Beethoven’s permanent move to Vienna in 1782 allowed him direct contact with the operatic and Italianate culture of the city. He took lessons in Italian word setting from Salieri and almost immediately began the composition of a series of arias in that language, including Primo amore, piacer del ciel and later the dramatic recitative and aria Ah! perfido. Beethoven also set strophic songs in German that form part of the popular Singspiel tradition which are genial and rare examples of his art. Here, the songs are performed by soprano Reetta Haavisto, tenor Dan Karlstrom, and baritone Kevin Greenlaw.

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These live performances from Snape Maltings Concert Hall present some of the most popular classical works for younger audiences. Their perennial appeal is a result of vivid melodies, witty instrumental characterisation, and in three works, the use of spoken texts to illuminate the narrative. Whether composed to amuse, entertain or educate, each possesses marvellous vitality, lyricism and bravura. The performances are conducted and narrated by Marin Alsop, one of the world’s most inspirational musical communicators.

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REVIEW:

The chamber orchestra used for Saint-Saens's Carnival of the Animals, with two solo pianists, is of excellent quality. By far the most frequently played section, The Swan, is beautifully performed by the principal cello of this student ensemble.

The video was made in 2017 and 2018, the young people having had the good fortune of working with the conductor, Marin Alsop. The resulting concerts were filmed with Alsop acting as narrator, that narration becoming more serious as she takes us through The Young Persons Guide to the Orchestra, a searching test for the young players who give a very creditable performance. As one would expect from the Snape Malting's venue, the sound quality is excellent, the result being a highly desirable gift for the children in your life.

– David's Review Corner (David Denton)

Music for wind ensemble was a regular part of entertainment in Beethoven’s day, and his Octet was composed for the skilled players in the service of his patron, the Archbishop-Elector in Bonn. The charming and skillfully written Sextet is also ‘from my early things and, what’s more, was written in one night’; impressing a critic of the time ‘by its splendid melodies, leisurely harmonic flow, and wealth of new and surprising ideas.’ Wind partitas often opened with a March, and the Rondino was originally intended as the Finale to the Octet, two suitable pieces to complete this fashionable Beethoven soiree.

Van Gogh’s Sunflowers, da Vinci’s Mona Lisa, Tolstoy’s War and Peace – those works of art that are truly part of the canon of global culture are few and far apart. In music, one work that holds significance for people all over the world is Ludwig van Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, and especially its choral finale. Even today, as we are getting ready to celebrate the 250th anniversary of the birth of its creator, the sheer size and complexity of the symphony is daunting. There are some eyewitness accounts from the first performance, at the Kärntner-Tor-Theater in Vienna on 7th May 1824: we know for instance that Beethoven was on stage himself throughout the performance, but that owing to his deafness he did not notice the audience’s overwhelming enthusiasm. What the Ninth sounded like that evening in Vienna is something we will never know, however – which is why hearing it in a historically informed performance on period instruments is all the more interesting. With impeccable credentials from their 65-album series of Bach’s complete cantatas, and acclaimed recent recordings of Mozart’s Requiem and Beethoven’s Missa solemnis, Bach Collegium Japan and Masaaki Suzuki now give us their rendering of Beethoven’s last and greatest symphony, joined by a fine quartet of vocal soloists.

Sergei Prokofiev virtually grew up at the keyboard – he composed for the piano from early childhood, and the instrument was his workshop and laboratory. Well before the end of his student days he had absorbed the virtuoso techniques of Rachmaninov and Scriabin, and to these he added his own brilliant, sharp-edged virtuosity, marked by a keen contrast between dramatic, hard-driven passages and more intimate and gentle lyrical moments. His nine sonatas therefore hold a very special place in his output and represent his language at its most personal, free of any external dramatic, verbal or visual associations: they contain the essential Prokofiev. Freddy Kempf has previously recorded four of the sonatas to critical acclaim: ‘Kempf is joyfully exuberant, flashing through every savage challenge with the assurance and instinct of a born virtuoso’ (Gramophone). With this release, he adds another three sonatas to his discography, starting with Sonata No. 3 in A minor which Prokofiev premièred in Petrograd in April 1918. Three weeks later he left Russia and only returned in 1936, after seventeen years spent in the USA, Germany and France. Premièred in 1944, Sonata No. 8 is the third and last of the so-called ‘War Sonatas’ – possibly less virtuosic than its predecessors, it has a wide emotional range, with unexpected depths. His final, ninth sonata Prokofiev wrote for Sviatoslav Richter, saying: ‘Don’t think it’s intended to create an effect.’ Often almost improvisatory, it was the last work he completed before the infamous 1948 decrees that disciplined many Soviet composers, and the first performance did not take place until 1951.

Ivan Ilic came across these transcriptions, scarcely known at all, through the most unlikely and serendipitous sequence of events. Carl David Stegmann (1751 – 1826) was a tenor, keyboard player, conductor, and composer, who worked mostly in the field of opera. Employed by the Court Theatre in Mainz (where he sang in the first German-language production of Don Giovanni), he also gave a number of acclaimed performances in Frankfurt. Trained as an organist, he made transcriptions of string quintets by Mozart and Beethoven’s Trios, Op. 9 as well as keyboard transcriptions of twenty-five of Haydn’s symphonies. Ivan Ilic writes: ‘It is unclear to me whether these transcriptions were ever meant to be played as concert repertoire, in public. Nevertheless, the enthusiasm I have encountered wherever I have played them has persuaded me to make this recording, to allow more people to hear Stegmann’s idiomatic arrangements.’