A Symphonic Journey from Philly to Utopia contains world premiere recordings of some of the works Dirk Brossé has written over the past 10 years. These works reflect the beauty of the world Brossé sees around him; they are a mirror to his soul. For these recordings, Brossé conducted Brussels Philharmonic. Dirk Brossé, an internationally acclaimed conductor and composer, is currently Music Director of The Chamber Orchestra of Philadelphia. He is also Professor of Composition and conducting at the Royal Conservatory of Music in Ghent, Belgium. A highly-regarded, award-winning composer, Brossé’s body of some 400 works encompasses concerti, oratorios, lieder, chamber music and symphonic pieces, as well as scores for cinema, television and stage, including the Emmy-nominated score for the BBC/HBO series, Parade’s End.

Still in his twenties, Pétur Sakari studied in his native Finland and in Paris and made his recording début at the age of 18. On his previous disc for BIS, he performed works by five French composers, receiving international acclaim with top marks in Diapason as well as on the Klassik-Heute website. For the present disc, Pétur has chosen to focus on César Franck, performing the composer’s Three Pieces and Three Chorales ‘pour grand orgue’ on an instrument perfectly suited to the repertoire. Completed in 1880, the great organ in the Sainte-Croix cathedral of Orléans is a major – and well-preserved – example of the art of Aristide Cavaillé-Coll, the same maker who had previously built Franck’s beloved organ in Sainte-Clotilde in Paris. (‘My new organ? It’s an orchestra!’ was Franck’s verdict.) Together the two gave the French organ tradition a new impetus with Franck laying the groundwork for a French symphonic organ style while Cavaillé-Coll constructed hundreds of organs capable of producing a sound that was full, homogeneous and modern. The Trois Pièces, which closes with the famous Pièce héroïque, were written for a Cavaillé-Coll instrument built for the 1878 World Fair in Paris. Twelve years later, and only weeks before his untimely death, Franck completed the Trois Chorals. The idea of writing organ chorales was inspired by Bach, but Franck composed them ‘with quite a different plan’: instead of traditional hymns they use an original, freely composed melody which is gradually revealed ‘with great imagination’, as Franck himself put it in a letter to his publisher. Both the Pieces and especially the Chorales have become central works in the repertoire of concert organists.

Classical Music

Featuring music created in the spur of the moment, straight from the heart, and inspired by a deep connection to New York life and scenery—this collection contains some of Gjeilo’s most soulful and passionate music; ranging from the introspective wistfulness of Dark Blue to the serene joyfulness of Snow in New York, and to fantasies around his own choral works.

Estonia provides both starting point and goal for this disc of sacred music for male choir, with a traditional hymn followed by works by composers such as Kreek, Eespere and Lemba, and the closing De profundis by Arvo Pärt. But in between, Orphei Drängar and their conductor Cecilia Rydinger Alin make a grand tour of Europe, taking in music by composers from the Nordic countries, France, Italy, Central Europe and the UK. Biblical Psalms have provided many of these with their texts, such as Milhaud (in French), Langlais (in English), Kreek (in Estonian) and Pärt (in Latin). Others - Lemba, Söderman, Sandström - have set portions of the text of the Catholic mass. Grieg and Biebl were both inspired by prayers in Latin, while Rossini chose to set one in Italian. For Nattlig madonna ('Nocturnal Madonna') the Finnish composer Nils-Eric Fougtstedt selected a poem depicting the Virgin Mary with her newborn child by his compatriot Edith Södergran, while Bob Chilcott has chosen one by the Guyanese-British poet John Aagard, whose version of John Newton's Amazing Grace gives the background to the conversion of this 18th-century slave-trader turned abolitionist. Throughout a programme ranging from Rossini's Preghiera from c. 1860 to Sven-David Sandström's Sanctus, composed for the choir in 2010, Orphei Drängar and Rydinger Alin once again demonstrate the versatility and exalted standards that habitually causes the choir to be described as the finest male-voice choir in the world.

This beautiful collection of Sufi music comes from Iran, Afghanistan, Turkey, Pakistan, and Egypt. This eclectic mix of songs consists of raw field recordings, and modern renditions of traditional songs, performed on both traditional and modern instruments. This devotional music is largely inspired by Sufi poets such as Rumi, Hafiz, Bulleh Shah, and Khwaja Ghulam Farid.

The success of Ottorino Respighi’s ‘Roman Trilogy’ brought the composer international fame as an outstanding orchestrator. One side effect of this are the orchestral transcriptions gathered on this album: all made in 1929-30 and commissioned by eminent conductors such as Arturo Toscanini and Serge Koussevitzky for their American orchestras.

