Walter Braunfels is a composer whose music died twice: Once when the Nazis declared his music “degenerate art”. Then again when post-war Germany had little use for the various schools of tonal music; when the arbiters of taste considered any form of romantic music – almost the whole pre-war aesthetic – to be tainted. This sixth release of Capriccio’s Braunfels Edition shows again his large range of colorful music and focus this time on his works for piano and orchestra from three different periods of his life: his first complete orchestral work, the Witches Sabbath, op. 8 (1906), the Concert piece for piano and orchestra op. 64 (1946) and one of his last compositions the Hebridian Dances op. 70 (1950/51). Tatjana Blome is the featured pianist on this release.

In December 2017 soprano Rodica Vica made the world premiere recording of George Enescu’s Ghosts (Strigoii) alongside the Rundfunk- Sinfonieorchester Berlin led by conductor Gabriel Bebe?elea. Nobody knew anything about George Enescu’s oratorium Strigoii. The script, lost together with other items in the turmoil of the First World War, was purchased back by the Director of the Enescu Museum. To make it easier to understand how Strigoii was created, it was necessary to undertake the decipherment and reconstruction of the manuscript. When Enescu approached Strigoii in 1916, it was the result of an older admiration for the poet Mihai Eminescu that was to last until the end of the composer’s life. Whilst Enescu evinces some similarities to German Romanticism in his poem (Novalis or Tieck), in Strigoii Enescu also shows stylistic affinities to some contemporaries such as Alexander von Zemlinsky or the young Alban Berg.

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REVIEW:

Both works here are world premiere recordings. Strigoii was designated by Enescu as an oratorio, although it would seem better to fit the description of secular cantata. It was composed in 1916 for full orchestra, choir and soloists in three parts, to a text which is a poem by Mihai Eminescu (1850–1889); the score was presumed lost during the First World War but eventually re-discovered and purchased by the director of the Enescu Museum, who gave a photocopy of the manuscript to Cornel ??ranu, the arranger here. Dramatically, thematically, textually and musically, it has much in common with two works both written five years earlier: Schoenberg’s Gurre-Lieder, also in three parts and Bartók’s Duke Bluebeard’s Castle, all with elements that can ultimately be traced back to the post-Romantic trope of “Love in Death” epitomised in the “Liebestod” of Tristan und Isolde, but stylistically the influences of Zemlinsky and Berg can be detected in the score. Interestingly, the German translation of what is rendered in English as “Ghosts” is “Geister” on the cover but the translation of the poem in the booklet is entitled “Vampyre”, which puts a rather different and darker complexion upon the tale.

??ranu’s reconstruction has been richly orchestrated by composer Sabin Pautza. It purportedly sets the entire text of Eminescu’s poem, although in track 5, Part II, the action omits six stanzas of the original present in the libretto, thereby leaping from King Arald’s plea to the Seer to bring his beloved back from the dead to his spell, excising the narrative description of the preparation and build-up to its incantation. Insofar as I can tell, not speaking Romanian but being familiar with other Romance languages and having the English translation to follow, the poetry is beautiful and it certainly adds interest to hear the language sung so idiomatically by native speakers.

“Free declamation” or “Sprechgesang” is sometimes employed by the tenor and bass, and the music is highly chromatic in approach, giving it a nebulous and free-floating character and making it hard for the amateur ear to pin down its shape. The through-composed music does not so much accompany the vocal lines as provide a kind of eerie, atmospheric backdrop to them. I certainly find myself frequently reminded of the atmosphere of Bluebeard while listening, especially as so much of the music is for the bass, but especially striking is the tenor Arald’s searing, soaring narration of how his passionate, all-consuming love for his Queen was stirred into being. All four singers here are first-rate, especially the incisive baritone who sings the Magus. My experience of Romanian opera hitherto has been limited to Enescu’s life’s work and masterpiece, the beautiful, refined and densely orchestrated Oedipe, and the operas of Nicolae Bretan, whose own libretto for his Arald was based on the same poem as Enescu sets here; likewise, the text for Luceaf?rul, was again derived from an Eminescu poem. Both were first recorded by Nimbus and well worth exploring, while the best recording of Oedipe remains that from EMI with José Van Dam, but I certainly also welcome this new addition to the canon, even though I find Enescu’s idiom here quite challenging.

