Pianist Luiza Borac plays Bach's Goldberg Variations and Canons, transcriptions of Bach works by Lipatti, Busoni, Kempff, and Siloti, concluding with Chick Corea's Children's Songs.

REVIEW:

There is no attempt on Borac’s part (unlike some other famous pianists) to suggest the sonority of the harpsichord. But her playing has a clarity and deftness of touch entirely appropriate for this repertoire. Borac’s superb technique, crystalline tone, and seamless legato provide the utmost pleasure.

The remaining Bach items embody a comparable level of artistry, both unaffected and highly expressive. Jazz pianist and composer Chick Corea’s Children’s Songs were inspired in part by Bartók’s Mikrokosmos. Borac, who participated in some of Corea’s workshops, and found them “unforgettable and matchless,” plays the songs with masterful technique, captivating energy, and pervasive joy. She dedicates this recital “to the memory of my father George Borac.” What a beautiful musical tribute, and gift to us all. Highest recommendation.

— Fanfare (Ken Meltzer)

Joseph Suder was an excellent pianist. In his works the piano remained an expressive instrument and did not become (as has been the case in the works of many other twentieth century composers) a sort of a percussion instrument. In these piano pieces, works representing a cross section of his compositional output from 1911 to 1951, Suder is concerned with extending the expressive range oft he piano. Elements of very different character can be found here: dance and lyrical-serious song or humor and onomatopoeia. Although Suder proceeds from the precedents of the tradition like the dance types of the baroque, the Romantic scherzo, or the Song without Words, he transforms the tradition into something new by compressing form and expression in these short pieces and thus penetrating to what is essential.

On July 24th, Gerd Schaller conducted the Philharmonia Festiva in a performance of the Bruckner Symphony No. 9 in a "four movement version with Finale supplemented from original sources and completed by Gerd Schaller." The performance took place in the Ebrach Abbey in Ebrach, Germany as part of the Ebracher Musiksommer. As with Schaller's other Bruckner performances at Ebrach, the concert was recorded by Bavarian Radio Studio Franken and will be released on CD this December on the Profil label.

Gerd Schaller’s completion and performance gained long applause, the conductor repeatedly called back to take a further bow, and to my ears succeeded wonderfully in its aim of presenting a completed Ninth as a great musical event and a shattering, revelatory spiritual journey. Ken Ward on the original concert.

Anton Bruckner's Second Symphony is certainly one of the most interesting symphonies in the cycle, even for musical amateurs, due to a number of special features. Inside Bruckner 2024: The complete symphonies in all essential versions.

Katerina Izmaylova - Symphony for full Orchestra after the opera “Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk“ by Shostakovich, arranged by Benjamin Basner.

"The Katerina Izmaylova symphony is much more than an opera arrangement. It intensifies opera music to instrumental music, to a symphony exposing the perversion of power in a very direct and therefore highly penetrating way." Franzpeter Messmer

The preserved “miraculous harp:” 475 years of orchestra history – and a whole century is there to be listened to. This CD box is an invitation to a musical journey through time with one of the world’s best orchestras! Not only that, it is one of the world’s oldest, founded in 1548 and active without a break ever since. The former Hofkapelle, the court orchestra of Saxony, now proudly bears the name Sachsische Staatskapelle Dresden. “Kapellkonzerte“ since the beginning of sound recordings under conductors like: Fritz Busch, Richard Strauss, Karl Böhm, Joseph Keilberth, Kurt Sanderling, Otmar Suitner, Herbert Blomstedt, Giuseppe Sinopoli, Bernard Haitink, Fabio Luisi, Christian Thielemann and many more

The familiar in a new guise – Tatjana Masurenko and the Yaruss Quartet are therefore in good company when they clothe the music of the Russian Romantics in novel acoustic garments. Using viola, soprano domra and alto domra, accordion and double bass, they play 19th century works in their own arrangements, using gut strings for all of their instruments, the domras sounding somewhat like Italian mandolins. In this guise, compositions by Rimsky-Korsakov, Musorgsky, Borodin and Glazunov seem lighter, more open and agile, their music expressing a fresh elegance with different colours, taking on a completely new character.

