After narrowly escaping the Holocaust, Mieczyslaw Weinberg then faced anti-Semitic hostility in the Soviet Union under Stalin. These existential experiences are reflected in his music which challenges player, instrument and listener alike - at once immensely fascinating and touching.

Lukáš Vondráček and Sergei Rachmaninoff. Scarcely do we encounter a connection between a musician and a composer so close, strong and energizing. When, at the age of 15, Vondráček was invited by Vladimir Ashkenazy and the Czech Philharmonic to perform Rachmaninoff’s Concerto No. 1, he had garnered international acclaim at numerous concerts and competitions. Just a year later, the pianist toured the USA and appeared at Carnegie Hall. At the age of 29, he triumphed at the Queen Elisabeth Competition in Brussels (2016), performing Rachmaninoff’s Concerto No. 3, conducted by Marin Alsop. Love at first listen, Rachmaninoff has become his flagship composer: “Besides affording the opportunity to showcase one’s technique, his music impresses by being contrastive and having an immense dynamic range ... What more could a person keen on tone color wish? It’s sheer beauty!”

Lukáš Vondráček has been invited to perform Rachmaninoff’s concertos by the most prominent orchestras and conductors worldwide. The present album is one of the few sweet fruits of the Covid pandemic, which cleared the soloist’s otherwise jam-packed diary and afforded him peaceful time for recording. The booklet contains an interview with Lukáš Vondráček, within which he provides an account of his ample experience of and great affinity to Rachmaninoff. Yet the most powerful confession is the recording itself, made with the superb Prague Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Tomáš Brauner, capturing performances rendering every detail, teeming with emotion, colour and contrast. Sheer beauty indeed! Rachmaninoff in Lukáš Vondráček’s hands. A lavish musical feast.

Gustav Mahler’s cycle Des Knaben Wunderhorn features on innumerable recordings – so why yet another one? Because it is … entirely different. Peter Schöne, a baritone with an immense sense for songs, the winner of prestigious international competitions (Franz Schubert Kammermusikwettbewerb in Graz, ARD in Munich), accepted the invitation to work with PhilHarmonia Octet Prague, whose members have performed with leading European orchestras (Czech Philharmonic, Berliner Philharmoniker, WDR Sinfonieorchester Köln). After presenting arrangements of Modest Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition and a suite from Leoš Janácek’s opera From the House of the Dead, the Mahler project currently represents the apex of the Czech wind ensemble’s endeavour to extend their repertoire and make it even more intriguing. Even though essentially intimate, Mahler’s songs have often been closely linked with symphonies, which also applies to the Des Knaben Wunderhorn collection. Of the 24 pieces, PhilHarmonia Octet Prague have recorded ten, those best suited to a wind ensemble. Opting for wind instruments makes sense, given that in his childhood Mahler’s musical vocabulary was formed in part by listening frequently to the Jihlava military band. His music is interwoven with military motifs, with wind instruments being afforded a prominent position. The chamber arrangements on the new album show an interesting path between the piano and orchestral versions, and allow for highlighting the colourfulness and intimacy of Mahler’s songs. Mahler’s songs, extraordinarily colourful and intimate

On his second album for Alpha Classics, rising star violinist Kerson Leong juxtaposes the Violin Concertos of Bruch and Benjamin Britten. This unusual pairing is a reflection on the journey from one extreme of expression to another. Bruch’s In Memoriam is the perfect bridge between them. “The Britten expresses a raw and exposed experience, while the Bruch is comforting and uplifting. After the last few years in which the world has experienced much difficulty and uncertainty due to pandemic, war, and crisis, recording this album in London in January 2021 with the Philharmonia Orchestra and Patrick Hahn was a profoundly cathartic moment. It is in the spirit of catharsis that I offer this album.” - Kerson Leong

REVIEW:

The clincher for me was the lead work on the disc, Britten’s Violin Concerto, which actually has enjoyed a rash of recent recordings by “name” players, but none that has managed to make sense of the piece for me – or even particularly to like it. Leong changed that for me, and when an artist can overcome my resistance and make me hear a work in a different perspective, one that illuminates its beauty and elucidates its soul, that is worthy of a Want List entry.

-- Fanfare

Kerson Leong’s splendid account of the Bruch comes hot on the heels of [other recordings, but] Leong’s take on the piece is more outgoing in expression. Leong’s generosity of phrase and tone, for instance, comes unashamedly from the chest in the songful reaches of the slow movement, and in the finale where the big tune bears down on the G string he really tugs at our emotions.