Respighi’s wide-ranging musical tastes included an interest in early music which probably contributed to him taking on the task of transcribing organ works by Bach – or creating ‘orchestral interpretations’, as he himself called the results. Among the Bach works are the celebrated Passacaglia in C minor – which Stokowski had orchestrated just a few years earlier – as well as the Prelude and Fugue in D major. Both are given the full treatment by Respighi, with orchestral forces including strings, triple woodwind, bass clarinet, contrabassoon, four horns, three trumpets, three trombones, tuba, timpani and piano four hands for the Prelude and Fugue. The score for the Passacaglia asks for even greater forces (including an organ); Respighi compared Bach’s original to ‘a cathedral built exclusively of sound’ – a description equally valid for his own arrangement. The Passacaglia was a success for Toscanini in New York, possibly influencing Koussevitsky in Boston to place a commission of his own. For him and the Boston Symphony Orchestra Respighi transcribed five of Rachmaninov’s etudes-Tableaux for solo piano. Although these are programmatic pieces, their subject matter had not been disclosed in the editions for piano, but the Russian composer revealed his inspiration to Respighi in order to help him ‘find the appropriate colors’.

With the present album, l’Orchestre Philharmonique Royal de Liège and John Neschling bring us the fifth installment in a series that has been called ‘the finest-ever survey of the composer’s orchestral output undertaken by a single conductor’ (BBC Music Magazine).

REVIEW:

The alliance of John Neschling and BIS’s engineers has displayed Respighi’s genius for orchestration in all their previous albums together. This latest offering is no exception. I listened to the stereo layer of the SACD and was well impressed with the results. The sound has depth, body and presence and the engineers have conveyed an abundance of detail in a pleasingly natural way. The recorded sound shows the fine, alert playing of the Orchestre Philharmonique Royale de Liège to optimum advantage. The booklet essay by Jean-Pascal Vachon is very useful.

If anyone doubts Respighi’s flair and skill as an orchestrator, this SACD should still those doubts. It’s an entertaining disc in the best sense of the word and it’s a worthy addition to John Neschling’s Respighi series.

– MusicWeb International

An important centre for iron production in 17th-century Sweden, Leufsta Bruk came into the hands of the De Geers, a Dutch family, in the 1640s. In 1730 the young Charles De Geer inherited the estate and the ironworks, and it was here that he kept his extensive collection of sheet music, including many volumes imported from Amsterdam but also works by composers based in or visiting Sweden, such as Hinrich Philip Johnsen and Conrad Friedrich Hurlebusch. Charles played the cello and the harpsichord, and it is probable that much of the music in the Leufsta collection will have been performed by members of the De Geer family themselves. The collection, now housed in the library of the University of Uppsala, thus offers fascinating insights into domestic music-making in 18th-century Sweden. This is the third album to present music from the collection, and the first to focus on vocal music. It also features the famous organ in the church belonging to the estate, built in 1728 by Johan Niclas Cahman. Ranging from Swedish chorales to French opera, the varied selection is performed by soprano Elin Rombo and members of Rebaroque, one of the leading baroque ensembles in Sweden.

Running through this album is a path from despair and sin through revelation, repentance and belief, to life, triumph and finally love. The stations on the way are eight five-part fantasias for viols by Michael East (1580–1648), unusual in that each of them has a Latin title – from Desperavi to Amavi. In his time, East was one of England’s most published composers with seven books of his compositions in print, all of them containing music for viols and voices. The fantasias are here performed by the five members of Chelys Consort of Viols, who together with the singers in Fieri Consort have selected vocal items by East to complement each of the instrumental pieces. Regretting the lack of modern repertoire for this combination the performers have also commissioned a new piece by the composer Jill Jarman. Setting a verse by Sir Henry Wotton, a contemporary of East, Now are my thoughts at peace sums up the journey of the fantasias from Desperavi to Amavi, 400 years after they were written.

This new album by the great pianist and composer Alain Lefevre unveils the results of three years of hard work by Jacques Marchand, George Nicholson and Alain Lefevre aimed at restoring Andre Mathieu’s famous Concerto No. 3. Presented as a world premiere in February 2017 in Buffalo, where it was performed by Alain Lefevre and the Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra under the direction of the renowned JoAnn Falletta, the reconstituted Concerto No. 3 was enthusiastically received by the audience. Recorded at those performances, the album Andre Mathieu: Concerto No. 3 accurately conveys the brilliance of Alain Lefevre and the enthusiasm of the musicians, aware as they were of sharing a highly emotional and one-of-a-kind moment. JoAnn Falletta had previously collaborated with Alain Lefevre in presenting works by Mathieu – in New York’s Carnegie Hall in 2013, among other settings. It was in the fall of 1942, 75 years ago, that young Quebec prodigy Andre Mathieu, just 13 years old and at the peak of his glory, began writing his Concerto No. 3, which he would finish the following summer. In 2008, George Nicholson discovered the original score of Andre Mathieu’s Concerto No. 3 written in the Quebec composer’s own hand. The differences, which were noteworthy, between this original score and the Concerto de Quebec, the well-known, modified, version of the work, were the starting point for an enormous undertaking aimed at restoring this masterwork of Mathieu’s. The new album also contains George Gershwin’s An American in Paris. Commissioned by the New York Philharmonic and premiered in 1928, the work translates into music the vivid impressions of an American visiting Paris, strolling the city streets and soaking up the exuberant atmosphere of the French capital.

