmonies and brilliantly effective techniques to pay tribute to the country music of Sao Paulo State in Concerto Caboclo.

Wife of Robert Schumann, Clara Wieck Schumann was a great piano virtuoso. She also was a wonderful composer of piano works. Korean-born pianist Junghwa Lee brings these works to life with vital performances. Junghwa Lee performs actively in solo recitals, chamber concerts and lecture recitals, and has frequently appeared in concerto performances as a soloist including those with the Korean Symphony Orchestra, Salina Symphony Orchestra, Hutchinson Symphony Orchestra and Greeley Philharmonic Orchestra among others. Lee has presented solo performances in Korea, Holland, France, Hungary, Romania, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Brazil, Chile, Singapore, Thailand, Taiwan, China, the United Kingdom and the United States, including appearances at the Arts Center Concert Series at National Chiao Tung University in Taiwan, Shenyang Music Cultural Exchange Exhibition Between China and Foreign Countries Festival in China, Beethoven 32 Sonatas Recital Series in Singapore, the Dame Myra Hess Memorial Concert Series at the Chicago Cultural Center and her New York debut recital at Weill Recital Hall at Carnegie Hall as a winner of Artists International’s Special Presentation Award.