The bonus addition here is Bruch’s littleheard but substantial tribute to Joseph Joachim, In memoriam, which is as turbulent as it is reflective, as befitting the legendary violinist’s fighting spirit, and gives Leong further opportunity to sing from the heart. My thoughts occasionally turned to Elgar and the more than a hint of nobilmente that it proffers.

But it is the coupling of the Britten Violin Concerto (gratifyingly becoming more and more core repertoire these days) which...sets this disc apart. The inspiration here was another violinist, Antonio Brosa, but more self-evidently, through the Spanish inflections in its material, it’s a meditation on that most divisive of civil wars – something which clearly distressed and exercised Britten, the pacifist. This is the composer at his most elegiac and unsettled (is it major or minor?) and Leong is clearly at one with its inner tussles – but also with all the extraordinary sparks of originality which make it unmistakably Britten: like the powerful coda of the first movement which pits the soloist’s abrasive pizzicato against deeply meditative strings only to have him grow more and more prayerful with the music’s ascendancy.

The kinship with Shostakovich is startling in the trenchant Scherzo, which Leong digs into with great resilience, but again the entry of the tuba with violin and piccolo in extremis high above the stave is pure Britten, as is the emotive orchestral climax.

But Leong really makes his mark with the concluding Passacaglia, a form so beloved of both Britten and Shostakovich as a metaphorical anchor in times of great stress. Suddenly psychological ambiguities are set aside and in the wake of one war Britten becomes contentious objector of all. The tragedy catches in his throat and the music of those closing pages – movingly projected by Leong – chokes on the soloist’s final utterances. With outstanding collaboration from Patrick Hahn and the Philharmonia Orchestra I can’t recall a better account of the piece than this.

-- Gramophone

Shostakovich: String Quartets, Vol. 4

Following the first volume in this series, which charted Franz Schreker's developmental path up to the success of his dance-pantomime�Der Geburtstag der Infantin�(The Birthday of the Infanta; 777 702-2), this second album focuses primarily on the triumphant years that followed the premiere of his opera�Der ferne Klang�(The Distant Sound) in 1912. The�Vorspiel zu einem Drama (Prelude to a Drama) from 1914 and the�Chamber Symphony, composed in 1916, are among the gems of musical Jugendstil (Art Nouveau). Originating as offshoots of contemporary stage projects, these two captivating works display a mastery of sound, harmony, and melody that was unparalleled at the time. The�Four Small Pieces for Large Orchestra�(1931), which separate these older "siblings" on this recording, speak in a new language. These abstract contributions to film music, presented as a compact and multifaceted concert suite, hint at powerful new directions - plans that, sadly, Franz Schreker could never fully realize.

Richard Strauss described his two-act opera 'Intermezzo' as a 'bourgeois comedy with symphonic interludes'. The soprano role of Christine with her shimmering cantilenas represents Strauss's wife Pauline, while the successful Court Conductor Robert Storch is Richard Strauss's alter ego in a reality drama that was avant-garde for it's time. This acclaimed production from director Tobias Kratzer brings 'Intermezzo' into the present day, highlighting Strauss's own clever switches between reality and fiction with stunning visual effects and a superbly characterful cast.

Erling Bloch He was born into a home where artistic matters held pride of place. His father was a painter and at the same time extremely interested in music; therefore, a musical education was a wholly natural thing for the young Erling. Already at the age of seven he received violin tuition and was made familiar with chamber music through the cellist Emil Robert Hansen, the brother of the pianist Agnes Adler, whose piano trio was to be of great significance for him. He entered the conservatoire at the age of fifteen, where already in 1922 he gave his d�but concert, and only one year later became a member of The Royal Danish Orchestra. Here he was active until 1954, when teaching steadily began to take up more of his time. He had taught at the conservatoire since 1946 and became a professor there in 1949. Here he was held in affection and admired by his pupils, and was musically a central force at the conservatoire until he had to retire at the age of seventy. After his retirement, he continued as an examiner. I met him repeatedly for many years at The Royal Academy of Music, where I was a member of the staff. He was always friendly, attentive, and witty-in short, a person whom we always looked forward to meeting.