Wieland Wagner's production of Parsifal was performed at the Bayreuth Festival every year from 1951 to 1973. This makes it the longest-running production of Parsifal on the Bayreuth programme following the world premiere of 1882, which ran until 1933. Wagner’s opera opened the first post-war festival on the 30th of July, 1951, the day after the former Bayreuthian Wilhelm Furtwängler had performed Beethoven's 9th Symphony.

REVIEWS:

Hans Knappertsbusch led Wagner’s Parisfal at the Bayreuth Festival in 1951 and 1952, and then annually from 1954 through 1964. For some reason his August 16, 1955 performance has never surfaced on CD until now, and it’s one of Kna’s stronger Parsifals.

Tempos are generally faster and more fluid than in the commercial 1951 recording. Compare the Act 1 Prelude’s Grail theme and the Transformation music, the Act 2 Flowermaiden’s scene, and the Act 3 Good Friday Spell in both recordings, and you’ll hear what I mean. Furthermore, Act 1’s recalcitrant bells had been replaced by 1955 with an electronic version that was reliable in intonation yet made less sonorous and majestic an impact.

One can argue that 1955’s cast is the most consistently satisfying out of all the Kna Bayreuth Parsifals, with no weak links. Ludwig Weber reprises his distinctive and lieder-like Gurnemanz from 1951. Hermann Uhde’s heavy voice is better suited to Titurel’s gravitas here than Klingsor’s malevolence in 1951. 1955 features Gustav Neidlinger’s Klingsor, which is as riveting a piece of vocal acting as his legendary Alberich in Das Rheingold.

Ramón Vinay sings rather than barks the title role, and the unforced lyricism of his top notes seems to spur on Martha Mödl to deliver her best all-around Act 2 Kundry. True, Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau’s Amfortas abounds with sibilantly snarling consonants, but he’s in fresher, more agile voice than in his 1972 studio Amfortas under Georg Solti.

-- ClassicsToday (Jed Distler)

Bruckner’s Fifth is eminently suited to an arrangement for performance on the organ above all because of its musical texture. In no other Bruckner symphony, for example, does counterpoint play such an important part. I am thinking in particular of the great fugue in the final movement. It really does seem as if many passages of this magnificent work were composed as if with the organ in mind, even though the Fifth is not a piece for organ at all, being in the first place a symphonic work. And yet it lends itself admirably to the extraction of a compositional substrate with no loss of essential content. That cannot be said of all Bruckner’s symphonies. Of all his symphonies, in my opinion, the Fifth, Eighth and Ninth are most amenable to an arrangement for organ. Building on the compositional core, it is the orchestral treatment above all that plays a key role. If this is lacking, an arrangement of the work can deprive the work of its grandeur. That is again at risk if one attempts to copy the orchestra or to transpose certain orchestral effects one-to-one onto the organ. Such an approach is generally unsatisfactory, because organ writing is governed by different rules than those applying to orchestral scoring. It would be fatal to make the organ rival the orchestra. My aim from the start was to avoid imitating the orchestra and to create a work specifically for organ in the manner of an organ symphony.

Mozart created 22 stage works in his lifetime. This 10 CD box comprises the world-famous ‘evergreens’ in historical recordings from Vienna 1955. Soloists are Christa Ludwig, Lisa Della Casa, Hilde Gülden, Alfred Poell, Cesare Siepi, Fernando Corena, Kurt Böhme and many more.

