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Klami: Northern Lights, Cheremissian Fantasy / Peltonen, Storgards, Helsinki PO

Ondine

Available as CD

$18.99

Jan 26, 2010

Uuno Klami was the Finnish Ravel, his music characterized by superb craftsmanship, glittering orchestration, and melodies that sound like you might have heard them before but can't remember where. The Cheremissian Fantasy for cello and orchestra is a case in point, saturated with the folk music of far-off Cheremissia (or wherever). It doesn't matter, either there, or in the Kalevala Suite, the closest thing that Klami has to a popular international hit. Northern Lights will be new to most collectors. It's an 18-minute symphonic poem that more than lives up to its title: alternately atmospheric and brilliant, it rises to an imposing climax that reveals Klami's gifts as an orchestrator to excellent effect.

While both the Fantasy and the Kalevala Suite have been recorded previously--and very well (BIS has a fine Klami series from Lahti)--this new release is outstanding in every way. The Helsinki Philharmonic knows this music as well as anyone, and in any event is a first-class ensemble no matter what the repertoire. John Storgards leads vibrant interpretations, with Samuli Peltonen an impressive cello soloist. The sonics are superbly lifelike, with plenty of detail and a wide dynamic range. Highly recommended.

--David Hurwitz, ClassicsToday.com

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KLAMI Northern Lights. Cheremissian Fantasy. 1 Kalevala Suite • John Storgärds, cond; 1 Samuli Peltonen (vc); Helsinki PO • ONDINE ODE 1143-2 (65:25)

Uuno Klami (1900–1961) is one of the best-known of those Finnish composers who flourished in the wake of Sibelius, although Klami was also influenced by French and Russian music of the early 20th century. He was especially renowned for his orchestral works, of which the five tone poems comprising the Kalevala Suite (1943) are the most familiar and most often recorded. His best music maintains a bracing rhythmic momentum and reveals an attractive vein of lyricism.

The tone poem Northern Lights (1946) was new to me. The piece does not seem to have been recorded before (or, at any rate, no previous recording appears to be available). It evokes a Sibelian atmosphere; Klami’s music became more appreciably nationalistic after the Second World War. It is a lovely work, with a Ravelian sheen to the orchestration. While there are moments where swirling woodwind and harp glissandi suggest the dazzling phenomenon of the northern lights, Klami’s penchant for melodic cells keeps the music anchored. Around the 10-minute mark a cheeky waltz episode appears, and a suitably grand chorale provides a satisfying coda.

The Cheremissian Fantasy for cello and orchestra (1931) is in two movements, slow and fast, its thematic material loosely based on folk tunes from northern Finland. The cellist is given the bulk of the melodic material, which young soloist Samuli Peltonen plays here with fine tone and lots of heart.

The main work on this disc is the Kalevala Suite . In five movements, its layout could be regarded as symphonic. The first movement, “The Creation of the Earth,” is the equivalent of a sweeping symphonic allegro with a mysterious introduction and gentle postlude added. The second movement,“The Sprout of Spring,” is a scherzo with a lyrical second subject; the third, “Terhenniemi,”—apparently a late addition—serves as an evocative interlude before the calm of the slow movement, “Cradle Song for Lemminkäinen,” and grandeur of the finale, “The Forging of the Sampo.”

The suite’s programmatical basis lies in the great Finnish national epic, the Kalevala , which also inspired much of Sibelius’s music. Indeed, Klami’s work was initially commissioned by Robert Kajanus, chief conductor of the Helsinki Philharmonic and a friend and champion of the older composer. (Kajanus died before the suite reached its final completed form.) Sibelius does not seem to be a major influence until the final movement, and even then the theme on which the movement is based (first played by the English horn) primarily suggests Grieg. Again, Klami’s melodic ease and expertly detailed orchestration leave their stamp on the work.

Storgärds and the modern-day Helsinki Philharmonic give it everything they’ve got in this stunningly recorded program: Tender moments sound gorgeous, the climaxes leap out at you, and Storgärds’ plush, well-balanced orchestral textures do not preclude tension or drama. In the Kalevala Suite , a greater sense of urgency informs a 1973 performance on a Finlandia disc with the same orchestra conducted by Jorma Panula (which includes the only other recording of the Cheremissian Fantasy , with Arto Noras); it may be difficult to track down. Panula rerecorded the suite alongside other works of the composer for Naxos, but rougher sound blunts that performance and the Turku Philhamonic Orchestra is not quite in the Helsinki league. This new Ondine release is definitely the one to go for.

FANFARE: Phillip Scott

Klami: Northern Lights, Cheremissian Fantasy / Peltonen, Storgards, Helsinki PO

$18.99
CD

Ondine

Jan 26, 2010

ODE 1143-2

Sgambati: 6 Nocturnes, Etudes & Other Works

Piano Classics

Available as CD

$19.99

Mar 21, 2025

A detailed portrait of a 'one-work composer': nocturnes, studies and miniatures by Giovanni Sgambati, as well as the famous Melodie de Gluck which has linked his name with many of the world's most illustrious pianists. When Richard Wagner visited Rome in 1876, he was so impressed by Sgambati's two piano quintets that he introduced him to Ludwig Strecker - head of Schott in Mainz - and invited the publisher to bring Sgambati �to the attention of the wider musical world, since in Rome 'he is not in the right place'. Although he was highly regarded by the likes of Wagner and Liszt, Sgambati was almost totally forgotten after his death in 1914. The Piano Classics label has played a leading part in the composer's renaissance, with an ongoing survey on record of the composer's complete piano music. 'I am a pianist and a music populariser,' says Cecilia Faccini. 'I have always seen music as the best form of language through which I can express myself. When I play I try to establish a deep and intimate communication with the listener.' She has applied herself to reviving Sgambati as both a scholar and a performer, and on this new album she makes a personal selection which is designed to reflect various aspects of the composer, as a teacher, an arranger, and an original tone-poet. Inevitably, the album opens with the Melodie de Gluck which transcribes the Dance of the Blessed Spirits from Orfeo ed Euridice for the 19th-century keyboard. In her booklet essay, Facchini remarks that the Nocturnes are among 'the most interesting of Sgambati's compositions. Composed between 1873 and 1897, these pieces require a refined use of the touch and pedalling to create contrasting musical atmospheres. The heritage of Liszt's pianism and style of composition seems to be evident even on first listening.' She also includes a set of Concert Etudes Op.10 to illustrate Sgambati's importance as a composer-pedagogue, whose didactic works were reprinted in many significant 'piano methods'. A violinist who played Beethoven with Sgambati remarked that 'his piano technique was impeccable, clear and pure even in the most difficult passages. His sound was smooth and harmonious, his use of pedals as accurate as ever. Gifted with a touch of great beauty, his fingers could sing on the keyboard.' In this regard, Cecilia Facchini is a worthy successor and advocate for Sgambati in the 21st century. - Born in Rome, to an Italian father and an English mother, Giovanni Sgambati (1841-1914), received his early education at Trevi, in Umbria. In his early twenties he met Franz Liszt in Rome, where the great composer resided for a period each year from 1861. The young man immediately became his favorite pupil, a faithful interpreter of his compositions and a precious collaborator for the mission that warmed both their hearts: to spread classical music in the Roman society of the time. Liszt's Roman school was based in Sgambati's home, where the master trained the best pianists of the time. Sgambati was the first to conduct his Dante Symphony. Liszt took him with him on his travels and introduced him to Richard Wagner, who deeply admired his compositions. His fame grew rapidly, leading him to give concerts all over Europe and in Russia. He received invitations and signs of esteem from the most important musicians of his time: in addition to Liszt and Wagner, he was friends with Brahms, Tchaikovsky, Grieg, Massenet and Busoni. - Sgambati's piano music consists of a wide variety of shorter pieces. This new recording presents his 6 Nocturnes, 2 Etudes de concert and a set of Morceaux, works with a solid and well-defined structure, innovative ideas and interesting harmonic choices, showing mastery of the musical discourse and a unique expressiveness, all concentrated in a few minutes. - Cecilia Facchini graduated in piano at the Istituto Superiore di Studi Musicali in Ravenna under the guidance of Alessandra Ammara and continued her studies at the Conservatorio della Svizzera Italiana in Lugano, where she obtained a Master in Music Performance in Anna Kravtchenko's class. She followed master courses with Roberto Prosseda, Paul Badura- Skoda, Boris Berman, Claudio Martinez-Mehner, Lilya Zilberstein, Jeffrey Swann and, for chamber music, with the Parma Trio.

Sgambati: 6 Nocturnes, Etudes & Other Works

$19.99
CD

Piano Classics

Mar 21, 2025

PCL10319

Rheinberger: Complete Organ Concertos / Stefan Johannes Bleicher

MDG

Available as SACD

$24.99

Nov 01, 2010

RHEINBERGER Organ Concertos: No. 1 in F; No. 2 in g. 3 Pieces for Cello and Organ • Stefan Johannes Bleicher (org); Douglas Boyd, cond; Musikkollegium Winterthur; Cäcilia Chmel (vc) • MDG 1643 (SACD: 57:58)

Josef Rheinberger (1839–1901) is frequently named alongside Max Bruch, Karl Goldmark, Robert Fuchs, and Carl Reinecke when mention is made of late 19th- to early 20th-century German Romantic composers who cultivated an essentially conservative style influenced by the Mendelssohn-Schumann-Brahms-Joachim axis. Budding composers from abroad, including America, flocked to Germany to study under these men and to have bestowed upon them the mantle of a proper German pedigree. In Leipzig, Reinecke could claim Grieg, Sinding, Svendsen, Janá?ek, and Weingartner among his students; while in Munich, Rheinberger could name Humperdinck, Parker, Chadwick, Wolf-Ferrari, Thuille, and Furtwängler among those he instructed.

