Violist Jutta Puchhammer's album Pieces de concours pour is a treasure trove of late romantic French viola music. Originating as exam compositions for students enrolled at the Conservatoire Superieur de Paris from 1896-1938, this album demonstrates Puchhammer's peerless virtuosity as a performer, as well as the expressive range of her instrument, which was largely dismissed by the mainstream of eighteenth and nineteenth century composers. Many of the compositions on Pieces de concours pour share the Classical form of Sitt's concerto, such as Henri Marteau's Chaconne in ut majeur, or the French romantic aesthetic of Busser's Appassionato, such as Paul Rougnon's Concertino Romantique. Romanian-born composer Stan Golestan's Arioso et Allegro marks an interesting departure from these other works, as it reflects the new aesthetics of the twentieth century. Arioso et Allegro is dominated by pentatonic scales, which may suggest the influence of indigenous Asian musics - as they do in Debussy's piano piece Pagodes - Eastern European folk music, or American jazz, which took France by storm in the 1920s and 30s.

Premonitions American Chamber Works

With two critically-lauded releases on Navona Records, pianist Eliane Rodrigues returns with Reflets, showcasing the pianist’s nuanced and thoughtful performances of fifteen works by Claude Debussy. While it might seem that child prodigies are commonplace in the world of classical music, only a few truly make a lasting impact, one that lives on long after those prodigies have passed well into their adulthoods. Mozart began to play piano at the age of three, Beethoven did so at seven and a half, and Georges Bizet did so before his tenth birthday. Pianist Eliane Rodrigues, who began composing at three, played her first recital at five and first performed with an orchestra when she was just six years of age, can certainly be counted among those prodigious musicians, as evidenced on her latest recording, Reflets. The album opens with “Suite Bergamasque,” one of Debussy’s most well-known piano suites. The dynamic contrasts in the moods of the suite’s four pieces are well suited to Rodrigues’ sensitive and vivid style. Debussy is credited as one of the ‘founders’ of Impressionist music, distinguished by its focus on suggestions and atmosphere, a world that Rodrigues also inhabits here, as evidenced by her cascading and powerfully textured performance of Debussy’s “Ballade.” “Pour le Piano,” certainly one of the composer’s most moving works for solo piano, features rapid, brilliant passages that fully emphasize the pianist’s virtuosity. That impressionistic ability to invoke a mood or a feeling carries on with “First Arabesque in E Major,” one of a pair composed early in Debussy’s career. “Images,” comprised of two ‘books’ of three pieces each, ranging from the subdued “Homage à Rameau” to the energy of “Mouvement,” marked by the torrent of notes in its finale. Eliane Rodrigues was born in Rio de Janiero, where the performances that she gave in her childhood bore fruit when she was awarded the Gina Bachauer prize at the Van Cliburn Competition in the United States at only 18 years of age. She has gone on to perform internationally, as well as to hold the position of professor at the Royal Conservatoire in Antwerp.

Although Arnold Schoenberg is often seen as a composer strictly concerned with pitch, his interests in timbre and sonority are ever-present in all five of his completed piano works. On Schoenberg Piano Music And His 17 Fragments, pianist Yoko Hirota performs three of Schoenberg’s completed works along with the 17 fragments that he never brought to completion. Hirota, praised as being “precise and keenly projective” and demonstrating the “highest level of proficiency,” is one of the leading interpreters of contemporary piano repertory, and she brings Schoenberg’s compositions to life with conviction. The three pieces that make up Drei Klavierstückes op.11 demonstrate Schoenberg’s burgeoning awareness that, as a corollary to the atonal structures he was beginning to use, more emotionally stringent use of the piano made for fertile musical ground. A close examination of the 17 fragments illustrates the composer’s preoccupation with and research into expressivity and color in his piano music — elements that are communicated clearly in Hirota’s performances. The evolution of Schoenberg’s musical thought can be clearly traced in the fragments, which were written throughout the first quarter of the 20th Century. The influence of Brahmsian piano writing is evident in the first four fragments; by the time he had composed the ninth, his demand for articulation had become predominant. The twelfth fragment contains a character dissimilar to both his previous works and fragments, in that the harmonic language is rather tonal and in the vein of Prokofiev’s works. Schoenberg’s priority was the expression of music in the creative process. Through this album, Hirota does not only demonstrates Schoenberg’s care for expressivity in music. She highlights the fact that other pianists should strive to present this color and expression in the performance of Schoenberg’s works, in order to deliver a performance that is both rich and true to the composer’s intent.