After George Antheil had earned his reputation in Europe as the self-proclaimed "Bad Boy of Music" and caused plenty of scandals with his avant-garde experiments, he made a dramatic shift upon returning to his native America. This change in direction led to a significant number of important compositions, including his later symphonies and a series of one-act stage works, where Antheil dramatized a wide range of themes and situations. The final work in this series is�Venus in Africa, a charming, touching, and highly amusing piece for five characters, in which the ancient goddess of love helps an American couple forge a lasting relationship. The music, oscillating between operatic turbulence, impressionistic refinement, and musical-style tunes, is further proof that Antheil had successfully shed his early rebellious image.

Unchanged since its formation more than a decade ago, the Quartetto Noûs has made albums for the Amadeus label and the Italian division of Warner Classics, but this is the ensemble’s first recording to receive international distribution and attention. Having studied with the Quartetto di Cremona but also quartet luminaries such as Gunter Pichler and Rainer Schmidt, they combine an Italian warmth of collective sonority with the incisive musical instincts of modern-European schools of quartet playing.

Pesenting five of Shostakovich’s best-known quartets, this volume presents the first in a projected series of the complete quartets for release on Brilliant Classics. Contemporaneous with the postwar Ninth Symphony which attracted censure for its unsettling humor, the Third Quartet of 1946 remained one of the composer’s own favorite works, and its five-movement form dives deep into dark waters before finding uneasy rest in one of Shostakovich’s most characteristically edgy finales. It was following the death of Stalin in 1953 that several of Shostakovich’s works began to feature his musical monogram, DSCH transliterated into notation, and the Fifth Quartet is one of the first such pieces. The contrapuntal working of the quartet makes it one of the most satisfying in the cycle, while the Seventh presents the composer once more as oddball clown, the Fool to the King Lear of the Eighth Quartet, where the DSCH motif finds a tragic apotheosis. The five-movement form once more serves Shostakovich well in the Ninth but signs of his refined and austere ‘late style’ begin to appear in the solemn simplicity of the slow music and the pithy exhilaration of the finale, which is almost a quartet in itself and the most Bartókian movement of the entire cycle.

REVIEW:

"Shostakovich has weathered the storms of time and modernity well and his popularity in the last few years has reached unprecedented peaks. A lot of this is on the back of his symphonic output and on his concertos which seem to speak to the current generation in a way that Mahler spoke to the Sixties generation. All of this attention has meant that Shostakovich’s later music, more often damned with faint praise in his lifetime, is now being critically reassessed. Nowhere is this more true than with the chamber music of which the jewel in the crown is, of course, the cycle of quartets...alongside those by Bartók, the most impressive composed during the twentieth century...younger quartets are embracing these superb works as part of their core repertoire...

Which brings me to the Quartetto Noûs. I will start with the latest quartet included in what is the first volume in a projected series, No. 9. I do so partly because it is a good example of the effect of the long shadow of No. 8 on the others in the series. This great masterpiece belies any notion that Shostakovich’s powers in any way diminished in the sixties and is the full equal of the more celebrated sibling which preceded it. I also start with it because this recording by the Quartetto Noûs is an exceptionally good one. I started by comparing the scherzo third movement with the reference set by the Fitzwilliams and the Italians just seem sharper, more caustic and yet also more playful. It is unfair to contrast a much older recording technically with a brand new one but the superb sound given to the Noûs really does make a difference. It is simultaneously richer and in closer focus. Listen to the way the pizzicati in the first movement skitter like raindrops. There is a lot of lyricism to this quartet, another dimension of Shostakovich’s musical personality not often heard in the symphonies, that the Noûs mine to great effect. We are reminded that this quartet was dedicated to his new wife. The first of the piece’s two slow movements really sings on this recording.

...I suspect most listeners will go to the eighth for a visceral evocation of the historical period yet the more introspective, less febrile approach taken by the Noûs has a lot to recommend it[.]

A significant feature of this new recording is a welcome insistence on finding color in this music. When I listen to these quartets I am constantly thinking that this is where the firecracker modernist of the fourth symphony went with all his bag of tricks and relentless invention. He made a brief, enigmatic reappearance in the ninth and in his last symphony but generally the Shostakovich of the symphony and concerto is a rather sober soul. The performance here of the seventh string quartet, itself a somewhat enigmatic work written after the death of the composer’s first wife, exemplifies what I liked so much about the Noûs’ manner. Even at full stretch, as in the finale, which must surely be an expression of personal not societal grief, they find a strange luminous beauty of sound in the double stopping that dominates the wild first half of the movement. They seem to be making the point that Shostakovich doesn’t have to be ugly in sound to register...This score, brief but haunting, might stand for the buried treasure awaiting discovery in the Shostakovich cycle as a whole.