Rheinberger’s instrument was the organ, a fact that’s hard to ignore based on his vast output in which the organ plays a dominant role. Yet, in his entire voluminous catalog—the solo organ pieces alone occupy 12 CDs—the two concertos on this disc are the only concerted works I’m aware of that he wrote for organ and orchestra. The mind leaps immediately to the similar compositions by Rheinberger’s French contemporaries Widor and Guilmant, but the reality is that Rheinberger’s concertos are in a more classical mold and of a thematic content somewhat similar to the chorale-like melodic and harmonic manner of Saint-Saëns. Oddly, as well, there are not a few passages that seem to anticipate the sort of ceremonial hubbub and pageantry one hears in Elgar’s soon-to-be pomp and circumstance mode. Rheinberger’s concertos, however, predate the earliest of Elgar’s coronation marches by 17 and seven years, respectively.

The Concerto No. 1, dated 1884, two years before Saint-Saëns’s brilliant “Organ” Symphony, is modestly orchestrated for three horns (or two horns and bassoon) and strings, with the organ filling in for the absent winds. Scoring in the Concerto No. 2 of 10 years later isn’t much augmented, but to the earlier ensemble Rheinberger adds two trumpets and timpani, so that the organ must still furnish the sonorities that would ordinarily be supplied by flutes, oboes, and clarinets. If the Second Concerto finds its voice somewhere between Saint-Saëns and Elgar, the First Concerto reaches a bit further back, perhaps to Mendelssohn and Schumann.

These are not hard works to like. They’re tuneful, spirited, and engaging enough that one doesn’t miss the fuller symphonic approach that Saint-Saëns took to the orchestra or the more variegated splashes of color Widor and Guilmant drew from their Cavaillé-Coll and French organs.

There are two or three more recordings of these works available than I find reviewed in the Fanfare Archive. In 23:6, John Bauman covered a Classico release featuring organist Ulrik Spang-Hansen with the Chamber Philharmonic of Bohemia led by Douglas Bostock; while in 28:5, James Reel readdressed a Capriccio recording that had originally been reviewed in 16:2 and was recycled in SACD format with the rear channels presumably artificially processed. That disc featured organist Andreas Juffinger with Harmut Haenchen conducting the Berlin RSO. Not reviewed, as far as I can tell, are recordings by Ulrich Meldau with Daniel Schweizer presiding over the Zurich Symphony Orchestra on the Motette label, and a more recent Naxos version by organist Paul Skevington with Timothy Rowe leading the Amadeus Chamber Ensemble. Of these several editions, the only one I have for comparison purposes is the Juffinger in its “enhanced” SACD incarnation.

The Capriccio booklet has nothing to say about the organ, though the recording was made in Berlin’s Jesus-Christus-Kirche, so I assume the instrument to be of German, Swiss, or Dutch pedigree, but for the concertos the new MDG recording is to be preferred. Newly recorded in February 2010, the disc is in true surround format. Full-page specifications are given on Winterthur’s historic Stadrkirche organ built by E. F. Walcker in 1887–88 and restored in 1980–84 by the Swiss firm currently doing business as Kuhn Organ Builders, Ltd. And MDG’s Bleiche and Boyd are considerably more animated than Capriccio’s Juffinger and Haenchen in every movement of both concertos, delivering performances that are crisply articulated and in which the organ and orchestra are beautifully integrated.

MDG’s bonus is three pieces— Abendlied, Pastorale, and Elegie —Rheinberger transcribed for cello and organ from a set of six pieces he’d originally written for violin and organ at the dual requests of church organist Johann Georg Herzog and the composer’s publisher, August Robert Froberg. Adagio meditation-type pieces for a solo string instrument accompanied by organ were rarities, if indeed they existed at all at the time. Rheinberger’s contributions are exactly what you would expect—the musical equivalent of votive candles flickering in the transepts. Cellist Cäcilia Chmel plays prayerfully enough, but the angels remain frozen in their friezes, unmoved by Rheinberger’s entreaties.

Definitely recommended for enjoyable, if not great, music, fine performances, and superb recording. I will not, however, be throwing away my Juffinger and Haenchen on Capriccio for the simple reason that it includes Rheinberger’s Suite for Violin and Organ, op. 166, a lovely neobaroquish affair that echoes with distant strains of Bach, Handel, and Corelli, and is a more substantial and preferable alternative to the three cello pieces on the current disc.

FANFARE: Jerry Dubins

Rheinberger: Complete Organ Concertos / Stefan Johannes Bleicher

$24.99
SACD

MDG

Nov 01, 2010

9011643-6

FAIREY BAND: Brass Favourites

Chandos

Available as CD

$6.99

Feb 01, 1991

Classical Music

FAIREY BAND: Brass Favourites

$6.99
CD

Chandos

Feb 01, 1991

CHAN 6530

Right Through The Bone - Rontgen / Arc Ensemble

Sony Masterworks

Available as CD

$11.99

Nov 06, 2007

Wonderfully warm, committed and utterly convincing. A fascinating disc.

If you are puzzled, as I was, by the title of this CD then there is a logical explanation which is given at the beginning of the booklet notes. It was Julius’s cousin Conrad Röntgen (1845-1923) who discovered X-Rays, who won the Nobel Prize in 1901 and who ultimately transformed medical science. Knowledge of Conrad however led Grieg to say, after hearing a piece by Julius, that the music “went right to the bone”, hence the CD title. Although it seems to be just a clever remark it has more than a ray of truth!

The music of Julius Röntgen is just beginning to be noticed again after years of lying forgotten on dusty shelves. “Oh no,” you say, “Not another mediocre worthy dug out by musicians with nothing else to do.” Well if you think that then read on - indeed listen on - because I can tell you that this is very fine music indeed. The revival which is just beginning is worth every penny and every column inch spent on it. So let’s forget that this music was written when Bartók, Schoenberg and Ives were at their heights and take it with an innocent ear just as it comes. Indeed it may be more helpful to remember that Röntgen is almost an exact contemporary of Elgar.

A few words of biography first. In 1924 Röntgen retired from public life to concentrate on composing. Although already quite prolific, many more works started to flow from him. He had studied in Leipzig, meeting Liszt and Franz Lachner, Carl Reinecke and Heinrich von Herzogenberg, but he made the surprising decision to live and work in Amsterdam. There, amongst other activities, he was one of the founders of the Concertgebouw and even more significantly he was instrumental in establishing the Amsterdam Conservatoire. He worked there not as a Director but as an accompanist and so he had time to compose. He also had influence as Director of an organization with the snappy title ‘The Society for the Promotion of Musical Arts’ which meant at that time much new music.

You may fear that Brahms might have been a strong influence. Röntgen was the soloist in the first Dutch performance in 1884 of the master’s 2nd Piano Concerto under Brahms’s direction. After that Röntgen saw Brahms socially as it were for many years. Also Röntgen liked to work on quite large canvases, yet he is no clone of Brahms indeed there is much originality here. The ghostly and eerie second movement of the Viola Sonata’s outer section is like nothing else I can describe, and the finale has an occasional touch of Debussy about it. The initial impassioned Allegro has an opening idea which has remained with me for some days. The excellent booklet notes by Simon Wynberg mentions César Franck as an influence.

The CD begins with a fine and arresting work: the Quintet for piano and strings. In its opening movement there is a restless and memorable idea, sextuplets or quadruplets in the piano and cello with the violins above singing a lovely melody canonically in the minor key. The melting sequences also give the music an unforgettable character. The compound time second movement, marked Allegro, is rhythmically memorable with a wonderful passage towards the end over an ostinato pedal building to the final bars. The slow movement is questing and exploratory at first until a cello melody answered by violin takes over with a melody which Borodin would have been proud of. At the end of the contrapuntal and at times fugal Con moto finale Röntgen quotes briefly his first movement opening and ends the piece in a questing atmosphere.

The Clarinet Trio falls into three movements with an especially sunny initial movement. Brahms did come to my mind during this piece but none the worse for that. The main weight of the work rests on the finale with its memorable ‘Sostenuto’ opening suddenly transforming into a friendly Allegro commodo. It is the earliest work (1921) here and has the occasional Mendelssohnian touch in its lightness and sophistication.

The String Sextet really has little in common with the two by Brahms although it is in a late-Romantic style. The first movement may remind one more of Max Reger; the booklet writer mentions Max Bruch. With the grace and ease of the second movement Andante we step gently into the world of Dvo?ák, except that the middle section is unexpectedly storm-tossed before subsiding again. Curiously it’s followed by another Andante which is a set of variations and then an Allegro of great vigour, especially for the cellos.

The performances are wonderfully warm, committed and utterly convincing. These are young performers who, one assumes, have not come across Röntgen before. The booklet pictures them and gives some biographical details. I remember reading a sensational review of their debut in New York in 2003. This is, in my view, top quality musicianship and even if the music was not that interesting I would still be praising the music-making. The recording only serves to enhance all that they achieve.

This then is a fascinating disc and I urge you to look into it. From there you might join me in a search for more music by this, as yet, little known but true master of the early twentieth century.

-- Gary Higginson, MusicWeb International

Right Through The Bone - Rontgen / Arc Ensemble

$11.99
CD

Sony Masterworks

Nov 06, 2007

88697158372

Martucci: Piano Concerto No 1, Etc / Coggi, La Vecchia

Naxos

Available as CD

$19.99

May 26, 2009

MARTUCCI Piano Concerto No. 1. 1 La canzone dei ricordi 2 • Francesco La Vecchia, cond; Gesualdo Coggi (pn); 1 Silvia Pasini (mez); 2 Rome SO • NAXOS 8.570931 (67:53 Text, no Translation )

Giuseppe Martucci (1856–1909) was a forerunner to the so-called “generazione dell’ottanta” of composers (see Malipiero review elsewhere) that sought to initiate a new golden age of instrumental music in Italy to vie against the overwhelming dominance of opera. Most of those who would follow in his footsteps—and the list is long, including the likes of Casella, Castelnuovo-Tedesco, Menotti, Pizzetti, Respighi, Rota, Wolf-Ferrari, and Zandonai—hedged their bets by playing both sides of the fence; but Martucci was unique for his time and place in that he wrote no operas whatsoever. Ironically though, in his role as a conductor, introducing Wagner’s operas to Italy may have done more to poison the well of Italian opera than any of his works as a composer did to stanch the opera rage. If you can’t lead the cattle away from the watering hole, do the next best thing: contaminate the water and kill them.