Pastorale fantaisie is a youthful work, written in 1899, when the composer was only eighteen. For a number of reasons, it was not given an opus number or published, and was re-discovered only in 2017 by the conductor here, Gabriel Bebe?elea, who transcribed it from the manuscript and directed its second performance 118 years after its premiere. Its structure is tripartite and employs two fugues as its main musical ideas, culminating in a grand coda; it is evidently indebted to Baroque models. The gentle, undulating, then descending, opening theme gives it an airy, pastoral quality, contrasting strongly with the ensuing stormy sections, reinforcing any association we might have with the Beethovenian allusion contained within the work’s title; despite its formal, archaic structure, it emerges as sounding more modern, perhaps more like an attractive tone poem.

– MusicWeb International (Ralph Moore)

Trade Mark "Bad Boy" - After all the experimental episodes the audience has faced in the field of New Music in recent decades, today the oeuvre of George Antheil will be welcomed with a great deal of sympathy and many a friendly smile. The American knew full well not only how to meet the expectations of an audience "prepared to protest", but also how even to challenge them more overtly. An excellent example is the Jazz Symphony, written in 1925, shortly after George Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue, that bursting the limits of the customary listening experiences of teh age in a similar way to e.g. Stravinsky's Le sacre du printemps of 1913.

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REVIEW:

Thanks in large part to Karl-Heinz Steffens’s interpretation, I’d argue that A Jazz Symphony, despite its blatant references to Stravinsky's Rite of Spring, are woven inextricably into the music’s narrative structure. Steffens underscores the work’s unifying characteristics rather than emphasizing its incongruities.

Pianist Frank Dupree’s finely chiseled performance in the First Piano Concerto maintains a tighter grip overall than any of his rivals.

– Gramophone

'Mar�a de Buenos Aires brought me inner peace, a partial serenity that has changed my way of approaching music. I reached the zenith of my musical life at the time. (Astor Piazzolla) Piazzolla himself equated Mar�a to the tango and it's historical ups and downs; and this is probably also the primary aid to understanding the reception of the contents of the piece. Next to that, there is also a musical diction that is entirely unique in the second half of the 20th century, indeed in the New Music scene as a whole. 'I learnt something: to be patient, to be self-critical, to co-ordinate reflection with passion. Now I am told: 'That is a different Piazzolla', but that is not the case. I am the same man, but I have reached a synthesis'. (Astor Piazzolla)

John Christopher Williams, OBE (born 24 April 1941) is an Australian virtuosic classical guitarist renowned for his ensemble playing as well as his interpretation and promotion of the modern classical guitar repertoire. In 1973, he shared a Grammy Award in the Best Chamber Music Performance category with fellow guitarist Julian Bream for Julian and John (Works by Lawes, Carulli, Alb�niz, Granados). Guitar historian Graham Wade has said: "John is perhaps the most technically accomplished guitarist the world has seen." This third instalment in the IDIS John Williams Beginning of a Legend series includes works recorded in the studio in 1961, when John was only 20 years old. Works include compositions by Ponce and Torroba as well as traditional songs for voice and guitar.

"•Erwin Schulhoff (1894-1942), one of the most important Czech artists in the first half of the 20th century, came into contact with the Dadaists in Dresden after WWI. • For artists scarred by war, Dadaism reflected their attitude towards life which found expression in word and image as glaring derision, scorn and shameless provocation. In this climate, Schulhoff discovered American jazz. • The Piano Concerto, WV 66 is a wild blend of Impressionist, late-Romantic and jazz-inspired sounds and rhythms."

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Ernst von Dohnanyi’s piano works are influenced by the late romantic era, with different character pieces woven together as a cycle like the late piano works of Brahms. Dohnanyi first made his mark on the music scene as a pianist. He made his debut in Berlin in 1897 and was at once recognized as an artist of extremely high merit. Similar success followed in Vienna, and then he toured Europe. After he began composing, the piano was his natural instrument to write for. Sofja Gulbadamova has long been a champion of Ernst von Dohnanyi’s piano oevre. Sofja has won prizes at many international competitions in the USA, Spain, France, Germany, and Russia. Several CD recordings of her performances have already been published in Germany and France, and have been widely well-received.

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Composed over a period of some thirty years, the six string works in this programme cover the full stylistic range of Penderecki' towering compositional career.

Recording information: Siemens Villa, Berlin, Germany (03/10/2009-03/11/2009).

This album was nominated for the 2005 Grammy Award for "Best Instrumental Soloist(s) (with Orchestra)."