-----

REVIEW:

After languishing unnoticed for several decades, in 2008 the original autograph score for two pianos of Andre Mathieu's Concerto No. 3 was discovered in Ottawa. Since then, composer and conductor Jacques Marchand has prepared a critical edition that is faithful to the original manuscript. This is its first full recording. It has all the sweeping gestures of its period and a devilishly difficult piano part. Lefèvre’s performance at the keyboard is masterful. He and the BPO perform the work with astonishing authenticity, restoring a fascinating chapter to Canadian music history of that period.

– The Whole Note (Canada)

From the moment Karen Gomyo first heard Astor Piazzolla on album, at the age of fourteen, she was spellbound: ‘I had never heard such a combination of sensuality, fierceness, playfulness, sadness and nostalgia.’ As a violinist she found the role of the violin in Piazzolla’s music especially inspiring, and soon started playing it herself – first in various group combinations, and eventually together with Piazzolla’s longtime pianist Pablo Ziegler and his Tango Quartet. For the present disc she has chosen to record strings-only versions of three works originally for tango quintet (Seasons), guitar and flute (Histoire), and solo flute (Études). Piazzolla’s Cuatro Estaciones were initially conceived neither as a suite nor as a tribute to Vivaldi’s Four Seasons. Verano porteño (Summer) was composed first, as part of the incidental music for a play, with the other three following several years later. If the Seasons provide a soundtrack to the year as it unfolds in Buenos Aires, Histoire du Tango describes the development of the tango itself in four chapters – from the brothels around year 1900 to the concert halls where Piazzolla himself performed his tango nuevo. These two works frame three of Piazzolla’s Tango Études, which Karen Gomyo performs solo, while otherwise being partnered by the strings of the Orchestre National des Pays de la Loire (Seasons) and the guitarist Stephanie Jones (Histoire).

Begun in 2012 with the release of Symphony No. 1, Thomas Dausgaard’s four-album traversal of the symphonies of Johannes Brahms is here brought to a close with the composer’s final work in the genre. The E minor Symphony is sometimes described as Brahms’ ‘elegiac symphony’, and has been called ‘one of the greatest orchestral works since Beethoven’. Typical for the composer is the striking degree of motivic relationships throughout the work. This includes the finale in which Brahms demonstrates his full mastery in a towering Passacaglia consisting of 30 variations and a coda. The smallish forces of the Swedish Chamber Orchestra contribute to a transparency and clarity which bring out the finer details of Brahms’ compositional web. As on previous installments, the symphony is coupled with other works by Brahms. Included on the present release is another late work, Tragic Overture, which concludes the programme. These two ‘serious’ works frame some of the most rousing and ebullient music Brahms ever wrote, namely his Hungarian Dances. Composed for piano four-hands, the 21 dances became immensely popular, and Brahms arranged three of them for orchestra himself. Having made his own orchestrations of the remaining 18 dances, Thomas Dausgaard has recorded the full set for his Brahms cycle, with the final nine dances included here.

On this transatlantic album, three American composers born during the first half of the last century rub shoulders with two young musicians from Eastern Europe. A member of the BBC New Generation Artists scheme, the violinist Aleksey Semenenko first met the pianist Artem Belogurov at the Stolyarsky Special Music School in Odessa at an early age. Even if their individual careers have taken to different parts of the world, the two still perform together whenever possible, and here they present three sonatas. Of the composers, the best-known is André Previn who composed his Violin Sonata No. 2 in 2011 for Anne-Sophie Mutter. An improvisatory spirit permeates the work which is in three movements with the markings Joyous, Desolate and Brilliant. Tony Schemmer and Paul Gay are both based in the Boston area and share a background in which jazz and classical genres merge. This is reflected in their sonatas, composed in the 1980s and here appearing on disc for the first time.

REVIEWS:

My tastes in repertoire generally stop with the mid-20th century and I don’t take an active interest in contemporary work. Perhaps that very fact indicates why I responded so favorably to Crossroads: American Violin Sonatas, for here are three composers—two of them still living—who continue the craftsmanship, seriousness of purpose, and tonal communicativeness of the best mid-20th-century American music. These sonatas offer no Postmodern spoofery, nor avant-garde aural assaults. All three composers deftly mix popular elements with their classical technique yet in a way that is integral and natural.

The performances of the Ukrainian musicians are faultless and idiomatic, as is the recorded sound. This delightful disc afforded some new discoveries for me and comes strongly recommended.