...the third quartet is concerned with the human cost of war – the heartfelt return of the Schubertian theme of the slow movement that seems to quote Der Greise Kopf from Winterreise is gut wrenching in this performance before fading out into the stratosphere. The line from the Schubert song – ‘how far it is still to the grave’ – seems appropriate to the mood of the post war movements and Shostakovich’s expectations of that period.

The Noûs approach to this intriguing work might be described as consistently cantabile. Even in the spiky second movement, they play beautifully. Anyone raised on Soviet era Shostakovich might baulk at this but it is worth recalling that, in this fraught post war period, to embrace traditional abstract musical traditions like quartet writing was in itself a radical act courting accusations of formalism. Music was meant to evoke socialist realism, not concern itself with beauty of form...The Noûs play with plenty of grit as demonstrated by the third movement but there is always that sense of lamenting, singing voices behind and responding to the violence.

The fifth quartet clearly presents commentators with a challenge. The translated notes by Oreste Bossini included with this release in effect raise their hands in the face of music which is, apparently, ‘complex and inscrutable in its density and depth’. Hardly words to send the prospective listener rushing to the CD player...Yet there does seem to be an autobiographical element to even a quartet like this that seems to be resolutely absolute music. During the development section of the first movement all four instruments declaim a new melody fff. Not just any melody but a quotation from a clarinet trio by the astonishing Russian composer, Galina Ustvolskaya, to whom the composer had earlier proposed marriage only to be rejected. Knowing this fact, seems to me, to transform this movement into one concerned with ardent, turbulent feelings of desire. It is a fact that also gives me an opportunity to get on my soapbox about what a scandal it is that Ustvolskaya is still only known as a footnote to a less well known Shostakovich quartet rather than on the merits of her music. This is little short of a disgrace.

What we get is a passionate rather than a gaunt work and the Noûs Quartet’s singing style is glorious here. Have a listen to the soaring, high lying violin melody that ends this opening movement before ushering in the second. It is like an austere, ecstatic lark ascending. That second movement, one of Shostakovich’s finest, has never sounded more like an intimate, clandestine assignation...what the Quartetto Noûs give us is a Shostakovich in the round in all his multifaceted genius.

--MusicWeb International (David McDade)

Francesco Piemontesi, a BBC Music Magazine award-winning pianist and lauded as a 'wonderful Mozartian', has an intense curiosity about his fellow artists - their pianos, the sonorities they cultivate, the secret elements that animate their playing, and what drives them. In this documentary by Jan Schmidt-Garre, filmed over one year, Piemontesi talks with some of the world's leading performers, including his mentor Alfred Brendel, Maria Joao Pires, Stephen Kovacevich and Antonio Pappano, in a series of revealing encounters that illuminate their individual approaches to the instrument, it's colour and form. The film is complemented by a bonus 60-minute recital by Yulianna Avdeeva, Zlata Chochieva and Francesco Piemontesi, played on Rachmaninoff's Steinway piano at Villa Senar, his home in Switzerland during the 1930s.

From 1950 and onwards, Allan Pettersson was mainly occupied with working on the monolithic symphonies for which he is best known. But before that, while still a student at the Conservatory in Stockholm and later a viola player in the Stockholm Philharmonic Orchestra, he composed two sets of songs: Six Songs and Barfotasånger (Barefoot Songs). Of these two, the second would become especially important for the composer, who returned to it throughout his life, quoting various songs from it in his symphonies. In Barfotasånger he set his own poems, full of autobiographical detail and using a highly personal, archaic language. Several of the songs reflect his childhood, as the youngest of four children growing up in a poor working-class neighborhood in Stockholm. All but two of them are in a minor key, in an idiom which alludes to folk songs, hymns and popular songs. They are here brought to sometimes painful life by Peter Mattei, one of the great singer-actors of our time, supported by Bengt-Åke Lundin, with whom he first collaborated almost 30 years ago, on an album of songs by Wilhelm Stenhammar.

Between 1803 and 1968, the Grand Prix de Rome marked the zenith of composition studies at the Paris Conservatoire. In Maurice Ravel’s time the competition included an elimination round (a fugue and a choral piece) followed by a cantata in the form of an operatic scena. The entries were judged by a jury which generally favoured expertise and conformity more than originality and Ravel’s growing reputation as a member of the avant-garde was therefore hardly to his advantage, and may explain why he never won the coveted Premier Grand Prix, and the three-year stay at Rome’s Villa Medici that went with it.