During his lifetime, Martucci was best known as a conductor, pianist, and teacher, Respighi being one of his more prominent students. His compositional output is not overly large, totaling fewer than 100 published opus numbers. Among them, however, are two symphonies, two piano concertos, two piano trios, a piano quintet, one sonata each for violin, cello, and organ, and a considerable volume of pieces for solo piano.

The current release—Volume 3 in Naxos’s complete survey of Martucci’s orchestral music—contains works that are not new to the recorded catalog. The Piano Concerto No. 1 in D Minor and La canzone dei ricordi were both coupled together, as here, in another Martucci survey a decade or so ago on the ASV label. The artists there were pianist Francesco Caramiello in the Concerto, soprano Rachel Yakar in the vocal work, and Francesco D’Avalos leading the Philharmonia Orchestra. That entire collection is now available in a super-budget four-disc set on Brilliant Classics. At about the same time that ASV was busy with their Martucci project, along came Sony with their release of the composer’s Piano Concerto No. 2 in B? Minor played by pianist Carlo Bruni, paired once again with La canzone dei ricordi , sung by Mirella Freni. The conductor and orchestra on that recording were Riccardo Muti and La Scala Philharmonic.

The good news is that I have the Freni/Muti CD, so I’m able to compare the Sony recording with the new Naxos. The bad news is that of the D’Avalos survey on ASV, I have only the two symphonies, but not the disc with the Piano Concerto; thus, I’m unable to compare Caramiello to Coggi. So let me begin with La canzone dei ricordi (“The Songs of Memories”), which seems to be one of Martucci’s more enduring works. As originally completed in 1887, the piece was conceived for mezzo-soprano and piano. It wasn’t until 11 years later (1898) that Martucci orchestrated it. The piece is a setting of seven poems by Rocco Pagliera. Unless one is fluent in Italian, Naxos’s printing of the texts in Italian only is highly frustrating. The Sony with Freni provides translations in English, French, and German.

The poems, as can be deduced from the work’s title, are about dreams recollected, mostly of longed-for, but alas, only imagined loves. More interesting are Martucci’s formal design and musical content. Each song ends in a different key from which it started. The song that follows it begins in the key in which the previous song ended. Thus, by the end, we have returned to the key and the poem with which the cycle began. Stylistically, Martucci’s indebtedness to Wagner is unmistakable, but it’s a Wagner tinted—some might say tainted—by some of Puccini’s more pastel orchestral touches that one hears in La bohème . Martucci undoubtedly knew the opera, which premiered in 1896, two years before his orchestration of La canzone dei ricordi.

Freni was 60 when she recorded the Martucci with Muti in 1995. Age had added a degree of weight to a soprano voice that in its youth was lighter and more lyric in character. I’m not suggesting she would have made a good Brunhilde, but her projection in these songs comes across as sounding more Wagnerian than does Silvia Pasini’s delivery on the new Naxos. Nor by any means is it just a matter of voice. Freni dispatches the cycle in just over 28 minutes, compared to Pasini’s drawn-out 33:50. The result is that Freni’s reading has tremendous dramatic thrust, frequently sounding like an agitated Brunhilde railing in high dudgeon against Wotan, while Pasini sounds more like Mimi in her “Mi chiamano Mimì” aria from La bohème.

If my description has led you to believe that I prefer Freni to Pasini in this song cycle, you’d be wrong. Martucci may have been a Wagner champion, but he was not Wagner; and Pagliera’s poems, to which Martucci set his music, are not about mythic warriors, heroes, and the downfall of the gods. They’re about dreams remembered in that half-conscious state of waking. Pasini, I believe, comes closer to capturing the more impressionistic character of the poetry and the music; and Francesco La Vecchia has under him in the Orchestra Sinfonica di Roma a better ensemble than Muti did at the time in his La Scala Philharmonic.

Since I have no other recordings of the Piano Concerto against which to compare Gesualdo Coggi’s performance, I can be brief. If you love big, Romantic piano concertos, Martucci’s D-Minor Concerto is right up there with some of the best of them. Echoes of Schumann, Grieg, and Brahms’s First Concerto (his Second hadn’t been completed yet when Martucci wrote his score in 1878) reverberate throughout the score, and maybe even a hint every now and then of Tchaikovsky (assuming Martucci had heard it in its original 1875 version prior to starting work on his own Concerto). Gorgeous music, gorgeous playing, gorgeous recording; this one is not to be missed.

FANFARE: Jerry Dubins

Martucci: Piano Concerto No 1, Etc / Coggi, La Vecchia

$19.99
CD

Naxos

May 26, 2009

8570931

Smyth: The Prison / Burton, Brailey, Blachly, Experiential Orchestra

Chandos

Available as SACD

~~$21.99~~ $10.99

Aug 07, 2020

The 2020 GRAMMY Award winner for Best Classical Solo Vocal Performance, honoring Sarah Brailey and Dashon Burton!

August 18th marks the 100th anniversary of the 19th Constitutional Amendment, granting women in the US the right to vote. A fitting time then for our release of the World Premier Recording of Ethel Smyth’s late masterpiece The Prison. Smyth left home at nineteen to study composition in Leipzig. In the company of Clara Schumann and her teacher Heinrich von Herzogenberg, she met and won the admiration of composers such as Tchaikovsky, Brahms, Dvorák, and Grieg. Smyth was the first woman to have an opera performed at the Met, in 1903. (The second was Kaija Saariaho, whose L'Amour de loin appeared there in 2016!) Smyth later became central to the Suffragette movement in England, writing the March of the Women. Her gender politics and sexuality were cause for attacks by critics, and she famously went to prison herself for throwing a stone through an MP’s window. Composed in 1930 and premiered in 1931 in Edinburgh’s Usher Hall, The Prison is a Symphony in two parts, ‘Close on Freedom’ and ‘The Deliverance’, set for soprano and bass-baritone soloists, chorus, and full orchestra. The text is taken from a philosophical work by Henry Bennet Brewster and concerns the writings of a prisoner in solitary confinement, his reflections on life and his preparations for death.

REVIEWS:

Ethyl Smyh's late work, The Prison (1929-30), is uncategorizable. The 64-minute “vocal symphony” for bass-baritone (The Prisoner) and soprano (his Soul), with chorus (philosophical commentary) is in two parts: Close To Freedom and The Deliverance. The heavy-ish text, by Smyth’s dear friend (and perhaps lover, though her relationships tended otherwise to be lesbian) Henry Bennet Brewster centers on the gloomy ruminations of a prisoner considering the end of his life, and his soul, which is guiding him toward peace. In Part 1, He, for instance speaks of his anxiety and inability to sleep, and wonders about immortality and if he will be emancipated; in Part 2, the Soul tells him the end of his struggle is near and he learns to “disband his ego”. The chorus has a further calming effect: immortality is everywhere, human passions remain. He finally finds peace. As you can see, a regular Offenbachian satire–not.

From the very opening moments – “I awoke in the middle of the night” – the mood is weighty with disquiet. The bass-baritone voice of Dashon Burton has both substance and gentleness, his attention to the text that of a Lieder singer. Violin and harp circle his words. Sarah Brailey’s Soul, from the start, sings with subtlety and a type of fleeting loveliness. She opens the second part with a solo on the words “the struggle is over”, intoning much of her words on one note while first a trio of winds, then a solo violin, then the full body of strings and chorus–all pianissimo–join her above and below. Chant? Hymn? Both, really. Smyth layers the orchestra; a brass choir during a passage about immortality makes a grand effect. Later, a painfully beautiful pastoral section precedes the Prisoner’s feeling of metaphysical freedom.

While much of it is gripping, its slow pacing and didacticism can dehumanize the story that the Prisoner and Soul are stuck in. The Prisoner’s “prison”, both metaphorical and real, is presented with such humanity and openness by Burton that his eventual spiritual freedom makes a glorious sound, despite–rather than due to–the orchestrally and chorally weighted underpinnings. Some Elgar shows up, and is not very welcome.

The performance, I suspect, could not be bettered. The New York City-based Experiential Orchestra and Chorus both perform with luscious tone and poise. James Blachly’s leadership brings the work’s lyricism to the forefront; it would be easy to over-emphasize passages but he works best within the dramatic arc of the narrative. Much of The Prison is gorgeous and unexpected – who does Smyth sound like? And while some moments seem inert, they are few and far between.

– ClassicsToday.com (10/10; Robert Levine)

Smyth’s haunting music, given here in conductor James Blachly’s new edition, is beautifully constructed and highly evocative (with quotes or allusions to earlier Smyth scores). Her orchestration is limpid and masterly, rendered lovingly here by Blachly with the Experiential Orchestra. The choral contribution is relatively minor, the focus rightly on the two soloists, but again superbly performed. The only miscalculation is Smyth’s use of ‘The Last Post’ in the concluding pages, adding a martial resonance that may jar to modern ears; to Smyth, a major-general’s daughter, it may just have been an echo of (her) youth which she wanted at this point. Magnificent sound from Chandos, too. Very strongly recommended.