This collection of classical favorites of Penderecki's work serves as a compilation of his famous works made available by Polish National Radio Symphony Orchestra, Warsaw Philharmonic Orchestra and the Warsaw Philharmonic Choir. Also featured are renowned classical conductor Antoni Wit and other classic artist.

This album was nominated for the 2005 Grammy Award for "Best Chamber Music Performance."

In terms of genre, Allan Pettersson was uniquely single-minded: during his entire career as a composer (1953–80) he produced only a dozen or so works that were not symphonies. By name, Violin Concerto No. 2 is one of these, but it is fair to say that it straddles the divide. Pettersson himself remarked: ‘In reality my work was a Symphony for violin and orchestra. From this results the fact that the solo violin is incorporated into the orchestra like any other instrument.’ It should therefore not come as a surprise that Christian Lindberg has chosen to include this massive 53-minute work in his acclaimed and award-winning series of Pettersson’s symphonies, realized in collaboration with the Norrköping Symphony Orchestra. The concerto was written in 1977, 28 years after its predecessor, the Concerto for Violin and String Quartet (1949). In that work, written while Pettersson was still studying, the composer was experimenting with radical ideas that are not to be found in his later compositions. Concerto No. 2 is rather characterized by the central role given to one of Pettersson’s Barefoot Songs – a trait that appears in several other mature works. Throughout the score, the song ‘The Lord walks in the meadow’ provides motivic material but is also quoted extensively. The hugely challenging solo part was first performed by Ida Haendel in 1980, and is here taken up by Ulf Wallin, who with an extensive discography has already proved himself to be one of the most intrepid violinists of today. The album closes with Pettersson’s last musical thoughts: a 207-bar long fragment generally regarded and referred to as a sketch for the composer’s Seventeenth Symphony. The fragment has been performed in public on one or two occasions, but it is only now that a wider public is given the opportunity to hear it.

Click Here for the complete Naxos Film Music Classic Series

Towards the end of the 19th century, France saw a renaissance for chamber music, perpetuated not by popular demand but by the composers themselves. An early response to Saint-Saëns' initiative came from a former student, Gabriel Fauré, who completed his Violin Sonata in A Major and gave it the opus number 13, making it the first instrumental work in his official work list.

This is a hybrid Super Audio CD playable on both regular and Super Audio CD players.

Since his appointment as chief conductor and later music director in 2003, Andrew Litton and the Bergen Philharmonic Orchestra have richly proven a particular affinity for Russian repertoire, both on their numerous tours and in recording. Works by Prokofiev, Stravinsky, Rachmaninov, Tchaikovsky, Medtner and Scriabin have featured on discs which have been welcomed by the international music press with distinctions such as Editor's Choice (Gramophone), Disc of the Month (Classic FM Magazine and ClassicsToday.com), Empfohlen (Klassik-Heute.de) and IRR Outstanding (International Record Review). As Litton now steps down from his post with the Bergen orchestra, the team marks the event with their rendition of Sergei Rachmaninov's gigantic Second Symphony, with its playing time of 60+ minutes as broad and expansive as the Russian steppes. The work followed upon a first symphony which in 1897 had had a disastrous reception, and it took the intensely self-critical Rachmaninov ten years before making another attempt at the genre. Fortunately the first performance of the work in 1908 was a complete success, the broad melodic gestures and the arduous journey from the brooding melancholy of the symphony’s introduction to the triumphant liberation at its close speaking directly to the St Petersburg audience. Later criticism of the symphony’s broad scale prompted Rachmaninov to sanction several cuts, however, and it was only in the mid-1960s that it became common practice to perform the symphony complete – as in the present recording. Rachmaninov is joined on the disc by his older colleague Anatoly Liadov, whose brief and shimmering tone poem The Enchanted Lake provides an atmospheric ending to the recording – in the words of Liadov himself an image of nature, as ‘fantastic as a fairy tale’, in which the listener will feel ‘the change of the colours, the chiaroscuro, the incessantly changeable stillness…’

Review:

Rachmaninov’s Second Symphony is often accused of being gargantuan, schmaltzy and overblown. In Andrew Litton’s new recording with the Bergen Philharmonic, it sounds gargantuan, schmaltzy – and just blown enough, if you like your Rachmaninov big and extrovert.