The present set brings together all the vocal works that Ravel composed for the Prix de Rome – five shorter settings for choir and orchestra and three cantatas, each with three characters taking part in a plot which followed a more or less fixed sequence of introduction, recitative and aria, a duet, a trio and a brief conclusion. First published more than half a century after Ravel’s death, these test pieces for the Prix de Rome have never acquired the popularity of his other early works, such as Pavane pour une infante défunte, Jeux d’eau or the String Quartet. They are worth more than their reputation as academic exercises might suggest, however, and deserve to be better known, especially when performed by Orchestre National des Pays de la Loire and Pascal Rophé and a team of vocal soloists including Véronique Gens and Michael Spyres.

REVIEWS:

This two-disc set brings together all of these rare vocal pieces by the composer: five shorter settings for choir and orchestra, and three cantatas, each with three characters taking part in the plot, which followed a more or less fixed sequence of introduction, recitative and aria, a duet, a trio and a brief conclusion. First published more than half a century after Ravel's death in 1937, these test pieces for the Prix de Rome have never acquired the popularity of his later and more mature works, but they are no mean pieces and are worth more than their reputation as academic exercises might suggest. These are compositions that are deftly crafted, full of attractive melodies, harmonically refined, and very often deeply sensitive. Indeed, they encapsulate all of the future Ravel hallmarks that were to make him one of the twentieth century's leading French composers.

Pascal Rophé draws some convincing performances and, in his hands, the music has an immediacy that keeps it consistently fresh and vivid. More than a collector's item which should attract the interest of all music lovers - Ravel aficionados in particular. Sonics and booklet notes are first-rate.

-- Classical Music Daily



Now on vinyl! The accordion is an instrument that is deeply rooted in Lithuanian folk music. Today, the accordion is also recognized as a versatile instrument of classical music, a change in perception that has largely been promoted by Martynas Levickis, one of the most internationally sought-after musicians in his field. With its lightness and melancholy, Astor Piazzolla’s music has fascinated the young accordionist from an early age, and so it goes without saying that he is dedicating himself to this exceptional composer in his anniversary year. Together with the Lithuanian National Symphony Orchestra he recorded "Aconcagua" live in concert. For conductor Modestas Pitrenas, Piazzolla's concerto - named posthumously after the highest mountain in the Americas - "conveys the climb to the roof of the earth in all its facets and symbolism: freedom, longing, loneliness, pain, transfiguration, peace." Levickis has a long and close collaboration with the chamber orchestra "Mikroórkestra". Together they present their interpretation of "Las Cuatro Estaciones Portenas," Piazzolla's timeless masterpieces of many styles that capture in music the four seasons in Argentina's capital Buenos Aires.

When in 1913 Respighi settled in Rome where he would reside for the rest of his life, he would produce a large amount of highly varied music-some of it now well-known, much of it less so. Geoffrey Simon’s championship of the little-known works of celebrated composers has proved highly successful on both record and in the concert hall, and his exploration of Respighi’s catalogue has yielded a number of colourful compositions whose neglect hitherto remains something of a mystery. The works recorded on this Cala Signum reissue cover a wide range of moods, from the opulence and excitement for which Respighi was noted in his famous Roman Trilogy, to more reflective pieces inspired by nostalgia for the music of the past.

The instrument was made by Eberhard Friedrich Walcker & Co. From Ludwigsburg in Wurttemberg and was completed in 1878 as Op. 306; the organ was accepted in the presence of Anton Bruckner. Franz Schmidt had already composed several large-scale organ works in the early 1920s, which were followed by smaller works such as "Vier kleine Praludien und Fugen". The Prelude No. 3 in G major develops in a calm, cheerful march movement, the trio with solo cantilena is followed by the first part da capo. The three-part fugue with obbligato pedal is reminiscent of Johann Sebastian Bach's technically demanding "Sonatas for two pianos and pedal" BWV 525-530. Variations and Fugue on an Original Theme (Royal Fanfares from Fredigundis) is Franz Schmidt's first solo organ work. The cycle Vier kleine Choralvorspiele on melodies of common Lutheran Sacred Songs was published in 1926. Prelude and Fugue in A major was written in 1934 as the penultimate of his works for solo organ.