– Gramophone

On Sale

Smyth: The Prison / Burton, Brailey, Blachly, Experiential Orchestra

~~$21.99~~ $10.99
SACD

Chandos

Aug 07, 2020

CHSA 5279

Bull: Violin Concertos / Folleso, Ruud, Norwegian Radio Orchestra [Hybrd SACD + Blu-ray Audio]

Available as Blu-Ray with SACD

$44.99

Apr 27, 2010

BULL Sæterjentens Søndag . Violin Concerto in A. Concerto Fantastico in e. I Ensomme Stunde. La Verbena de San Juan. Et Sæterbesøg • Annar Follesø (vn); Ole Kristian Ruud, cond; Norwegian RO • 2L 67 (Blu-ray audio: 69:21)

& SACD

Tall, preternaturally handsome Ole Bull captured the fancy of concertgoers in Europe, and in the United States as well. In fact, at a time when classical artists like Henri Vieuxtemps had trouble making inroads in the American hinterland (supposedly after an initially disappointing reception, he composed his first set of variations on Yankee Doodle ), Bull made immediate connections with his program of atmospheric, sentimental, and technically dazzling pieces that he had composed himself—and always with his audiences in mind. Nevertheless, as had Paganini, whom he idolized, before him, he proved himself able to win the admiration of first-rank composers. The opening work on this program, Sæterjentens Søndag (The Herd Girl’s Sunday Morning), represents just such a simple song, one that must (and seems calculated to) have drawn an admiring tear from his listeners. Annar Follesø gives an appropriately sensitive and atmospheric account of it (with the accompaniment arranged for orchestra by Johan Svendsen), along with Ole Kristian Ruud and the Norwegian Radio Orchestra. The two concertos, recently discovered, represent the more virtuosic side of Bull’s personality. The first, in A Major, opens with a long and symphonically conceived tutti, with some of the quieter passages sensitively orchestrated. The soloist enters with a showy cadenza that must have been in part just what Bull’s audiences wanted—and even expected. The writing for violin sounds like a (derivative?) mix of Paganini’s pyrotechnical wizardry and De Bériot’s suave tunefulness. Still, many listeners may doubt that Bull has integrated his thematic materials as successfully (or at least consistently) into the passagework as did his contemporaries the Henris (Vieuxtemps and Wieniawski). But Follesø displays the natural virtuosic flair to play some of these seemingly aimless passages without retaining his tongue in his cheek, as well as an affinity for the concerto’s genial ethnic harmonic and melodic atmosphere. The brief slow movement also opens with an extended orchestral passage; but the soloist claims the limelight upon his entry in an affecting passage on the G string. The Rondo pastorale that brings the concerto to a close features thematic fireworks in double-stops, and while some of the later material grows almost maudlin, Bull always manages to hold his listeners’ interest.

The nominally programmatic Concerto fantastico (with movements representing night, dawn, and day) also begins with a long tutti and features even more flamboyant passagework, which Follesø plays with aplomb. As in Bull’s Concerto in A Major, the streamers seem to be stretched pretty thinly over their underlying framework. Once again, though, Follesø (and Ruud and the orchestra) play their roles without sounding smugly superior to the program. The slow movement, built on a simple, heartfelt tune, sounds affecting in the same way as did the other concerto’s corresponding movement. The finale, a short but intoxicating romp with lyrical pauses for breath, seems even more shrewdly calculated for effect than does the other concerto’s finale. Once again, Follesø provides a rollicking, technically dazzling account. I Ensomme Stunde (La Melancolie), here arranged by Johan Halvorsen and Wolfgang Plagge, offers Grieg-like fare like that in Sæterjentens Søndag . The more extended fantasy, La Verbena de San Juan , however, with its percussion-rich orchestration, sounds like a sort of Norwegian counterpart to Sarasate’s ethnic concoctions, although it seems to go a step further in local color. According to the notes, Bull wrote it for Queen Isabella of Spain upon the occasion of a tour in 1846. The queen, again according to the notes, enjoyed Bull’s music—and perhaps other attentions. According to the notes, Bull incorporated Sebastian Yradier’s Jota Aragonesa out of gratitude to that composer; audiences should recognize it. They should also recognize Sarasate’s whistling harmonics (also familiar from Paganini). And Bull, as did Sarasate, incorporated left-hand pizzicatos liberally in his works. Follesø is equal to the challenges both these techniques pose.

Et Sæterbesøg includes references to folk fiddling with drones that I’ve always associated with the Hardanger fiddle or at least its style. The notes relate that, coupled with the words to Sæterjentens Søndag, it’s become a part of Norway’s cultural heritage. For those inclined, as many have been, to dismiss Bull as a sort of musical charlatan, the lyrical outpouring in the song’s middle should invite at least a second look. Arve Tellefsen played a program of Bull’s music for violin and orchestra with Andrew Karsten and the Bergen Symphony Orchestra in 1988 (Norsk Kulturraå ds Klassikerserie 50008), including two works on Follesø’s, Et Sæterbesøg, I Ensomme Stunde , and the Adagio sostenuto from the Concerto fantastico . Tellefsen’s version of Et Sæterbesøg takes advantage of bells to enhance the mountain atmosphere, and his “Hardanger” sounds twangier, even if he doesn’t draw as deeply affecting a cantabile from its lyrical passages (or those of I Ensomme Stunde— though Tellefsen’s version of the concerto’s slow movement throbs with a warmer expressivity despite his edgier tone production).

The Blu-ray version (audio only), to which I listened (although I used the CD version of Follesø’s program in making the comparison with Tellefsen’s program), provides extraordinarily sharp definition, hardly losing clarity in the midst of a somewhat reverberant setting. Whether or not this medium will offer relief to listeners fatigued by the roughness of even the best CDs, in particular in recordings of violin tone, it represents an improvement over CDs, as did DVD-Audio, among formats dependent on high-storage media (the sound: 24 bit and at least 192 kHz, with a choice of 5.1 DTS HD, 7.1 DTS HD, or 2.0 LPCM). Notes in the highest registers hiss and spit, yet with a relaxing smoothness and stimulating three-dimensional (a metaphor only) projection. The entire program, in this rich smorgasbord of formats, should appeal to lovers of the violin and perhaps to general listeners as well. As did Paganini and figures like Sinatra and Presley, Ole Bull represented a cultural phenomenon that should interest at least historians. His success in his own time demonstrates that, at least to the extent that his effect didn’t depend on his personality, genuine musicality underlay his work. It’s apparent in this collection. Recommended on that account, as well.

FANFARE: Robert Maxham

Bull: Violin Concertos / Folleso, Ruud, Norwegian Radio Orchestra [Hybrd SACD + Blu-ray Audio]

$44.99
Blu-Ray with SACD

2L

Apr 27, 2010

2L067SABD

Reinecke: Complete Violoncello Sonatas / Manuel Fischer-dieskau, Connie Shih

MDG

Available as CD

$23.99

Sep 01, 2011

For British listeners, the name of Reinecke is likely to evoke Stanford’s recollection - after an uninspiring period of study with him - that “of all the dry musicians I have ever known, he was the most desiccated”. Scandinavians will remember that Grieg thought no better of the man and that for Svendsen, “not only is he envious and bloodless … he is also in the highest degree villainous”. Yet many musicians sought him out during his long reign at the Leipzig Gewandhaus (1860-1895), including Sullivan, Bruch, Delius and the three just mentioned, while Elgar travelled to Leipzig in 1882 to hear him conduct.

If this all suggests a plodding academic, the “Undine” Sonata for flute and piano, the one work by Reinecke that remains at least on the fringe of the repertoire, is neither academic nor lacking in fantasy. A disc containing the First Symphony, the Violin Concerto and some smaller pieces suggested to me that further examination of Reinecke would be never less than pleasant, if hardly thrilling. Maybe thrilling would be too strong a word for these cello sonatas too, but they do suggest he was more inspired in chamber music than in larger orchestral pieces.

In some ways the first sonata is the most attractive of all. Its ballad-like opening theme immediately catches the attention and the second theme is not only well contrasted, it is introduced in a very remote tonality indeed. What is striking about this movement is the mastery with which it combines free-flowing, rhapsodic feeling with tight formal control. Though Reinecke is said to have looked back to Mendelssohn and Schumann for his models, and certainly rejected Liszt and Wagner, his music combines romantic spirit with an intuitive sense of form. Here, at least, he was able to make his own personal fusion of classical ideals and romantic freedom. The second movement also contains a number of quite contrasting ideas and the finale has much surging passion.

The claims of the second sonata are not to be underestimated, either. After a short but brooding introduction the first movement leads off with a pithy, expressive idea that revolved in my head for some days afterwards. Again, Reinecke’s formal control is tight even while the effect is of free rhapsody. The themes tend not to appear and reappear in the expected places and tonalities, and are inclined to undergo transformations just where an exact recapitulation might seem in sight. The second movement is marked “Quasi fantasia” and has much soaring romantic melody. The finale starts with a catchy tune but is inclined to chase its own tail a bit too much for its own good. This, admittedly, is a common failing among 19^th century finales when not written by Brahms.

Altogether, it may be said that, if Reinecke did not revolutionize sonata forms, he nevertheless evolved an intuitively inventive way of reinterpreting received formal wisdom. The interesting thing is that exactly the same thing could be said about his grudging pupil Stanford’s chamber music, even down to a tendency to write finales that chase their own tail. One is bound to wonder if Reinecke’s music did not have a greater influence on Stanford than he later cared to admit, having been so disappointed by the man himself. Also common to both composers is a complete equality between the two partners, with plenty of challenging material for both players and a continual melodic interplay that must make Reinecke’s chamber music rewarding to perform. Ultimately, I suppose this music inhabits smiling valleys and pleasant domestic surroundings rather than soar above the mountain peaks, but we can surely find a place for music that does this so attractively.

The third sonata arouses more ambivalent reactions. Dedicated “to the shade of Brahms”, who had just died, its formal mastery will not be questioned. Furthermore, while in one sense it occupies harmonic ground solidly rooted in Schumann, its restless modulations look ahead to the world of Reger. It is a bitter, even vehement work by a composer whose art was by then left high and dry by musical progress. The only problem is that Reinecke’s easy flow of melodic inspiration seems to have dried up. The themes are clear-cut and functional, but neither the composer’s masterly development of them, nor these performers’ imagination and conviction, can hide the fact that the cupboard is a little bare. Only the second theme of the finale recalls the warmth of earlier years. Nevertheless, as often with late works by composers clinging to the style of their youth in the teeth of what they perceive as ugly modernism, the sense of isolation and disillusionment can be moving in themselves. Here, too, the case of Stanford is an obvious parallel.

Manuel Fischer-Dieskau, just in case you’ve been wondering, is the great baritone’s son. It would seem that interventionism, as an interpretative creed, runs in the family. But, like his father at his best, MF-D knows how to intervene in a way that brings the music to life, and he extracts the maximum range of expression from these scores. The Canadian pianist Connie Shih has an easy technical command and a well-rounded tone in the heavier moments. She and the cellist seem in full agreement over how to play this music. They leave me wondering why the first two sonatas, at least, never made it into the not very large repertoire of romantic cello sonatas.