A Christmas Carol: Victorian Carols with Readings from Dicke

PROKOFIEV: Divertissement / Symphony-Concerto in E minor / S

It is the year 1966, in the Soviet Union. While Shostakovich is enjoying the success of the world première of his Second Cello Concerto, the Georgian composer Sulkhan Tsintsadze is putting the finishing touches on his own new work. In their respective concertos, these two composers draw their own psychogram: a sombre landscape intermittently illuminated by rays of light, brightened up with a few prudent dabs of color here and there. German shooting star cellist Maximilian Hornung releases here his first album on the myrios classics label. Born 1986 in Augsburg, Hornung studied with David Geringas, Thomas Grossenbacher and Eldar Issakadze, to whom he dedicated the album. It was Issakadze who introduced him to the fascinating music of Sulkhan Tsintsadze, one of the most celebrated composers of Georgia. The musical link of Tsintsadze’s Second Cello Concerto to the late work of his Soviet colleague and contemporary, Dmitri Shostakovich is at the core of this gloomy, yet enchanting album. The Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester Berlin under the baton of the Latvian conductor Andris Poga provides perfect musical partnership.

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REVIEW:

Because both concertos were composed in 1966 we get a new-to-disc work by the more or less forgotten Georgian composer, Sulkhan Tsintsadze. It shares with fellow Georgian Giya Kancheli an inclination for melancholy and contemplativeness but stops well short of the latter’s violent dynamic contrasts. Play it a few times in a row and it will grow on you.

– Records International

Both works date from 1966 and both leave the soloist a huge degree of expressive liberty. Tsintsadze is very good at disguising folk roots in his music and Shostakovich, by this time, is an unassailable master. This is quite a cello feast.

– Norman Lebrecht

BAX: Orchestral Works, Vol. 8

Classical Music

Well known for his interpretations of the works of Frederic Chopin and Serge Rachmaninov, the great Argentinean pianist Nelson Goerner joins the Zig-Zag Territoires label with the piano works of Debussy.

This newest release from the Naxos Idil Biret archive features the works of Claude Debussy. "For well versed insiders of music, Idil Biret is since years a trusted, respected and beloved artist... The discipline of her powerful grasp and approach of the music has led, especially for works of our century, to a stylistic congruence between the written score and the interpretation...(that) makes us all aware of an outstanding artistic potency of the highest standards of excellence!" (DIE WELT, Germany 1979) "Idil Biret takes the opening movement of Debussy's Children's Corner very briskly and impetuously, but the performance then settles down and is sensitive and well characterized, especially the closing Golliwog's Cakewalk. Good recording and recommendable couplings too." (PENGUIN GUIDE, England 2009) "There is no question whatever that Biret's reading of the Ravel Gaspard de la nuit takes it's place among the most delicately wrought Ravel interpretations by any of the many great pianists renowned for their performances of French piano music." (SOHO WEEKLY NEWS, USA 1977)

The penultimate release in the Naxos Seattle Collection, featuring internationally renowned soprano Susan Graham.

A subtle alchemy and a powerful performance.

The association of Robert Craft with The Rake’s Progress spans the 45 years between this recording and his first meeting with Stravinsky in 1948 on the same day that W.H. Auden delivered the completed libretto to the composer. Craft subsequently became involved in what he describes as “the first step” in the composition of the opera, especially in helping Stravinsky master the pronunciation, vocabulary and rhythms of the English text. This involvement is described in an extract from Robert Craft’s memoirs in the booklet. Craft’s recordings of Stravinsky and others, in this case originally on the MusicMasters label, have seen a recent revival from Naxos with their ‘Robert Craft Collection’, and very excellent they are too.