Re-Release of an important item of the back catalogue. The present recording shows the highly acclaimed premiere from 2009 of the original version of Shostakovitch's opera. It represents also the debut of conductor Ingo Metzmacher at the Vienna State Opera. The opera was premiered in 1934 in Leningrad. After Stalin visited a performance in 1936 and then published a scathing review about it, colleagues and critics, who had previously approved of the opera, turned against Shostakovich. It was only about 30 years later that the piece was performed again in the Soviet Union, however, in a toned-down version under the name "Katerina Ismailova". This version was also performed internationally. The original version came to Western Europe only in 1980. The Vienna State Opera performed the original version of Lady MacBeth of Mtsensk for the first time in 2009 - that premiere is to be heard on the present album.

Ravel grew up in Paris during la belle epoque, the thirty-odd years prior to 1914 when Paris was the unquestioned artistic center of the world. The fin de siecle years saw him enter the Paris Conservatoire. He was an immensely gifted youth, and one by one his early compositions began to show a real mastery of conception and execution-before the 1800s were out, he had produced such assured works as Habenera, Menuet antique, several fine songs, and Pavane pour une infante defunte.

Between 1934 and 1949, Allan Pettersson, one of Sweden’s foremost composers of symphonies, wrote chamber works that differ greatly from his later production. With his Two Elegies, composed at the tender age of 17, Pettersson drew the enthusiasm of his teacher, who saw in him the makings of a composer. The Four Improvisations for string trio recall Bartók’s music with their rhythmic vitality. The Andante espressivo is more personal with its experimental melodic and harmonic leanings. After his forced return from Paris in 1939, where he had gone to study, Pettersson composed a tender and lyrical Romanza and, three years later, his only piece for solo piano, the elegiac and meditative Lamento.

The most important work on this recording is the Concerto for Violin and String Quartet, a harsh, dense work that places great demands on the musicians. Initially rejected by the critics, the work now appears almost unique in terms of its radical tonal language and experimental use of extended techniques. For this recording, Ulf Wallin has brought together colleagues and friends to perform these lesser-known works, which nevertheless constitute an essential milestone in the career of the great Swedish composer.

REVIEW:

The Concerto for Violin and String Quartet of 1949, which opens the program and makes up over half of the album’s run time, is a lush work with numerous challenges for performers, both technically and harmonically, that from the outside would seem likely to limit the scope of listeners who would enjoy it. However, credit to the present performers, for these demands are met, and the results are thoroughly interesting and thought-provoking. The Concerto is the latest included work, chronologically, and it is a clear step toward the composer’s symphonic writing. The earliest works here are the Two Elegies for Violin and Piano, from 1934. These lovely, short tunes reflect the schooling the composer had undertaken; one could perhaps mistake these as having been written in the previous century.

Pianist Thomas Hoppe, Wallin is another draw. Aside from ideal backing on the violin and piano works, Hoppe delivers a beautiful reading of Pettersson’s Lamento for Solo Piano. There is a lot to take in here, and listeners will be rewarded with subsequent hearings.

-- AllMusic.com (Keith Finke)

One of the oldest musical instruments we know of, the pan flute was played in many antique civilizations. The sophisticated type used in Romanian folk music is the most familiar to a contemporary audience. The virtuosos who brought fame to the pan flute in the second half of the 20th century include the Romanian musicians Damian Luca, Radu Simion, Nicolae Pîrvu, Gheorghe Zamfir and Simion Stanciu. Liselotte Rokyta studied with four of the “Big Five” and also gained authentic pan flute skills from folk players during a number of visits to Romania. The present album documents that the pan flute also occupies an indispensable position in classical music. The pieces by Bartók and Porumbescu are arrangements of Romanian folk dances, in which the pan flute is commonly employed. Debussy composed his Syrinx for the transverse flute, to which the pan flute (or syrinx) would seem to be an equal variant. The other arrangements are based on 19th- and 20th-century French composers’ works for the flute, as well as the piano and organ. You may have been hard pressed to imagine pieces by Varèse, Honegger or Messiaen played on the pan flute, yet you will certainly be engrossed by Liselotte Rokyta’s performance. The respective composers would undoubtedly have written music for the pan flute too had they had available a musician of her quality. The enchanting voice of the nymph Syrinx in the realm of classical music.

Richard Strauss's 'Arabella' is a lyric comedy that portrays hardships and obsessions in a society whose latebourgeois values are crumbling. An addiction to gambling has driven the family of cavalry officer Waldner into financial ruin, and their only hope for salvation lies in marrying off their daughter Arabella into a wealthy family. Strauss's orchestral opulence coupled with it's period Viennese setting has seen 'Arabella' perceived as a light-hearted comedy of errors, but Tobias Kratzer's multi-faceted production also explores the disunity between it's characters, spotlighting tensions that connect 19th-century Vienna to the present day.