Cellists reading these words may be wondering where they can get the scores. They will be delighted to find that the IMSLP-Petrucci Library, a great Internet resource, apparently offers all three for free download. They will be a bit less delighted when they find that the file of no.1 is missing pages 4-15, jumping from the first page of the first movement to the last page of the second, so you get only the finale complete. Also, there’s not a cello part, instead there’s an alternative violin part. The second sonata is complete but the piano part of no.3 lacks the last page, or maybe the last two. In compensation you get pages 10 and 11 twice. I used to think that people who do things for love not money do them properly, but on this showing even some who work for love are as slap-happy as any half-hearted employee anxious for the next coffee break. Granted, one shouldn’t look a gift-horse in the mouth, but we may reasonably check that it has all four legs.

None of this little grumble, obviously, affects the value of this finely recorded and excellently annotated disc of three cello sonatas well worth investigating. The name of Reinecke is beginning to come alive for me.

-- Christopher Howell, MusicWeb International

Reinecke: Complete Violoncello Sonatas / Manuel Fischer-dieskau, Connie Shih

$23.99
CD

MDG

Sep 01, 2011

6031661-2

Holst: St Paul's Suite; Warlock: Capriol Suite/ Sir Adrian Boult, Vernon Handley

Lyrita

Available as CD

$20.99

Nov 01, 2007

Tracklist:
Michael BALFE (1808-1870)
The Bohemian Girl: Galop (1843) [1:26]
Philharmonia Orchestra/Nicholas Braithwaite
Sir Edward ELGAR (1857-1934)
Variations on an Original Theme ‘Enigma’ Op. 36: X. Dorabella (1899) [2:41]
Pomp and Circumstance March No. 5 in C Op. 39 (1930) [5:41]
New Philharmonia Orchestra/Andrew Davis
Frederick DELIUS (1862-1934)
A Village Romeo and Juliet: The Walk to the Paradise Garden (1905) [10:49]
London Philharmonic Orchestra/Myer Fredman
Percy GRAINGER (1882-1961)
Shepherd’s Hey; The Immovable Do (1908-13; 1933-42) [2:11; 5:04]
London Philharmonic Orchestra/Nicholas Braithwaite
Sir Hamilton HARTY (1879-1941)
An Irish Symphony: The Fair-Day (1904) [3:01]
New Philharmonia Orchestra/Vernon Handley
Peter WARLOCK (1894-1930)
Capriol, Suite for full orchestra (1926-28) [9:47]
London Symphony Orchestra/Nicholas Braithwaite
Lord BERNERS (1883-1950)
The Triumph of Neptune: Hornpipe (1926) [1:50]
London Philharmonic Orchestra/Nicholas Braithwaite
Gustav HOLST (1874-1934)
St. Paul’s Suite for strings Op. 29 No. 2 (1913) [13:28]
English Chamber Orchestra/Imogen Holst
Ralph VAUGHAN WILLIAMS (1872-1958)
Fantasia on a theme by Thomas Tallis (1910) [16:08]
rec. Jan 1979, Kingsway Hall (Balfe); Jan 1974, Walthamstow Assembly Hall (Elgar); Jan 1970, Walthamstow Assembly Hall (Delius); Aug 1978, Kingsway Hall (Grainger; Berners); April 1976, Kingsway Hall (Harty); Sept 1978, Watford Town Hall (Warlock); Jan 1968, Walthamstow Assembly Hall (RVW)

R E V I E W:

A fine introduction to Musical Britain

When I first saw the advert for this CD I assumed that it was the ‘sweepings up’ from the floor of the Lyrita studios: it was all the bits and pieces from their vinyl pressings that could not find a home elsewhere. Yet two things made me modify that view. Firstly I know that there is a vast amount of material awaiting re-release (the mono recordings of Jacob, White, Ireland and Wordsworth, for example) and secondly, as I listened to this CD I realised that it made a fine introduction to Musical Britain. I remember as a child books called the ‘Boy’s Guide to’ … Field-craft, Trains, Racing Cars et al. Perhaps this, in a more PC age, could be referred to as the "Individual’s Guide to British Music"?

The CD opens with a piece that was written when Great Britain was a ‘land without music.’ The Galop is probably the most famous excerpt from Michael Balfe’s best known opera: The Bohemian Girl. And of course it was once a Tommy Beecham ‘Lollipop’. Perhaps Balfe’s twenty-nine operas do not signify in the early 21st century when compared to G&S, Tippett or Benjamin Britten, but in his day he was a seriously popular composer. And Ireland – Balfe was born in Dublin - was at that time part of the United Kingdom!

I usually baulk at excerpting from Elgar’s Enigma Variations. My exception is the annual outing of Nimrod at the Cenotaph: I can forgive anything in those circumstances. So I suppose I am not really happy about one short variation being given here. Yet here it is - Dorabella which follows on from Nimrod and is a complete change of tone, mood and emotion. We hear the ‘stammering lightness’ and ‘merry chatter’ of Elgar’s helper and admired Dora Penny. It is a lovely piece that actually does stand alone … just about … although I feel that it is much more telling and effective following that great Beethovenian variation in the complete work.

And how often do we hear the P&C March No.5? Even enthusiasts of ‘Grunge’ cannot have avoided ‘Land of Hope and Glory’ in their lives’ journey. But how many know the other four (five)? I guess most people over the age of thirty-five will recall No. 4 in G being played as the recessional at the Prince and Princess of Wales’s wedding. The rest are little known and rarely heard. But please note that this late - it was composed four years before Elgar’s death - march is rather good. And the interesting thing is that most of us come to it afresh. It has not accrued the baggage - good, bad and indifferent - of being an alternative National Anthem played at the Proms.

I am not an opera fan, but I have always loved The Walk to Paradise Garden by Fred Delius. I know the opera A Village Romeo and Juliet and realise that it has a tragic context in that work. However, I got to know the piece on an old Beecham release of Delius orchestral works on Decca Eclipse and have had my own programme for this work ever since! So I suggest that listeners dump the libretto and see this piece as a nature poem – descriptive of whatever landscape or mindscape moves them most.

Percy Grainger is a rare personality. He wrote a vast amount of music that is little played these days. I am not a fan of his, yet I do appreciate that he was probably a wayward genius. And a few of his works do have the capacity to move me: most I find entertaining. The majority of listeners will know his ubiquitous Country Gardens which was arranged for just about every instrumental combination possible. Yet Shepherd’s Hey and the Immovable Do presented here deserve greater popularity. The latter piece was inspired by a leaking harmonium which continually sounded a ‘high C’ throughout the performance of whatever Grainger was playing. Shepherd’s Hey is based on the folk tune ‘The Keel Row’. Incidentally, the score was dedicated to Edvard Grieg. Both miniatures are worthy additions to the repertoire and would make excellent encores - if given the chance.

Our musical exploration moves back to Ireland. This time it is the second movement of Sir Hamilton Harty’s fine Irish Symphony – subtitled The Fair-Day. Most people will associate Harty with the Hallé Orchestra which he conducted between 1920 and 1933. Yet he was also an accomplished composer who wrote not only the present work but a wonderful piano concerto, a violin concerto and a number of other excellent pieces. Fortunately, most of these were released on Chandos a number of years ago and are still available. Additionally, Naxos has contributed their recordings of the Symphony and the Piano Concerto. Harty is a composer well worth investigating. The present piece is a fine evocation of a ‘Fair Day’ in Ireland that must have been familiar to the composer as a young man. Look out for the fiddler tuning up and the fine reel!

Everyone knows that Peter Warlock was a pseudonym. His real name was Philip Heseltine. He took the name of Warlock after some involvement with occult mysteries after time spent in Ireland during the Great War. More often noted for his superb songs, Warlock composed a mere handful of works for orchestral forces – including An Old Song, the Serenade for Frederick Delius and the Capriol Suite. Best known in its string orchestra incarnation, this latter work was originally given as a piano duet. Latterly it was arranged for full orchestra – this is the version we hear on this CD. The Suite is based on tunes found in an antique dissertation called ‘Orchesography’ which was supposedly penned by a certain ‘Capriol’. The programme notes inform us that the Suite was rejected by a number of publishers: this is hard to imagine since we now regard the work as one of the minor masterpieces of 20th century music. Apparently Warlock sold the work for a mere 25 guineas!

Lord Berners’ real name is much more impressive – Gerald Hugh Tyrwhitt-Wilson: it sounds as if it were straight out of a P.G. Wodehouse novel. He was an artist and a ballet producer whose day-job appeared to be that of a diplomat. Moving in the rarefied atmosphere of the Sitwells it is not surprising that he was an eccentric. The Triumphs of Neptune was conceived by Sacheverell and eventually became a successful feature for the Ballets Russes. The Hornpipe does not press on to the limits of musical invention, but it is attractive and does justice to its nautical origins. It is well worth discovering other music by this fascinating, if somewhat odd, composer.

Gustav Holst’s St Paul’s Suite surely needs no introduction or recommendation to readers of these pages. Yet sometimes it is easy to forget that this work comes from the same pen as The Planets. The work is conducted here by the composer’s daughter Imogen: to my ear it is one of the best recordings of this work in the repertoire. It is a Suite that must be listened to in its entirety and not excerpted.

The last piece is a major masterpiece. Along with Tippett’s Double Concerto and Elgar’s Introduction and Allegro it is one of the most important essays in string writing in British musical literature. The Tallis Fantasia is a work that seems to gather up the whole tradition of England – its landscape, its literature and its religion. It is impossible to listen to this work without being aware of the whole sweep of history – both musical and otherwise. In one sense it is a timeless work, yet in another it is as much a part of twentieth century music as Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue or Berg’s Violin Concerto. The Fantasia is a visionary score which marked its composer out as a major figure in the British musical scene.

Most cognoscenti of British music will have all these works in their CD collections. This release is a bit of a pot-pourri. Yet consider this. It is good to take the opportunity of listening to a variety of pieces played end to end - now and again; it reminds us of our whole musical heritage. And lastly if you know anyone who is edging towards an appreciation of the native music of the British Isles – this is the present for them. In either case – Buy it!