With the label’s bargain pricing position, it seems fairest to compare like with more-or-less like in that department. My main reference has been Stravinsky’s own 1964 recording, now hiding discreetly as discs 16 and 17 in Sony’s bargain 22 CD box Works of Igor Stravinsky . This set is a must-have for any Stravinsky collector, but the recording in this set is not to be confused with the mono 1953 Metropolitan Opera recording, now available on Naxos Historical.

As you would expect, the more recent Craft recording wins in terms of sound quality, but aside from the usual leathery-sounding oboes and some tape hiss Stravinsky’s recording still comes up sounding pretty good. The same goes for the orchestral playing, with Craft more slick, and often more adventurous and energetic in terms of tempi. Stravinsky comes in at just under 141 minutes for the whole opera to Craft’s 128. If I have a minor criticism of both, it is the level at which the harpsichord is set, especially in the Craft recording. Even listening on best-possible hi-fi, the level is arguably too low to hear much of what is being played, and in the recitatives and important card game scene it is easily covered by the voices. This is a tricky aspect of such a recording and may be a fairly accurate representation of what you would hear in a live performance, but it is a shame that detail and harmonic content is missed in some of these recitatives, and I found my ears straining somewhat. By the way, Stravinsky’s recording has some useful riffle sound effects which help the ‘cards’ imagery in that long recitative Duet scene with Tom and Shadow which are absent with Craft. The timps are also a bit boomy in the Naxos recording, such as at the end of Act 3 scene 1, but this is another minor caveat.

While we are dealing with negatives, there is an aspect of the singing which bothered me just a little throughout. Jayne West is a star as Anne Trulove, and I have no complaints about her gorgeously innocent performance. Her gently simple final Lullaby is guaranteed to raise a tear. I am also greatly in admiration of just about everyone else, but for me the principal male characters Tom Rakewell and Nick Shadow, and Father Trulove for that matter, lack vocal variety and therefore remain rather two-dimensional as characters. Tom and Nick both have a hard-edged projection to their voices which softens little, even when the pair of them are supposedly in the hushed atmosphere of the dark and mysterious graveyard. John Cheek as Nick Shadow gives pretty much 110 % of his rich and powerful bass at all times, and comes across as more of an irresistible force than menacing presence. To be fair, Jon Garrison does give us some admirable restraint once he has been struck mad by Nick, and in any case this whole subject might in fact be less of a problem that you might imagine. I don’t wish to put anyone off with these comments - we’re talking bargain purchase territory after all. It is in the nature of Stravinsky’s vocal writing that there is almost always a certain amount of ‘distance’ between what might be expected to develop as a fully rounded theatrical character and the intentional neo-classical or even neo-baroque purity of the music. The Rake’s Progress is a wonderful score, ranging from Broadway musical corn very much to the heights of human expressiveness. There is always more than enough going on to keep us from worrying if this or that line might have been given marginally more colour or inflection. What I really do like about all of the solo vocalists is how clearly they articulate the all-important text, and while there is no libretto in the booklet for this release, you shouldn’t really need it.

With an American cast, you might also wonder if the accents of the singers might intrude to scandalise European sensibilities. This is not often the case, though there are one or two ‘The Waltons’ moments, such as when Trulove calls Anne, Anne! at the end of the Quietly, night aria, Act 1 Scene 3. The choir does very well and are stylishly punchy, but the satellite characters do leap out somewhat, and this is a mixed blessing on occasion. Shirley Love is very wobbly as Mother Goose, though this could easily be intentional. Wendy White begins imperious and perfectly and appropriately unsympathetic as the spoiled Baba the Turk, but mellows nicely for the You love him, seek to set him right scene. I was also glad to hear the smashing of crockery in her tiff with Tom in Act 2 is every bit as juicy as in Stravinsky’s 1964 version. Melvin Lowery’s Sellem is an energetic NYC auctioneer. The brief Keeper’s solo is alas unmemorable, but the part was never likely to steal the show.