With 22 symphonies, 17 string quartets, 9 concertos, and 7 operas, the composer Mieczyslaw Weinberg left behind an extensive oeuvre. Musically, one can hear the composer's close friendship with Dmitri Shostakovich, although Weinberg's music is more lyrical and romantic in nature. Nevertheless, the composer was long forgotten and his music has only been rediscovered in the last ten years. Gidon Kremer has dedicated himself to the rediscovery and cultivation of Weinberg's music.

Although Kurt Weill’s principal legacy lies in music theatre works of both popular appeal and intellectual weight, he was equally at home in purely orchestral works as evidenced by his two symphonies. Written just over a decade apart, they reveal his chameleon-like ability to work with any range of style and form. The Symphonie in einem Satz (Symphony in one movement), completed when he was barely 21, adopts an expressionist idiom that shows intricate writing, dense counterpoint and quick shifts reminiscent of Schoenberg's First Chamber Symphony. Completed in France in 1934 after Weill had to flee Nazi Germany, the Fantaisie symphonique is filled with allusions to the 'sung ballet' The Seven Deadly Sins, composed at the same time. Opening the programme is a selection from the ‘play with music’ Der Silbersee (The Silver Lake), a commentary on commercial greed. As in The Threepenny Opera, the vocal parts were composed for singing actors rather than opera singers. Steeped in the world of Weill, conductor, composer and chansonnier HK Gruber performs the songs himself in his own inimitable way, giving an unusual authenticity to the interpretations.

REVIEWS:

The collection is conducted by HK Gruber, a standard-setting interpreter of Weill’s music, who has been inspired by the composer in his own works. His account of the first symphony (1921) tightly controls what could easily seem scattered; and he sings in the “Silbersee” excerpts, with the gravely, unrefined affect of Lotte Lenya that will be instantly familiar to those who know his 1977 song cycle “Frankenstein!!” The second symphony unfurls with an ease that becomes more disturbing as, from behind the wit and tunefulness, emerge flashes of heartbroken nostalgia and martial terror. The scores comes out sounding more personal, if documentary, for it — a postcard from a precarious Europe on the brink.

-- New York Times (Joshua Barone)

Der Silbersee was Kurt Weill’s European swan-song; premiered in Berlin in February 1933, it was banned by the Nazis in March, and Weill was forced to flee Germany.

There’s a jarring contrast between the pungent text (beautifully projected here by HK Gruber) and the lovely orchestral accompaniment that perfectly sums up Weill’s best music. There are only a few excerpts from the score, but they’re choice.

The marvelous Symphony No. 2 is close to the top of my list of obscure orchestral works that deserve to be programmed and recorded much more frequently. He’s taken the accessible theatre music which had become his hallmark, and neatly slotted it within the classical symphony form of Haydn and Mozart.

Back in 1921, Kurt Weill had written his Symphony in One Movement (his First). His characterization of it: “By Mahler, out of Strauss, trained by Schoenberg.” Weill cleverly melds the neo-romantic tradition with leading edge serialism. This is more than juvenilia; it’s an accomplished work in its own right. Weill has the compositional skill this early in his composing career to produce music that has value a century later.

This project is a perfect example of honest performance of great music; with stellar support from the musicians of the Swedish Chamber Choir, we have here an outstanding contribution to the Weill discography.

-- Music for Several Instruments

Ravel's status as one of the most popular composers of all time rests to a large extent on the phenomenal success of Bolero. Yet there is much more to this endlessly intriguing man's work than the "seventeen minutes of orchestral tissue without music": childhood fantasy, Spain, the Orient, American jazz, the theater, clockwork toys and all the things mechanical, preoccupied Maurice Ravel throughout his life, and echoes of each can be found in all corners of his music.

The pieces featured on the present album are staples of Belfiato Quintet’s modern repertoire and are, above all, music close to their heart. Each of them occupies a special position in the ensemble’s history. Carl Nielsen’s Wind Quintet is the very first work they explored and performed, while their rendition of Cinq danses profanes et sacrées at the 2011 Henri Tomasi International Woodwind Quintet Competition in Marseille earned the prize for the best interpretation of a Tomasi composition. And the other works included on the album have played significant roles in the ensemble’s career too. The five pieces, dating from between 1922 and 1964, represent their creators’ specific “elements”, as well as the diverse music traditions of their native countries. Yet the album’s title may also refer to five highly distinct figures who – perhaps precisely owing to their being so distinct – form a superbly harmonized ensemble that possesses a remarkable variety of tone quality and shades of expression. Belfiato Quintet are indisputably a world-class ensemble, with regard to the present album’s repertoire and beyond. Belfiato Quintet – five elements chiming in perfect harmony.