-- John France, MusicWeb International

Holst: St Paul's Suite; Warlock: Capriol Suite/ Sir Adrian Boult, Vernon Handley

$20.99
CD

Lyrita

Nov 01, 2007

SRCD336

Delius: A Mass of Life, Idyll / Opie, Hill

Naxos

Available as CD

~~$29.99~~ $14.99

Jun 26, 2012

To witness a performance of Delius’s A Mass of Life, arguably his supreme creative achievement, is to look into the heart of the composer and his Nietzsche-inspired world. Moreover, this ravishing music, written between 1898 and 1905, represents Delius at the height of his powers, when musical ideas seemed to pour out of him at a time when he had finally learned to assimilate, in an entirely individual, not to say maverick manner, a confluence of modernist styles embracing Grieg, Wagner, Strauss, Charpentier and Debussy.

There is no doubt from the vivid opening choruses of Parts 1 and 2 of this recording (and what openings!) that the message of the work is a life-affirming one. There is a dynamic momentum to the tempi which perfectly evokes Zarathustra’s ruling passion, the Will of Man, and there is a richness to the orchestral sound which adds to the sense of muscularity. The chorus negotiate Delius’s often awkward vocal intervals with great skill and the intonation is virtually flawless. Just occasionally the sheer weight of the orchestral sound, which is quite forward on this recording (more so than Hickox), is apt to overwhelm the voices but this is a minor distraction.

Hill brings energy and élan to the third section, ‘In deine Auge’ (for me perhaps the most exhilarating section of Part 1), where the parallel with the end of Act 2 of Die Meistersinger is almost palpable and where the most unusual example of a Delius fugue (!) is given life, vigour and meaning.

Alan Opie, who has the lion’s share of the solo music in the work, is almost Wotan-like in his performances. From his first Nietzschean dance he is majestic and brings out of the score that vibrant, heady, Teutonic contemporaneity with which Delius had clearly become enthralled at this point in his career. Opie’s singing of what is effectively the role of Zarathustra has immense authority and his impressive range (up to high G) is ideal for Delius’s onerous vocal demands.

Andrew Kennedy, Catherine Wyn-Rogers and Janice Watson also offer fine lyrical interpretations of their solo parts and the choral accompaniments are allowed to intermingle subtly as an extension of the orchestra. The BSO are on fine form too, and special mention needs to be made of the haunting horn-playing in the introduction to Part 2 (‘On the Mountains’), a sound which sums up so much of Delius’s nature music.

This is a must for any Delius Liebhaber and, with the added bonus of the late Prelude and Idyll, a marvellous starting point for anyone new to Delius’s unique but compelling art.

-- Jeremy Dibble, Gramophone
3622320.az_DELIUS_Mass_Life_Prelude.html

DELIUS A Mass of Life. Prelude and Idyll1 • David Hill, Cond; 1Janice Watson (sop); Catherine Wyn-Rogers (mez); Andrew Kennedy (ten); 1Alan Opie (bar); Bach Ch; 1Bournemouth SO • NAXOS 8.572861-62 (2 CDs: 118:19 Text and Translation)

A Mass of Life is quintessential Delius, musically and existentially, composed over 1904–05 in the first great rush of his maturity. From the bounding affirmative choruses to the breathtakingly sustained nature contemplations, from the melancholy to the ecstatic, the Mass of Life traces and forecasts the gamut of Delian affect with a concision, fullness, and abundance he might rival but never achieve so comprehensively again. Unless I’ve missed something, this is but the fourth recording of the work since Beecham’s nonpareil 1952 account. Though its musical demands are daunting—if nowhere near as challenging as those of Mahler’s “Symphony of a Thousand,” with which it invites comparison—the primary bar to frequent performance is its text, drawn by Delius’s friend Ernst Cassirier largely from the Dance Songs of Nietzsche’s Also sprach Zarathustra. For those coming in late, one recalls the oft-quoted passage in Eric Fenby’s Delius as I Knew Him: “When, one wet day … he was looking for something to read in the library of a Norwegian friend … and had taken down a book, Thus Spake Zarathustra—a book for all and none—by one Friedrich Nietzsche, he was ripe for it. The book, he told me, never left his hands until he had devoured it from cover to cover. It was the very book he had been seeking all along, and finding that book he declared to be one of the most important events of his life. Nor did he rest content until he had read every work of Nietzsche that he could lay his hands on”—to which Fenby, a devout Catholic, adds—“and the poison entered his soul.” For listeners and performers today it may still be something of a jolt to find, in place of the supplicating Kyrie that the unfortunate term “Mass” leads one to expect, a glowingly charged hymn to the Will, “dispeller of need, my own necessity,” followed by Zarathustra’s brief praise of laughter (“My own laughter I pronounced holy”), succeeded by Zarathustra’s love duet with Life in a meadow filled with dancing girls, an archetypal encounter transpiring in a mythical dimension “beyond good and evil,” beyond place and time, crowned by the first, murmured, utterance of the Bell Song, the work’s central mystery. A Mass of Life may, of course, be enjoyed for its power and sensuous magic without reference to its text, but only to those nurtured on Nietzsche will it reveal its full import. Shrugging incomprehension of the text renders Benjamin Luxon’s Zarathustra, for Charles Groves (with the London Philharmonic Chorus and Orchestra), merely mellifluous, while Peter Coleman-Wright’s deadpan delivery for the late Richard Hickox—with the Waynflete Singers directed by today’s conductor, David Hill, and the Bournemouth Symphony Chorus and Orchestra—proves anesthetically workmanlike. When it appeared in 1997, I rated that reading, on Chandos, the best since Beecham’s (Fanfare 20:6). That honor goes now to the present offering. While Alan Opie does not efface memories of Bruce Boyce, for Beecham—whose delivery resonated from the nexus of Delius’s realization of Nietzsche—he teases the text gingerly, making a credible Zarathustra. In some numbers, Delius asks the soloists to share parts, with some of Zarathustra’s lines persuasively taken by Andrew Kennedy, and a portion of Life’s happily rendered by Janice Watson, though Catherine Wyn-Rogers’s beguiling, seductive Life recalls Monica Sinclair’s divinatory geste for Beecham. The choral work is beyond praise, though in Hill’s brisk approach the melting lyricism heard chez Beecham tautens and leaps.

Idyll is a late reworking of music from Margot la Rouge, composed in 1902 for the new opera competition offered by the music publisher Sanzogno. Though it failed to score and was not heard in Delius’s lifetime, it comes from the composer’s ripest years and contains gorgeous swaths of his richest utterance, which he salvaged in 1932, recomposing it to words by Whitman and making an extended love duet of it. Idyll has not lacked for vocally lustrous, persuasive performances submerging Whitman’s quaintness (“Behold me when I pass, hear my voice, approach, draw close, but speak not. Be not afraid of me”) in absolute conviction. Of major interest, the lovingly lingering 1981 account led by Eric Fenby—who took down the score from dictation by the blind, paralyzed Delius—features Felicity Lott and Thomas Allen (deleted Unicorn-Kanchana UKCD 2073). Meredith Davies’s still-available 1968 tilt at Idyll, with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, is made memorable by the divinatory partnership of Heather Harper and John Shirley-Quirk. In keeping with his go at the Mass of Life, Hill pushes the work a bit, spurring the impassioned moments to escalate from the pervasive tone of wistful elegy. Opie, as the anonymous man, is authoritatively resonant, in response to Janice Watson’s brightly edged soprano (touched by a bit of vibrato), with its gloriously amber lower register, buxomly filling the part of the nameless woman.

One caveat: In the headnote the title of the work is given per the album, but you will search the catalog of Delius’s works in vain for an orchestral Prelude. The work so designated is simply the first three minutes—an orchestral prelude, to be sure—of Idyll and has never, until now, been listed separately. The fake title generates a phantom work to bedevil buyers, scholars, and connoisseurs, and detracts from—rather than adding to—the program’s generosity.

Sound packs an immediate wallop making for occasional congestion. In the opening chorus, for instance, the leaping underlining of trombones and tubas becomes indistinct, overwhelmed by choral mass, and while one can pick out the glockenspiel, its function of festive accentuation is lost. In quieter passages, and in the capture of the vocalists, on the other hand, this upfront take is gratifyingly welcome. In German, Zarathustra’s pronouncements recall and parody the Lutheran Bible, in light of which the ostensibly stilted thee-ing and thou-ing of William Wallace’s singing translation—made for Beecham and used by him for all of his public performances (according to notes by Delius aficionado Lyndon Jenkins)—fall into place, if not quite into King James English. Whitman’s text is included.

In sum, a superb production and the grandest addition to the Delius discography in many years. Highest recommendation.

FANFARE: Adrian Corleonis

On Sale

Delius: A Mass of Life, Idyll / Opie, Hill

~~$29.99~~ $14.99
CD

Naxos

Jun 26, 2012

8572861-62

Guarneri Quartet - The Complete RCA Victor Album Collection

Sony Masterworks

Available as CD

~~$199.98~~ $149.99

Mar 28, 2025

In the early 1960s, four young musicians who had been playing chamber music at Rudolf Serkin’s Marlboro School and Festival in Vermont were encouraged to form a string quartet. In July 1964, the Guarneri Quartet gave its first concert and less than a year later made its first recordings under contract to RCA Victor. For the next 45 years, with only one change of personnel, the Guarneris performed all over the world and amassed a large, wide-ranging, prize-winning discography. Sony Classical now presents, for the first time in a single collection, all the recordings made by the Guarneri Quartet for RCA between 1965 and 2005.

When the announcement came of its retirement at the end of the 2008–09 season, the eminent British critic Rob Cowan wrote a perceptive, affectionate tribute to the Guarneri Quartet in Gramophone, comparing it to the Juilliard Quartet, the other superb ensemble that had dominated the American quartet catalogue for so many years. Using their respective Bartók recordings as an example, he contrasted the “cut-glass precision” of the Juilliard’s early-60s set to the Guarneri’s “volatile, free-spirited, generously expressive and tonally rich” performing style in its RCA cycle from the mid-70s.