– Guardian (UK)

Shostakovich's film score to Hamlet is one of his finest, possibly because it's a serious film rather than a socialist-realist potboiler, and the composer's moody, mostly spare music supports the action with unfailing accuracy and makes compelling listening on its own. The well-known suite leaves out a lot of music, and while there's inevitably a degree of repetition involved, this complete recording is very welcome for its inclusion of such segments as "Hamlet's Parting from Ophelia", "Hamlet's Monologue", "Ophelia's Descent into Madness", "Hamlet at Ophelia's Grave", and "The Cemetery".

As you may have guessed from the titles, the added music creates a considerably darker overall impression than does the suite, and this in a work that begins with the "whip-crack" motive from the third movement of Shostakovich's not-exactly-jocose Thirteenth Symphony "Babi Yar". So it may not be the most emotionally varied score, but it does sound very Russian and very much like late Shostakovich, and conductor Dmitry Yablonsky treats it accordingly. He and his orchestra bring just as much conviction and intensity (try "The Ghost") as they would to one of the symphonies, and Naxos' sonics are vivid. Be sure, however, to get the regular stereo CD: the SACD is a failure, with way too much stuff coming from the rear channels. Definitely worth owning.

--David Hurwitz, ClassicsToday.com

Full review from FANFARE Magazine:
Shakespeare’s indecisive hero played a persistent role in Shostakovich’s life. In 1932, the composer completed incidental music for a controversial stage production directed by Nikolai Akimov. Five years later, when the Fifth Symphony was completed, some commentators referred to it as the “Hamlet” Symphony because of its brooding and equivocal moods, and the composer himself did not escape comparisons with the great Dane. Given Shostakovich’s sizable experience with film scores, it was only natural for him to write the score to Grigori Kozintsev’s Hamlet in 1964. Over the years, there have been several recordings of the eight-item suite (op. 116a) that Lev Atovmian assembled from the score. This CD, however, appears to be the premiere recording of the complete score, including music that didn’t even make it into the film.

At this juncture, one usually makes the comment that Shostakovich’s film scores do not represent his best work, and that they shouldn’t be considered “typical” of his output. Even though I’ve made them myself, I’ve often found those comments a little condescending, however, and with Hamlet, we have music that is both top-of-the-line and typical of Shostakovich. To put this score in a chronological perspective, it is flanked by the 13th and 14th Symphonies, and it was completed in the same year as the Ninth and 10th String Quartets—hardly bad company! There’s much in Hamlet that is reminiscent of the composer’s very best work from this period. Shostakovich probably could write film music in his sleep, but it is clear that Hamlet engaged his attention and creativity in a very profound way.

Granted, not all the music is brilliant and essential—even 14-second fanfares have been included among these 23 tracks—but there’s much that is worth hearing outside of Atovmian’s suite. For example, the wonderfully eerie “Story of Horatio and the Ghost” might have been an outtake from the first movement of the 11th Symphony, and the five-minute “Hamlet’s Parting from Ophelia” proves once again that a note of music is worth a thousand words. A gently tinkling harpsichord aptly evokes both a courtly atmosphere and Ophelia’s emotional fragility. Hamlet’s music reveals his destructiveness and his nobility. And so it goes. Yes, there is some bombast here, yet it is bombast with a purpose—to evoke the empty pageantry of Claudius’s Elsinore, for example.

Yablonsky not only conducts this music passionately, he also plays it in its proper cinematic order. This is not true of Atovmian’s suite, in which the Players arrive after (!) they perform The Murder of Gonzago. As I suggested above, a few of the shorter cues are intrusive, but all in all, this CD is a satisfying listening experience, no matter what standard of judgment one uses.

Yablonsky is the son of pianist Oxana Yablonskaya, and he is accumulating quite a series of fine recordings for Naxos. Fine-sounding ones too, as the engineering is superb. Thirty years ago, who would have guessed that Russians would be making audiophile recordings in 2003? (I understand that there is an SACD version of this disc, too.)

If I had reviewed this disc a little earlier, I might have put it on my Want List for the year. The music, performances, and engineering are of the highest quality, and I can think of no better way to spend a leaden August (or November!) evening than to play this CD over and over again—which is exactly what I have done.

Raymond Tuttle, FANFARE

Click Here for the complete Naxos Film Music Classic Series

The music of Bohuslav Martinů, whose complete solo piano works have also been recorded by Giorgio Koukl for Naxos, can ring like bells, shimmer like a mirage or pulse with sheer rhythmic vitality as is the case with these three piano concertos, where high drama, brilliant tunes, captivating colouristic effects and tongue-in-cheek frivolity all find their place. Volume 1 – Piano Concertos Nos. 3 & 5 has been acclaimed for its ‘Buoyant and exuberant performances’ (Gramophone Editor’s Choice) and as ‘an auspicious debut [and] extremely well played’ (International Record Review).