‘The Miraculous Mandarin’ (Op. 19, Sz. 73) is Bartók's last work for the stage. The plot revolves around prostitution, brutality, robbery, murder, being an outsider, (unrequited) love, and finally, as a catharsis, a kind of love-death. The music is relentlessly sharp for long stretches, garishly dissonant, radical—probably the most modern score Bartók created. The premiere (1926) in Cologne was a scandal, and Konrad Adenauer, then Lord Mayor of Cologne, immediately cancelled the performances.The Violin Concerto No. 2, Sz. 112, was composed between August 1937 and December 31, 1938, shortly before Bartók's emigration to the United States in view of the increasingly oppressive political and social climate in Hungary. Unlike the ‘Mandarin,’ the work quickly established itself after its premiere in Amsterdam in 1939 as one of the central violin concertos of the first half of the 20th century, and at the same time, as one of Bartók's greatest creations.

In the course of his long career, Michael Gielen has been Music Director of the Royal Opera in Stockholm, the Belgian National Orchestra in Brussels, the Dutch Opera, and the Frankfurt Opera. He was also Principal Guest Conductor of the BBC Symphony Orchestra and the Staatskapelle Berlin, as well as Chief Conductor of the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra and the Südwestfunk Symphony Orchestra.

A unique demonstration of massed instrumental playing, featuring no less than 48 violinists under the baton of Geoffrey Simon. Three of London's finest sections drive the concept of the violin ensemble to new heights in these innovative, hugely sonorous treatments of repertoire from Debussy to Gershwin. "Monti's Csardas of course sounds appropriately passionate: and when it gets going the 48 players clearly enjoy their own virtuosity: the result is exhilarating" (Gramophone) "Stand out track is Shostakovich's Romance from The Gadfly which demonstrates how an effective melody can benefit from an arrangement sympathetic to colorful harmonies" (Classic CD)

In masterful arrangements, these four saxophone virtuosos explore the golden '20s and early '30s of the last century and give an exceptional and entertaining performance.

Mezzo-soprano Anna Lucia Richter interprets Gustav Mahler's Wunderhorn Lieder and Kindertotenliederwith great emotional depth and subtle creative power - two cycles that illuminate human fate in all itsfacets like few others. In the Wunderhorn Lieder we encounter tender childhood memories and bizarre stories - a worldbetween irony, folk song and deep melancholy. The harrowing contrast is provided by theKindertotenlieder, in which Mahler sets the pain of the loss of a child to music with poignant clarity andtouching restraint. Together with the Gurzenich Orchestra Cologne under the baton of Jordan de Souza, Anna Lucia Richtergives these songs a new, very personal dimension with her highly nuanced voice.

Paths – crossing and diverging, those we choose ourselves and those that are predestined and inevitable: through this prism the violinist Josef Špacek and the cellist Tomáš Jamník view the music of four Czech composers written within a mere 35 years of the 20th century. Janácek, enraptured by the idea of Pan-Slavism, was led by desire to Russia, a country where he found inspiration for his string quartet (here in an ambitious arrangement for two instruments), in a novella by Tolstoy. Ervín Schulhoff, an admirer and friend of Janácek’s (to whom he dedicated the duo featured on the present album), invested his hopes in Soviet Russia, yet this did not save him from death in a Nazi concentration camp. A similar fate (incarceration in Theresienstadt and Fürstengrube) befell Gideon Klein, another gifted and promising composer, who was murdered by the Nazis at the age of 25. Just two incomplete movements of his remarkable Duo for Violin and Cello have survived. The paths pursued by Bohuslav Martinu – first driven by thirst for knowledge and then forced to flee the Nazis – led from Prague through Paris to the USA, before returning to Europe; yet circumstances did not allow him to see his beloved country again. Martinu wrote his Duo for Violin and Cello No. 2 towards the very end of his life – and it also concludes the album by two brilliant artists. A virtuoso, profound and forcible recording indeed. Virtuosity, vivid joy and deep sorrow – the stories of four composers as reflected in their music.