That characterization of the Guarneri Quartet’s playing runs through virtually all the reviews garnered in their long recording career, a story that began with the 1966 release of two of Mozart’s late “Prussian” Quartets and an album coupling Dvořák and Smetana. HiFi Stereo Review wrote that “not since the Juilliard String Quartet set the New York music world on its collective ear some 25 years ago has a new chamber group created such a furor as the Guarneri Quartet on the occasion of its New York début in February, 1965. This pair of discs demonstrates eloquently what all the shouting was about, for these players – Arnold Steinhardt, John Dalley, Michael Tree, and David Soyer – blend precision with flexibility of phrasing and rhythm in a way not often encountered in contemporary American string groups. Here, indeed, is the influence of the seed bed from which the quartet stems – the Marlboro of Rudolf Serkin, Alexander Schneider, and Pablo Casals … To the Smetana [‘From My Life’] the Guarneri Quartet brings blazing intensity and fierce rhythmic verve, while the wonderful slow movement of the Dvořák [Op. 105] comes forth from the stereo speakers with an almost orchestral lushness, yet with inner voices flawlessly balanced.”

Other critics concurred in their reviews of these two LPs: “The foursome produces an unfailingly luscious tone, plays with letter-perfect intonation, and displays all sorts of felicitous pinpoint balances and coloristic effects. And how these gentlemen stay together … even in the most wayward of tempo changes. In short, this is ensemble work of a transcendental variety … The Guarneri Quartet is the most gifted group of its kind I have heard in years” (High Fidelity). “This is distinguished Mozart playing indeed. Its technical excellence needs little comment: as with the Dvořák/Smetana record … last month, with this team you take technical mastery for granted as soon as you hear the first phrase, and straightaway it's the intensely musical quality of the playing which strikes you. Theirs is Mozart played with the classical virtues, above all with firm line, poise and sensibility. The surface of the music is polished, but how much the Guarneri Quartet find beneath” (Gramophone).

Arthur Rubinstein was the quartet’s longtime keyboard partner. In 1966, they recorded the Piano Quintets of Schumann and Brahms: “Rubinstein and the Guarneris search out to equally convincing effect the flowingly lyrical aspects of the music, and this yields special rewards in a ravishing slow movement [the Brahms]” (HiFi Stereo Review). Dvořák’s followed in 1971: “The performance is beautifully balanced between the gentleman at the keyboard and the gentlemen with strings, and the sense of give and take comes from the experience of many collaborations” (High Fidelity).

They also recorded the piano quartet literature, beginning in 1967 with “beautiful performances” (High Fidelity) of Brahms. Their reading of Fauré’s Op. 25 in C minor was judged (also by High Fidelity) to be “beautifully played and exquisitely well reproduced. The instrumental lines are wonderfully clear in this highly directional recording … Rubinstein displays his regal style.” And in a disc containing both of Mozart’s piano quartets, “the playing throughout both sides is extremely beautiful … and superbly integrated – at once expressive and elegant, making all of Mozart’s points with clarity, straightforwardness, and the exalted give-and-take that is the life’s breath of real chamber music. The recorded sound, too, is exceptional for its richness, balance, and clarity” (HiFi Stereo Review).

One of many other composers who feature prominently in Sony’s Guarneri collection is Haydn. About the ensemble’s 1977 recording of the two Op.77 quartets, HiFi Stereo Review wrote that “these spirited, attractive performances of Haydn's two greatest string quartets are marked by a sense of real involvement. Articulation is crisp, ensemble is impeccable, and there is an organic flow from the first phrase to the last in each work”, while Gramophone praised their “deeply thoughtful, powerfully paced” 1986 reading of Haydn’s Seven Last Words.

With reinforcement from the Budapest Quartet in 1965, the Guarneris produced an “absolutely stunning performance (HiFi Stereo Review) of Tchaikovsky’s Souvenir de Florence sextet. In 1966, they recorded quartets by Mendelssohn and Grieg (the latter receiving its CD première in this set): “The Guarneri ensemble does itself proud throughout this disc – most notably in the Mendelssohn, in which they display a tonal homogeneity and a warmth of phrasing that are truly striking. It is as though one instrument, not four, were producing the lovely sound that emerges from the speakers. Happily, the RCA recording staff has come up here with a string quartet sonority of the utmost intimacy, yet endowed with just enough room tone to enhance the naturally warm tone of the Guarneris” (HiFi Stereo Review).

But the heart of any string quartet’s repertoire is inevitably the Beethoven cycle, and it is with these works that the Guarneris were most closely associated. They made their complete recording for RCA between 1966 and 1969. Gramophone described the Early Quartets as “elegant and buoyant, with well-chosen tempos, subtle bowing, crisp articulation, telling contrasts between staccato and legato, and a consistent sense of style.” HiFi Stereo Review enumerated the virtues of their Middle Quartets: “(1) excellent intonation; (2) glowing tone; (3) ensemble that is balanced and accurate but always flexible and natural; (4) superb phrasing and line-building; (5) good feeling for a high Beethoven style. These are strong and expressive readings that often achieve great poetic insight and a powerful dynamic impulse.” The HiFi Stereo Review’s critic rhapsodized over their Late Quartets: “If I had to make the choice of a very few records to take with me to a desert island, I’d choose recordings of the last five Beethoven string quartets. Now, with the arrival of this new album (complete with the Grosse Fuge) by the Guarneri Quartet, I’ve got my island package. All I need is the island. The Guarneri is, without a doubt, one of the most extraordinary string quartets before the public these days: the group has an absolutely stunning sense of both soloistic and ensemble color. Indeed, I can’t think of another string quartet that can match them for sheer sensuous appeal.”

SUMMARY:

• With the first release of the Guarneri Quartet’ recording of Mendelssohn’s Quartet No. 3, transferred and edited from the session reels using 24 bit / 192 kHz technology

• 9 quartet recordings for the first time on CD, transferred and mastered from the original analog tapes, 3 quartets remastered, using 24 bit / 192 kHz technology

• Includes collaborations with Arthur Rubinstein, Leonard Rose, Mischa Schneider, Pinchas Zukerman, Walter Trampler, Ida Kavafian, and more

• Original LP sleeves and labels, booklet with full discographical notes

On Sale

Guarneri Quartet - The Complete RCA Victor Album Collection

~~$199.98~~ $149.99
CD

Sony Masterworks

Mar 28, 2025

19658886002

Vaughan Williams, Mathias / Bebbington, Ulster Orchestra

SOMM Recordings

Available as CD

$20.99

Mar 01, 2011

These three very different works have been dealt with admirably. A huge sympathy and understanding is evident.

3612260.az_MATHIAS_Piano_Concertos_1.html

MATHIAS Piano Concertos: No. 1; No. 2. VAUGHAN WILLIAMS Fantasy • Mark Bebbington (pn); George Vass, cond; Ulster O • SOMM SOMMCD 246 (70:42)

An English online reviewer wrote that it is always interesting to hear early works by Ralph Vaughan Williams. Interesting yes, because of what came later, but this Fantasy—begun in 1896 and finally completed in 1904—does not hold a great deal of interest for its own sake. Vaughan Williams did not find his true voice as a composer until he incorporated the modality of British folk song into his music. Here we have second-hand Brahms. Additionally, the piano was not Vaughan Williams’s instrument, and the keyboard writing in the Fantasy speaks of application rather than fluency. Even in the highly individual and much more successful Piano Concerto of 1931, the soloist is given full chords and double-octave passages that sound heavy and cumbersome. Much of this Fantasy strives for grandeur, a quality Vaughan Williams achieved in spades in works like the Sea Symphony and Job , but in this case the result seems empty, partly due to an absence of memorable thematic material and the lack of a personal voice. The composer suppressed this piece, along with a good deal of his other early work, and it remained unknown until after his death.

By contrast, the Welsh composer William Mathias (1934–92) seemed to find his voice early: a Celtic lyricism sitting alongside a hard-edged rhythmic vitality that is clearly Stravinskian. Mathias also had an identifiable sound as an orchestrator, often pointing rhythmic passages and climaxes with tuned percussion. His Piano Concerto No. 1 was written in 1955 when the composer was a 20-year-old student. The work greatly impressed Edmund Rubbra, among others. It is a three-movement concerto with buoyant outer movements but a rather stern (perhaps self-consciously modern) central Largo. After several performances Mathias withdrew the concerto, but was reconsidering editing it for publication when he died.

The standout on this disc is Mathias’s Second Piano Concerto of 1961. Clearly influenced by Tippett’s Piano Concerto, but none the worse for that, it combines strength with fluidity. The work is in four movements: a lyrical prelude, a tough allegro molto vivace , a brief lento leading into a multifaceted finale marked allegro alla danza . Tippett is recalled in the glittering high figuration of the piano part, and stentorian brass fanfares making use of the interval of the major second to harden their harmonies—but these are also fingerprints we associate with the mature Mathias. For the record, both these concertos precede other recorded concertos by the composer: those for harp, clarinet, and the third for piano (Lyrita), and the Oboe Concerto (Nimbus).

Mark Bebbington has made several fine discs of little-known English music and this is one of the best. He is sensitive to all the technical and interpretive demands of these highly contrasting composers. George Vass and the Ulster Orchestra provide immaculate support, and the recording is clear and well balanced. Highly recommended.

FANFARE: Phillip Scott

---------

I first came across Ralph Vaughan Williams ‘Fantasia’ for piano and orchestra whilst carefully studying the 1996 imprint of Michael Kennedy’s invaluable ‘A Catalogue of the Works of Ralph Vaughan Williams’. It was one of many pieces that were hidden from view and were likely to remain so due to an embargo on works that the composer had withdrawn or laid aside around the end of the Great War. These included The Garden of Prosperine, the Heroic Elegy, the Bucolic Suite and the present Fantasia (Fantasy). They were works that I imagined I would never hear. Fortunately Ursula Vaughan Williams lifted the embargo and in recent years a number of these compositions have been recorded. Each time I have listened to one of these re-discovered pieces I have felt that the musical world has been cheated of a great piece of music for such a long time. This is the case with the present Fantasy. It may not be one of the composer’s masterpieces, but it is certainly a work with which the listener can do business.

This twenty-one minute score was originally begun in October 1896 and was finally completed on 9 February 1902. It was subsequently revised in 1904. Since then it has lain in the British Library. This Fantasy (Kennedy refers to Fantasia) is regarded as a ‘student’ piece by critics, however it must be realised that RVW continued studying until relatively late in life. His sojourn with Ravel was during 1907/08 when the composer was thirty-five years old! The present work was begun when he was 24 years old and finished when he was 32. So it is hardly a neophyte’s ’prentice piece.