REVIEW:

Böhm's conducting creates a slim, fluid Mozart sound in which the dynamic pendulum could swing a little more impulsively here and there, but which still has an instinctive feel for theatrical and dramaturgical diction on the one hand and interaction with the singers on the other.​

-- Klassik.com

Essentially, in the incredible ease and naturalness of his pianism, in the unassuming simplicity and absorption of the man, Backhaus was much the same artist and personality then. And he was far from unknown. Even before he won the Rubinstein Prize in 1905, Backhaus was internationally celebrated as a prodigious virtuoso. Backhaus never failed to win a succès d'estime among professional musicians. They always knew his qualities, always marveled at his instrumental perfection, his titanic mastery that scorned every complexity, his unsurpassed freedom and endurance. There was never a time when Backhaus could not toss off any or all of the Chopin études or the Brahms-Paganini variations with an imperturbable calm, an implacable security that left one open-mouthed. Not everyone, for only the pianists really knew what was happening before their eyes and ears, knew how to measure such achievement. There they all sat, in breathless astonishment and envy and despair. Backhaus was a shy, unaffected, recessive personality whose sensational capacities were so unsensationally projected that lay audiences remained totally unconscious of his fabulous accomplishments. (Gerhard Melchert)

The Hungarian violinist Johanna Martzy was born in Temesvár, then in Hungary, today in Romania, on October 26, 1924, and was hailed as a wunderkind. At the age of seven, she became the last pupil to be taken under the wing of the great violin teacher Jenö Hubay, who had enabled artists like Joseph Szigeti and Sándor Végh to fly high. Ferenc Gabriel continued the girl's training after Hubay's death, helping her to win first prize at the Hubay Competition when she was seventeen. She took up studies at the Ferenc Liszt Music Academy in Budapest the following year and made her orchestral debut with the Tchaikovsky Concerto under the baton of Willem Mengelberg a year later. When Nazi Germany occupied Hungary in 1944, Johanna Martzy and her husband Béla Szillery fled via Austria and France to Switzerland. There she won the Concours International d'Exécution Musicale in Geneva in 1947, and her international career gradually gained momentum. She began making gramophone records in 1950; Ferenc Fricsay's recording of the Dvorák concerto for Deutsche Grammophon of 1953 is notable for its rousing intensity and still enjoys benchmark status. In 1954 and 1955 EMI's legendary record producer Walter Legge made the recording of Bach's Sonatas and Partitas for solo violin presented here.

In spite of a successful concert comeback in the 1960s, she was no longer in the top flight. It seems symbolical that it was in Budapest that she discovered she had hepatitis in 1969. Johanna Martzy steadily grew weaker and died in Switzerland on August 13, 1979, a year after the death of her husband. The present recordings remain a rare attestation of the brilliance of Johanna Martzy's playing, and it ensures her everlasting fame, at least among connoisseurs.

REVIEW:

The Hungarian violinist Johanna Martzy, who died in Zurich in 1979 at the age of only 54, experienced a short, steep international career at the beginning of the 1950s. She has remained an icon for insiders to this day and is considered the last great representative of the Hungarian violin school.

Profil has now refreshed the majority of their EMI recordings plus two Yellow Label concertos produced in 1952 and 1953 by Mozart (KV 218) under Jochum and the legendary Dvořák concerto under Fricsay and packed them into a 6-CD box set. The EMI bundle includes the two concertos by Brahms (1954) and Mendelssohn Bartholdy (1955) recorded with Paul Kletzki, which are still among the most expressive interpretations of the entire discography, as well as Schubert's (almost) complete works for violin and piano, and then also her legendary Abbey Road recordings of Bach's solo sonatas and partitas.

Martzy embodies the romantic Bach conception of the time, which aims for intensity, expressiveness, and flowing legato, and an aesthetic that wants to overwhelm the listener with beauty and dramatic stringency. At the same time, on her full-bodied, almost viola-like sonorous Bergonzi violin from 1733, she ignites such an inner fervor and draws such arcs of suspense that one cannot evade her infinitely spun, plastic lines. Every single tone is suggestively shaped and part of the flowing universe: drama and logic in one. And with the changing keys it also changes the respective basic color of its tone, i.e. from the darkened sonority of the D minor partita to the radiantly bright E major of the third partita. You can feel the objective and subjective power of this music at every moment: they are monologues of harrowing beauty.