There are numerous recordings of The Rake’s Progress around these days, and I still have an affection for the Decca recording with the London Sinfonietta conducted by Ricardo Chailly, though Cathryn Pope’s Anne Trulove leaves a bit of a beige gap in an otherwise strong team of soloists. If it’s the best of the best of modern recording you are looking for at any price, then the critics seem fairly universal in praise of Kent Nagano’s 1995 Lyons Opera recording on Erato, though I don’t have this to hand for comparison. As far as the Sony Box/Naxos competition goes you can easily accommodate both - Stravinsky having a bit more unruly bite and grit, Craft winning in terms of refinement but at the same time losing out in terms of pithy character. What Craft does manage is to bring out the sheer wit in several little moments of Stravinsky’s score - more so than the composer himself did. I laughed out loud in a few places which might not have been intentional, but you simply must find fun in all those corners and cadences - vocal and tonal - which Stravinsky throws in to disarm us and allow us up for air in this most human and intense of dramas.

The Rake’s Progress holds a fascination for us in the 21st century, in the first place as a ‘classic’ and iconic work from one of the last century’s greatest composers, but also as one in possession of the magical tensions one of music’s turning points. In the late 1940s and early 1950s there was a wind of change, many of the protagonists of which both held Stravinsky as a respected statesman of contemporary music making, but who also already knew his style and idiom, and were more than prepared to see the new opera as rather old hat. The opera stands at the cusp of this transition in Stravinsky’s work, between the development or recycling of old formulae, and the decision whether or not to break new ground in order to compete with the new generation of composers. In the end, the intangible alchemy which was Stravinsky’s gift for creating remarkable music, combined in The Rake’s Progress with a penetrating insight into human nature and frailty, created a masterpiece which transcended and survived all of those internal and external musical revolutions. That we have such a direct link to Stravinsky’s living thoughts and intentions in Robert Craft and such a powerful performance makes this recording - even with its imperfections - as much a ‘must have’ as the composer’s own.

-- Dominy Clements, MusicWeb International

Conductor Leon Botstein has consistently offered the musical public some of the most innovative and fascinating programs to be found on today's concert stage. This album combines three orchestral works written within during the years 1926-1928, featuring Othmar Schoeck's stunning 45-minute song cycle for baritone, chorus and orchestra, "Lebendig Begraben" (Buried Alive), alongside Arthur Honegger's wildly colorful "Rugby" and Dimitri Mitropoulos's rarely heard "Concerto Grosso.” Leon Botstein is a Swiss-American Jewish conductor and scholar, and the president of Bard College. He is currently conductor of the American Symphony Orchestra and conductor laureate of the Jerusalem Symphony Orchestra where he served as music director and principal conductor from 2003-2010.

SPECIALLY PRICED 4 DISC SET


This is as fine a Sibelius cycle as any available, and the performances of Symphonies Nos. 1, 3, 4, 5, and 7, as well as the Violin Concerto, are uniformly top recommendations. All of the individual discs have been previously reviewed, and my only reservations (incidentally not shared by my colleague Victor Carr Jr, who covered the original release) concern Symphonies Nos. 2 and 6, particularly the latter, which strikes me as just a touch lacking in energy and directness. That doesn't mean the playing isn't very beautiful: indeed, it may be excessively so, and that takes some of the Sibelian edge off of the performance. Still, for the most part these are wonderful interpretations, and if you want a complete Sibelius cycle from top Finnish performers, then this set represents an obvious first choice, alongside Vänskä's very different and equally fine Lahti series on BIS. You simply can't go wrong either way.