For many listeners RVW is not normally associated with the pianoforte. To be true he made use of it in his Double Piano Concerto and in Fantasia on the Old 104 ^th Psalm Tune. Both of these works have their enthusiasts and have been reappraised in recent years. However, there are only a handful of solo piano works, not a few of which are arrangements of other works or are teaching pieces.

The form of the Fantasy is in one movement of six sections with an overall structure of slow-fast-slow. Without perusing the score it is hard to say how idiomatic the solo part is: how well it fits under the pianist’s hands. However the impression is that it has all the hallmarks of a ‘romantic concerto’.

Many listeners will play ‘spot the influence’. And it is not hard to hear all sorts of things going on in this work. Certainly Brahms and Grieg are never too far from the second section. Rob Barnett at MusicWeb International has identified a mood of orthodox chant: I felt that Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition was recalled. Liszt is amongst the exemplars. However, this is no stitching together of other composer’s music. Vaughan Williams has created a valid work that reflects the times in which it was written and possibly the fact that he had studied with Stanford and latterly Max Bruch. Finally, there are moments when the ‘real’ RVW stands revealed and we hear intimations of Job (is it my imagination?) and the later symphonies. It is this, more than anything that makes the Fantasy such an important work to have on disc.

William Mathias has been reasonably well-served with recordings. Just a quick glance at the Arkiv catalogue reveals some 77 discs dedicated to, or featuring music by, the composer. However there are a number of critical works missing from these listings. For example I believe that there is no recording of the Concerto for Orchestra, Litanies and the Holiday Overture. The present CD fills in an important gap with the early Piano Concerto No.1 which dates from 1955 and the Second Concerto from some five years later. Lyrita have already presented the Third Concerto on SRCD325.
Dr Rhiannon Mathias has noted that her father ‘always held a fascination’ for the concerto form. Apart from the piano concertos, there are ‘one each for flute, oboe, clarinet, violin, horn, organ, harp and harpsichord’ in the composer’s catalogue as well as a couple of early concertos written when in his teens.

The Piano Concerto No.1 seems to me a very confident and well-wrought work for a nineteen year old student at Aberystwyth University, although it is in no way precocious. Apparently, the work seriously impressed Edmund Rubbra, who was the external examiner. The work was premiered in London on 19 May 1957. After a few more performances it was withdrawn.

The concerto is written three well-balanced movements. The Guardian critic of this present CD rightly points out that this work is ‘angular’ in its effect. However this is not the whole story: the slow movement contains ‘nocturnal’ music that is particularly reflective and beautiful. However, much of the concerto does nod to Bartók and Prokofiev although this is presented with many of the fingerprints that were to dominate much of Mathias music over the next thirty-five years. For example, we hear sharp harmonies and syncopated rhythmic figures and the playing of the main themes together rather than separately. The piano part has been described as ‘exhilarating’ and this mood is well reflected in Mark Bebbington’s interpretation of the work. The score for this recording was prepared and edited by Dr Rhiannon Mathias.

From the ‘cool’ opening bars of the Piano Concerto No. 2, Op. 13 we are in a different world to the earlier piece. This is a lyrical work that is suffused with poetry. Much of the opening movement is reflective and perhaps even tentative in its exploration of the two main themes. However there are moments of tension and even angst in these pages.

Mathias has added a ‘scherzo’ in all but name. In fact, it is presented as a ‘danse infernale’ which promotes music of ‘ferocious energy’ that utilises ‘brittle and rhythmically alert’ themes and harmonies. This is in complete contrast to the typically gentle first movement.

The ‘lento’ is the heart of the work and has an improvisatory feel to much of the proceedings. That said there is a structure to this movement that references a theme from the first movement, and gradually leads the music to a ‘nobilmente’ climax before a brief link passage leads to the concluding ‘rondo.’ This is Mathias dance-music at its best: from the initial solo piano statement of the main theme to the concluding riot of sound this music impresses. The composer makes use of themes from earlier movements and this gives the ‘rondo’ a sense of unity and purpose.

This is a work that is difficult to tie down for influences: I have detected Malcolm Arnold and Michael Tippett, but the truth is that this is William Mathias’s own unique sound-world at its best. It is hard to see why this concerto is not so much more popular and regularly played.

The work was commissioned by the Welsh Committee of the Arts Council of Great Britain, and was duly given its first performance at the 1961 Llandaff Festival.

It almost goes without saying that Mark Bebbington’s playing is superb throughout the entire disc. Bebbington has done so much for British music in recent years, with his cycles of music by John Ireland and Frank Bridge, the Dale and Hurlstone Sonatas and the Ferguson and Bax piano concertos. In the present disc the playing of these three very different works call for a wide range of interpretation and technical styles. These have been dealt with admirably and suggest a huge sympathy towards, and understanding of, these works.

As usual with SOMM recordings, everything is ‘done decently and in order’: the sound reproduction is first, the cover painting by James Hamilton Hay (1874-1916), the sleeve-notes, the background preparation of the scores by Dr Graham Parlett and Dr Rhiannon Mathias. It all adds up to an excellent production.

It seems redundant to say that I recommend this CD! Every RVW enthusiast will demand a copy for the World Premiere Recording of the Fantasy. I guess that fewer listeners will be Mathias fans - however, they ought to be! - but these two works, again premiere recordings, are important additions to the catalogue of British (Welsh) piano concertos. For fans of William Mathias they are essential: for newcomers to his music they are a fine introduction to a great composer who has a style that is largely all his own.

-- John France, MusicWeb International

Vaughan Williams, Mathias / Bebbington, Ulster Orchestra

$20.99
CD

SOMM Recordings

Mar 01, 2011

SOMMCD 246

Grieg: Works For Orchestra / Abravanel, Utah Symphony

Vox

Available as CD

$29.99

Jan 01, 1991

Classical Music

Grieg: Works For Orchestra / Abravanel, Utah Symphony

$29.99
CD

Vox

Jan 01, 1991

CDX-5048

Grieg: Songs / Bodil Arnesen, Erling Ragner Eriksen

Naxos

Available as CD

$19.99

Jan 15, 1997

Though Anne Sofie von Otter’s Gramophone Award-winning disc remains the clear choice for a single record devoted to Grieg’s songs, this new one runs it close. Bodil Arnesen is a young lyric soprano with just the right freshness for these open-air songs (as so many of them are) of spring and hope. She is entirely firm, has a healthy glow on the upper notes, shows a nice feeling for nuance, and knows how to make the voice smile. Some limitation is felt in the few darker songs, such as the second of Op. 48, “Dareinst, Gedanke mein”, which von Otter takes at a slower pace, introducing an unearthly pallor into the tone, and providing a more weighty reminder of the link back to Schubert’s Wanderers Nachtlied and forward to Strauss’s Ruhe, meine Seele. Then in the next song, “Lauf der Welt”, von Otter has a style at once bolder and more confiding: she communicates as though to a larger audience and so on a bigger scale, enlarging what one might call the vocal gestures of intimacy to match. Yet for home-listening, especially if you are playing at a good volume, I’m not sure that such large expressiveness isn’t just a little overwhelming: certainly the return, from that, to the soprano’s relatively miniaturist style is no hardship.

The choice of songs is fine, so too the programming, in which the sequence (not chronological) is sensible and satisfying. For a proper conspectus of Grieg’s songs it is necessary to have the Haugtussa cycle, which von Otter includes and Arnesen does not; there is compensation, however, in the charming Bjornson settings (Op. 21), the two songs of Solveig, and others such as The Princess and “With a primrose” which are among the best of all. Erling Eriksen accompanies sympathetically, the balance of voice and piano is well judged and the booklet provides useful and attractive companionship.

-- Gramophone [5/1997]

Grieg: Songs / Bodil Arnesen, Erling Ragner Eriksen

$19.99
CD

Naxos

Jan 15, 1997

8553781

Grieg: Cello Sonata, Etc / Birkeland, Gimsen

Naxos

Available as CD

$19.99

Nov 22, 1993

GRIEG: Cello Sonata, Op. 36 / Piano Sonata, Op. 7

Grieg: Cello Sonata, Etc / Birkeland, Gimsen

$19.99
CD

Naxos

Nov 22, 1993

8550878

Grieg: Piano Music Vol 9 / Einar Steen-nokleberg

Naxos

Available as CD

$19.99

Dec 01, 1995

Grieg: Piano Music, Vol. 9

Grieg: Piano Music Vol 9 / Einar Steen-nokleberg

$19.99
CD

Naxos

Dec 01, 1995

8553395

Grieg: Piano Music Vol 8 / Einar Steen-nokleberg

Naxos

Available as CD

$19.99

Dec 01, 1995

Grieg: Piano Music, Vol. 8

Grieg: Piano Music Vol 8 / Einar Steen-nokleberg

$19.99
CD

Naxos

Dec 01, 1995

8553394

Grieg: Piano Music Vol 4 / Einar Steen-nökleberg

Naxos

Available as CD

$19.99

Aug 17, 1995

"[Steen-Nokleberg's] playing brims in turn with charm, pathos, nostalgia, simplicity, drama and whatever else is needed – invariably appropriate, straightforward, unaffected and vivid. The Holberg Suite has a performance of unparalleled vigour and charm. It’s almost impossible to imagine this music better interpreted. Sound quality is good and value is excellent indeed. I’m looking forward to the other discs."

-- Jessica Duchen, BBC Music Magazine

Grieg: Piano Music Vol 4 / Einar Steen-nökleberg

$19.99
CD

Naxos

Aug 17, 1995

8550884

Grieg: Piano Music Vol 3 / Einar Steen-nökleberg

Naxos

Available as CD

$19.99

Aug 17, 1995

"This CD includes the poignant Ballade in G minor, Op. 24, composed by Grieg on the death of his parents. Steen-Nokleerg is highly imaginative and...the keyboard colouring is subtle and rich. He conveys a splendidly rhapsodic spontaneity and there is much feeling. This [disc] deserves a particularly strong recommendation."

Penguin Guide [2003/4 Edition]

Grieg: Piano Music Vol 3 / Einar Steen-nökleberg

$19.99
CD

Naxos

Aug 17, 1995

8550883