Her interpretations of the concertos by Mozart, Mendelssohn Bartholdy, Brahms and Dvořák, glowing with intensity, shine as flawlessly clean, full-bodied and sonorous and at the same time as inwardly lively, as passionately urgent and lyrically shaped - she practices a kind of musical perfection that everyone Leaving virtuosity behind, proclaimed as a means to penetrate to the true inner, to the glowing human message, to enchant and shake us with pure, flowing heart energy. It's no wonder that Johanna Martzy enjoys iconic status in professional circles and that the few original LPs that have survived are sold at top prices.

-- Rondo (Germany, Attila Csampai)

Carl Meisl's play The Consecration of the House, to the music of Ludwig van Beethoven, was performed in Vienna on October 3, 1822 on the occasion of the reopening of the Theater in der Josefstadt. Its theme is the reawakening of art after times of crisis. Beethoven's music to August von Kotzebue's text The Ruins of Athens (1812) served as the basis for the work, and was adapted to Meisl’s text as well as expanded to include new music by the composer. Beethoven seems to have started composing for the upcoming performance only in September 1822, writing new music for those of Meisl’s texts for which nothing suitable could be found in The Ruins of Athens. The dance with chorus “Wo sich die Pulse jugendlich jagen” is listed separately as WoO (work without opus number) 98, as is the March, op. 114, which was reworked for the play. The overture achieved a high degree of popularity. Its prominent position as a separate opus (124) between the Missa solemnis and the Ninth Symphony reveals that Beethoven likely approved its use as a concert overture.

Bruckner's music embodies the visions of a devout, ordinary man. Parts of his expansive, shimmering musical landscapes are influenced by Wagner, but one can also detect Schubert, who began life in similar circumstances. The reposeful piety which runs through Bruckner's symphonic spectrum lends his music its unique power of attraction.

Recorded 1975-76.

For a long time Johannes Brahms was considered the epitome of conservatism, who, contrary to the disciples of Wagner and Liszt, fell back on old forms, which allegedly had no power anymore. Indeed, Brahms was an expert on music of the past, going back till the polyphonic composers of the 16th century. He made use of old patterns such as the variation and the interrelated passacaglia. He adopted the traditional four-movement symphony and its juxtaposition, respected the pattern of the sonata form and did hardly go beyond Beethoven when it came to instrumentation. However, the perception of Brahms as a “reactionary”, as it was initially argued by Nietzsche and later by the circle of Wagner and Richard Strauss, is unsustainable. No one less than Arnold Schoenberg has recognized the fundamentally different, which divided the composer Brahms, particularly as composer of symphonies, from the masters of the classical sonata and symphony in his famous paper “Brahms, der Fortschrittliche” (Brahms the Progressive)

Recorded 1974-75.

Friedrich Gulda was born in Vienna on May 16, 1930. He began his musical education at the Grossmann Conservatory and subsequently took private lessons from Felix Pazofsky. From 1942 to 1947 he studied piano at the Vienna Academy of Music under Bruno Seidlhofer and Music Theory and Composition under Joseph Marx. He gave his first public performance in 1944 and, two years later when just 16 years old, won the Geneva International Music Competition. Starting after the Second World War, as a 20-year-old, Gulda established himself as a piano soloist with an excellent international reputation and even performed at Carnegie Hall in New York City in 1950. In the 1950s he was celebrated and considered the leading interpreter of Beethoven in his generation. He founded his own Klassische Orchester Gulda for chamber music with members of the Vienna Symphony Orchestra.