--David Hurwitz, ClassicsToday.com

Following the success of their previous album, English Music for Strings, John Wilson and his Sinfonia of London turn their attention to the music of Henri Dutilleux. His ballet Le Loup was composed as a commission for Roland Petit’s dance company and premièred in Paris in March 1953. Rarely recorded – this is the first recording by a non-French orchestra – the work unfolds in three tableaux and tells a convoluted tale of a bridegroom who jilts his bride (to run away with a gypsy) by persuading her that he has been changed into a wolf. Over time she discovers that the wolf is real, but her feelings turn from terror to love and when the alarmed villagers hunt the wolf, she defends him and dies at his side. The album is completed by three world première recordings of new orchestrations (by Kenneth Hesketh) of wind solos written for the Paris Conservatoire in the 1940s. Both the Sarabande et Cortège and Sonate pour hautbois are virtuosic tours de force for their soloists, as is the Sonatine pour flûte, which displays the lyricism, agility, and sparkling incisive qualities of the flute in what became Dutilleux’s most-performed work.

Hailed by The Times for its ‘exhilarating performances’, the Kaleidoscope Chamber Collective was dreamed up in 2017 by Tom Poster and Elena Urioste, who met through the BBC Radio 3 New Generation Artists scheme. The Collective operates with a flexible roster which features many of today’s most inspirational musicians, both instrumentalists and singers, and its creative programming is marked by an ardent commitment to celebrating diversity of all forms and a desire to unearth lesser-known gems of the repertoire.

This ethos is clear in their repertoire selection for this their début recording. The Piano Quintet is one of Amy Beach’s better-known works, which the KCC collectively fell in love with during a residency at the Cheltenham festival. Composed in 1907, the work reflects the strong influence of the music of Brahms. Florence Price faced ‘two handicaps – those of sex and race’, and much of her music remained unpublished at the time of her death. Additionally, a significant quantity of her manuscripts had disappeared without trace. It was not until 2009 that a cache of them (including two lost symphonies) was discovered by property developers in the attic of an abandoned house in Illinois – including the score for the Piano Quintet in A minor that receives its world première recording here. Although characteristically conservative in its late-romantic idiom, the piece celebrates Price’s African American heritage with echoes of spirituals and hymns, and the popular juba stomping dance rooted in the slave plantations of the Deep South. Between these two piano quintets sits Samuel Barber’s early Dover Beach, a setting of Matthew Arnold’s famous poem that has remained one of the best-known works in the voice-and-quartet repertoire.

REVIEW:

I’d be delighted to listen to more Beach and Price performed with this courage, erudition, and aplomb, and keenly anticipate the Collective’s next offering.

– Gramophone (Editor's Choice, July 2021)

Medtner's legacy for solo piano is now widely esteemed alongside Rachmaninoff and other giants of the Russian 'silver age': melodists to their core, romantics at heart, yet rigorous craftsmen to their fingertips, who took their muse seriously and refined their inspiration to distil a peculiarly Russian spirit of melancholy in sound. However, around a third of Medtner's output, measured by opus numbers, was dedicated to voices, and this section of his music has received much less attention. Ekaterina Levental has dedicated herself to correcting this imbalance. The Uzbek-born, Dutch-resident mezzo-soprano has given all of Medtner's songs in concert with the pianist Frank Peters; together, they now embark on a recorded cycle. Medtner lacked nothing for self-sacrificing dedication to his art, and he chose to set the finest poets of his Russian homeland: Pushkin, Fet, Lermontov and others, and then Goethe and Eichendorff in German. Unlike Rachmaninoff he continued to write songs even after emigrating and settling in London. 'Medtner's musical vocabulary is very rich and expressive,' Levental and Peters explain in their own booklet note, which is printed together with English translations of the lyrics. 'Some songs immediately captivate you, others require a certain effort from the listener. Anyone who takes up the challenge, makes a discovery. Every song is a treasure and an intimate, spiritual confession from the composer to his listener.' In the category of 'immediate appeal' surely fall the two songs of Op.13: the ardent vocal response to Pushkin's Winter Evening perfectly underscored by the stormy piano part. No less unmistakably Russian in expression is the complementary Epitaph, triumphant even in it's mournfulness and like many other of the songs here not as stern as much of Medtner's piano music. Any listener looking for the composer's personal voice, behind the virtuoso keyboard fireworks, should start here.