One of Prokofiev' best loved works today, Romeo and Juliet was initially declared 'impossible to dance to'.

Let me say it right off the bat: I absolutely loved this CD, and I’m betting that you will, too. I have been enthralled with Hindemith’s Kammermusik ever since I acquired the complete set of works collected under that title in Riccardo Chailly’s 1992 two-disc Decca release. Seven works in all make up the series. Six are essentially chamber concertos, each featuring a different solo instrument: piano in the op. 36/1, cello in the op. 36/2, violin in the op. 36/3, viola in the op. 36/4, viola d’amore in the op. 46/1, and organ in the op. 46/2. The seventh, op. 24/1, is for 12 solo instruments. That leaves the op. 24/2 for five wind instruments heard here, to which Hindemith gave the title Kleine Kammermusik. Technically speaking, it falls outside the set of seven the composer designated Kammermusik, but in style it shares much in common with its siblings. Written in 1922, it is a delightful thing, peppy, perky, and playful, with just enough of those Hindemithian sour notes thrown in to give the piece a lemony zest. The Six Bagatelles by György Ligeti (b. 1923) is a fairly early piece written between 1951 and 1953, while the composer was still living in Hungary. The work is based on six movements from Ligeti’s Musica ricercata, and is clearly indebted to neo-Classical models, particularly Bartók and Stravinsky. Do not expect anything like the later spatial and spectral tone-cluster music that made Ligeti famous in the West.

I am of two minds when it comes to Carl Nielsen (1865–1931). Hearing his name so often in hyphenation with Sibelius (like Debussy and Ravel), I could not imagine how or why anyone would pair these two composers who sounded to me so utterly different in style and musical speech. Moreover, I was (and still am) a Sibelian to the core, and I was mystified that Nielsen, who seemed quite the inferior of the two, could be held up as an equal. Well, that was a long time ago, and before I really applied myself to learning Nielsen’s music. I still believe that Sibelius was the greater of the two composers, but they are so different from one another that comparisons are not very instructive. I have long since come to appreciate Nielsen for the individual and special voice that was his.

His Wind Quintet, op. 43, from 1922, is testament to that unique voice. At nearly 25 minutes, it is a substantive and masterful work. The concluding Theme and Variations movement, especially, is not only a brilliant display of wind-writing technique, but really beautiful and moving music.

What can I say about the Quintett Wien? These five musicians are more than masters of their craft; they come together as a perfectly blended ensemble that breathes as a single living organism. Truly magnificent. Nimbus captures them in an acoustic that is open and radiant, but not reverberant. I know that I will be playing this CD many times over.

Jerry Dubins, FANFARE

Includes work(s) for pno by Igor Stravinsky. Soloist: Martin Jones.

Beneath the shimmering surface of Delius�s little-known violin sonatas are the latent exuberance and nostalgic rapture which have made his orchestral music so popular. Across the decades separating the B major Violin Sonata of 1892 from the Third Violin Sonata of 1930, Delius developed a unique musical language which leavened the post-Romantic heritage of Wagner with French Impressionism and European and Afro-American folk idioms; an intoxicating mix that moved Sir Thomas Beecham to call him �the last great apostle in our time of beauty and romance in music�.

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When he became music director in Cologne after the war at the age of thirty-three, Günter Wand insisted from the start on the inclusion of contemporary music in order to restore musical life amid the material and intellectual ruins. Among others, he championed composers as diverse as Walter Braunfels and Tadeusz Baird. This recording is typical of a program – with the added bonus of renowned horn soloist Dennis Brain and oboist Lothar Faber.

Hindemith Sao Paulo Symphony Orchestra, John Neschling Orchestral Works

Sofia Gubaidulina has found a soulfulness and freedom in the guitar which speaks to her musical language of expressive mood and often mysterious but precise sonorities. In both Repentance and Sotto Voce she combines guitars with lower stringed instruments, creating a virtuosic, multi-dimensional and deeply poetic role for each voice. Fascinating new sounds from the guitar are produced from the most eloquent chorales to remarkable effects using a drinking glass. The earlier Serenade is ‘music for pleasure’, while this première recording of the Toccata reveals a work with a driving momentum that hardly stops.