In addition to Beethoven, Gulda’s repertoire encompasses works by Johann Sebastian Bach, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Franz Schubert, Frédéric Chopin, Claude Debussy, Maurice Ravel and Richard Strauss, whose Burleske in D minor and lieder are included in this release, with Gulda accompanying soprano Hilde Güden. Gulda was essentially an out-and-out contrarian who showed that a great genius can sometimes be only a step away from a certain madness. While Karl Böhm or Rubinstein admired him as a magnificently talented interpreter of Bach, Mozart and Beethoven, Gulda could also be provocative – including inciting his fellow concert pianists. Asked about Vladimir Horowitz, Gulda once responded: “Horowitz is a master. Because he is able to do – whatever he wants,” but also added: “But what he is after doesn’t interest me” (Joachim Kaiser).

REVIEW:
Friedrich Gulda (1930-2000) was certainly never a conformist pianist. But he was less flamboyant in his youth than in his later years, and he did present new perspectives at the beginning of his career, which helped to provoke a change in thinking. The recordings in this CD box set date from this period.

He recorded the freshly perky Mozart Sonata K. 576 in 1948, and both Concertos K. 503 and 537 in 1955 with the New Symphony Orchestra under Anthony Collins. Gulda’s fresh yet nuanced playing compensates for the weak orchestra’s playing. The Beethoven sonatas Nos. 4, 7, 8 and 19 show the still searching Gulda of 1955 on his way to the 1967 complete recording. The 3rd CD includes the concerto piece by Carl Maria von Weber and the Strauss Burlesque, as well as a set of Strauss songs that Gulda recorded with Hilde Güden in 1956. These are wonderful interpretations of rare freshness and suppleness. Güden’s silvery timbre and her confidently controlled, light vocal line coupled with Gulda’s spontaneous and sensitive playing make for an uncommonly natural performance.

Recorded in 1954, Chopin’s compositions, the 4 Ballades and the 1st Piano Concerto, are among Gulda’s ‘immortal’ recordings. In the 1st Piano Concerto, Gulda collaborates with the more traditional Adrian Boult, but it is precisely the contrast in temperament that leads to special tension and dynamics. This recording has been available several times on various labels, but here it definitely sounds in the best quality so far. Also very exciting are the four ballads, which he plays dramatically and narratively.

Debussy and Ravel, the composers represented on CDs Nos. 5 and 6 of this box, have been Gulda’s recurring preoccupation. The early recordings from 1953 and 1955 may not yet be as stylistically tested on the hard, sharp and pithy of jazz as the late recordings, but their analytically modern style, with clear, precise lines and contours and good transparency, shows the intellectual brilliance of these interpretations.

The bottom line is that this encounter with the young Gulda is a very important one that should help one understand the older musician and could help bring respect to Gulda among those who did not appreciate his later work as much.

-- Pizzicato

Christian Thielemann on Wagner’s Ring of the Nibelung “From 2006 to 2010, I spent some 300 hours in the orchestra pit in Bayreuth just on the Ring… Each year I looked forward to this task anew, and I am by no means of the opinion that I have completely finished with it. The Ring is so multifaceted musically that it can never exhaust one’s curiosity and one’s urge to explore further. In the Ring, the conductor feels like a battery that is permanently being recharged. That’s because of the contrasting worlds you move through for 15 whole hours, and the four highly different temperaments of the tetralogy. The orchestra is gigantic, with contrabassoon, bass tuba and eight horns – yet how nuanced and differentiated Wagner’s handling of this machine is!... As I see it, then, the Ring cuts a swathe through “the German sound”, it shows its extremes and its facets, from light and playful to heavy, serious and fraught with meaning. The German sound, Wagner teaches us, is never only the one thing and never just the other. Holländer, Tannhäuser, Lohengrin, Tristan, Meistersinger: when he comes to the Ring, Wagner starts again from scratch. In its compositional technique, in its treatment of the orchestra, in terms of its dimensions, harmonically, everything is different. When he composed the Ring, Wagner had no orchestra at his disposal to test whether what he imagined actually worked. Everything was playing out in his head. When he finally heard it in 1876, he did alter a thing or two – and would undoubtedly have liked to make even more alterations later. Not that I see any point in speculating about it. We have to address ourselves to the work as it is, and that task is hard enough.”