Somm Recordings closes the 120th anniversary year of George Gershwin's birth with the re-issue of the historic 1998 Centennial Edition recording initiated by the composer's sister, Frances Gershwin, together with first appearances of two orchestrations commissioned from Jos� Serebrier. Originally released on Dinemec Classics, the Gershwin Centennial Edition features the composer's nephew and Frances' son, pianist Leopold Godowsky III, and the Royal Scottish National Orchestra conducted by Jos� Serebrier. The recording followed a concert in London organized by the composer's formidable sister, Frances - 96 at the time - who invited Serebrier to conduct An American in Paris, the Concerto in F, and, in specially commissioned orchestrations by Serebrier, the Three Preludes and Lullaby. The programme shows Gershwin at his inimitable, era-defining best. Composed as an extended ballet sequence for the 1951 MGM musical starring Gene Kelly, An American in Paris is a buoyant, Technicolor-bright tribute to the French capital shot through with jazz-accented vitality. The Concerto in F is a bold, brassy, brilliantly orchestrated work with a grandstanding piano line bridging the worlds of classical music and jazz. It's animated opening movement is followed by a Blues-tinged Adagio and a finale boasting a helter-skelter orgy of rhythm and athletic pianism. Initially reluctant to orchestrate Lullaby, Serebrier says: "Now I am glad Leopold persuaded me. I have tried to keep the scoring as simple and pure as possible, so that the orchestral version of this poignantly lovely piece might take on a life of it's own in a voice that is still recognizably Gershwin's". The never before re-issued is a brilliant reminder of one of the most remarkable talents of the 20th century in performances by one of his greatest interpreters.

How to depict scenes of battle in music is a task that has long fascinated composers. From the dawning of the Renaissance the first successful programmatic works appeared from Susato, Dowland and Biber. But it was the nineteenth and twentieth centuries that witnessed a true flourishing, when composers utilized the full resources of contemporary symphonism to evoke the tumult of battle. Later the medium of film, notably those produced in Hollywood, brought with it colorful and gripping scores.

In February 2016 the recording took place in the Studio 2 of the Bayerischer Rundfunk in Munich. Dina Ugorskaja pursued the finishing process of the master with great impulse and unbelievable energy during all the time when her health abated, even to the point where she selected and approved herself the booklet notes by Tatjana Frumkis. This project will stay simply as a singular milestone, there was a lot planned by the two artists “…They were also ambivalent toward one another. Prokofiev accused Shostakovich of “devouring everything” (the fact that the younger composer dared to incorporate the street genres of entertainment music into his classical compositions), and affirmed that Shostakovich had no gift for melody. Shostakovich, for his part, occasionally found Prokofiev’s music too crude, too clearly illustrative. Yet in spite of the largely unfair criticism they directed toward one another, each one never let his counterpart entirely out of his sight, or, to be more exact, of his ears. Ever since the 1920s their music was featured on joint recital programmes. The young Shostakovich acknowledged Prokofiev’s influence on certain of his own works. Prokofiev, when abroad, encouraged “chemical exchange between Russia and Europe” and promoted Shostakovich’s works in particular, even expressing the wish that his younger colleague be allowed to perform abroad, too. But that was not to be. From the late 1930s to the early 1950s, their paths went on crossing in the territory of the totalitarian Soviet Union. Ever since then, the Prokofiev-Shostakovich dichotomy, an undeclared competition, has never ceased. (From the booklet lines notes by Tatjana Frumkis).

Satie’s personal eccentricities have never masked the fact that his music was both revolutionary and anticipatory of later artistic movements, principally Minimalism, Surrealism and Theatre of the Absurd. His piano music offers a perfect distillation of these elements. The Allegro is his earliest known work, offering his first use of quotations, a favored device. The extended pieces Le Fils des etoiles and uspud derive from incidental music, glorying in parodic and grotesque scenes, while his ‘humoristic’ phase of the 1910s is explored in Cinq Grimaces. Only Satie could attempt to fuse a fugue with a waltz, as he does in the Fugue-valse. Duanduan Hao was born in China in 1990. He began his piano lessons when he was four and by the age of six was already drawing attention to his precocious ability. He then studied in Shanghai and in Paris, going on to win many prizes in international piano competitions. He currently lives in New York and studies at The Juilliard School and Columbia University.

Classical Music

Although he is best known for his film scores and The Godfather in particular, Nino Rota’s concert music combines traditional tonality and forms with characteristically heartfelt melodies and appealing clarity. Contrasts abound in this selection of chamber works, from bassoon buffoonery in the Toccata to the Brahmsian eloquence of the Clarinet Sonata, and from the dramatic Improvviso and melancholy moods of the recently discovered Fantasia, to the jocular instrumental exchanges in the exquisite Trio.

One of the pioneers of the 20th-century resurrection of interest in the harpsichord was the great virtuoso Wanda Landowska who assisted in the development of a harpsichord built by Pleyel of Paris. Performing on a 1930s Pleyel harpsichord, Christopher Lewis has chosen a program of 20th-century works by French or French-based composers. Poulenc's colourful Suite fran�aise is followed by Fran�aix's exciting and previously unrecorded Deux Pi�ces. Martinu's lyricism and intensity of expression can be heard in the Sonata and other pieces while Louis Durey's piquant Dix Inventions is both a homage to Bach's Two-Part Inventions and a work whose compositional technique is firmly rooted in the modern era.

CPO’s successful Reger edition continues here with the fifth volume in the successful series, even as critics are still raving about the previous release. Musik & Theater wrote of Volume 4: “These recordings number among the best currently available.” The German organist and choral conductor, Gerhard Weinberger, studied organ with Franz Lehrndorfer and church music at the Musikhochschule in Munich. In 1971, he was the prize winner in organ at the renowned international ARD Music Competition. In 1974, after spending three years directing the choir at Saint Lorenz Basilica in Kempten, Gerhard Weinberger assumed a teaching post in organ and church music at the Munich Musikhochschule. He was Professor of Organ there from 1977 to 1983. Currently he is Professor of Organ and Director of the Church Music Department at the Hochschule für Musik in Detmold, Germany. He is a member of the European Academy of Sciences and Arts, and of the Leipzig New Bach Society directorate. Gerhard Weinberger's wide repertoire ranges from pre-Baroque to music of the 20th century, with a special emphasis on the works of J.S. Bach and Max Reger. He has given recitals throughout Europe, Asia and America.

This cd contains two 20th century masterworks for 2 pianos and orchestra: the Scottish Ballad by Benjamin Britten (1913-1976) and the Concerto for 2 Pianos and Orchestra by Francis Poulenc.

The Concerto for two pianos and orchestra is one of the most famous pieces by Francis Poulenc (1899-1963). Here we find the summary of the author's style, which from the very first movement plays with formal elements, loosening the schemes of the traditional sonata form to adapt to that kaleidoscope which is his stylistic signature. From Javanese gamelan to Mozart's atmospheres, from the childish nursery rhyme to the passionate impulse, from primitive percussiveness to café chantant. Benjamin Britten wrote his Scottish Ballad in 1941. The works is rhapsodic in character and nostalgic in tone, exploring folkloristic material.

Concluding this program the piano duo plays the First Orchestral Suite by Debussy, in an arrangement for two pianos by the composer.

Mattia Ometto and Leonora Armellini are two young and brilliant Italian pianists. Their perfect pianistic ensemble brings out all the humour, wit and melancholy of these wonderful works for two pianos.

Scottish Ensemble’s new release fuses together French and Japanese influences. Featuring works by Debussy and Takemitsu, instrumental color and textures are explored through these works. Scottish Ensemble is the UK’s only professional string orchestra. They are built around a core twelve members, and are known throughout the United Kingdom for their virtuosic and ambitious programming. ”…a scintillation of ace soloists who combine bracing energy, flexibility and precision, breathing and moving as one.” (The Observer)

.Following a period of soul-searching during the mid-1920s, and as his music gained success outside France during the 1930s, Albert Roussel took the rhythmic dynamism, thematic integration and formal lucidity of his Third Symphony to new heights.