-- Fanfare

Semenenko and his duo partner present premiere recordings of jazz-influenced sonatas written in the 1980s. The Schemmer is a particularly joyful discovery.

-- BBC Music Magazine

For this new album, Philippe Sly and the Chimera Project revisit Schubert's ultimate masterpiece, Winterreise, and offer a captivating version of the story of a wanderer who embarks on a journey through a winter landscape. From Schubert's score, only the vocal part remains intact and bass-baritone Philippe Sly's reading of it is touching and impressive. The piano part is replaced by the Chimera Project, an ensemble that comprises of trombone, violin, accordion, clarinet and a hurdy-gurdy. This delightful instrumentation brings this great work into musical territories that are both familiar and foreign. The result is an exceptional album. French-Canadian bass-baritone Philippe Sly is already gaining international notoriety for his "beautiful, blooming tone and magnetic stage presence" (San Francisco Chronicle). Mr. Sly is the first prize winner of the prestigious Concours Musical International de Montr�al and a grand prize winner Metropolitan Opera National Council Auditions singing the varied repertoire of Mozart, Bach, Handel, Stravinsky and Wagner. Recently, he was awarded Concert of the Year in Romantic, Post-Romantic and Impressionist Music at the 16th annual ceremony of the Prix Opus in Qu�bec.

Mozart's string quintets, and particularly the last four (K 515, K 516, K 593 and K 614) are often cited as being among the finest examples of his chamber music. The musicologist Charles Rosen has drawn attention to the fact that the quintets always appeared shortly after the completion of a series of quartets, as if the medium represented a more ideal and final realisation of the composer’s musical thoughts. It is not, however, a question of quartets with a fifth, ‘extra’ part. Even the early K174 possesses a striking complexity, and as a group the quintets employ a great variety of textures: dialogues between two instruments with three-part accompaniment from the others, the alternation of two string trios (two violins and viola or two violas and cello), or violin duets, alongside viola duets, accompanied by the cello. The performances of these intricate masterworks by the Orlando Quartet and Nobuko Imai, have been highly regarded ever since their original releases and were for instance described as 'magisterial and gripping' on AllMusic.com. They now appear in this box set, accompanied by a fourth disc which brings together three further Mozart quintets for varying constellations: the charming Horn Quintet from 1782, the extraordinary Clarinet Quintet from seven years later and the Quintet for piano and winds which Mozart in a letter to his father in 1784 described as 'the best thing I have written so far'. Performing these works here are eminent musicians including Radovan Vlatkovic, Martin Fröst and Stephen Hough.

The Finnish-American composer Alex Freeman has been described as being ‘as comfortable in the realm of the pop ballad as in that of the concert hall’ and yet his songs ‘are imbued with the craftsmanship and care one would expect of a composer of his formidable academic training, just as his concert works carry the emotional immediacy of popular music.’ Himself a choral singer, Alex Freeman has written a number of works for choir: music that aims to be sonorous and melodic, but is carefully crafted to avoid the clichés that can burden conventional tonality. Freeman’s requiem Under the arching heavens was commissioned by Nils Schweckendiek and the Helsinki Chamber Choir to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the 1918 Finnish civil war. The work incorporates poems in Finnish, Swedish and English, reflecting both the specific reason for the commission and the universality of human suffering caused by war. In the non-liturgical texts chosen by Freeman, birds are a recurring image, as is that of a mother and child. The work ends with lines by Walt Whitman from a poem written in the aftermath of the American Civil War. Also included on the album is A Wilderness of Sea, another recent choral piece which draws on works by Shakespeare, and the poet’s images of the sea, and of mankind’s relationship with it.

For his new recital disc, the acclaimed Finnish guitarist Ismo Eskelinen had the aim of creating a programme that works like a story: ‘a modern guitar album that lends itself to continuous listening from beginning to end’. The pieces that he has selected are united by the fact that, with the exception of Tan Dun, Eskelinen has collaborated closely with all the composers. In the liner notes to the album he expresses his admiration for how intuitively they all understood the essence of the guitar, even though none of them is a guitarist. ‘Everyone has found a unique way to bring his own musical style to the guitar, and each of the composers is clearly recognizable.’ Opening the album are Kromos by Sebastian Fagerlund and Solo XI by Kalevi Aho, two pieces that in technical terms come close to the limits of what is possible on the guitar, but with a completely convincing musical logic. Olli Mustonen’s Sonata No. 2 contains drama but also lyricism, qualities which are emphasized in Tan Dun’s multi-movement collage Seven Desires with inspiration from the different traditions and characteristics of Spain’s flamenco guitar and China’s pipa (lute). Jukka Tiensuu is among the pioneers of modern Finnish guitar music and wrote his first work for the instrument as early as 1974. His Daydreams from 2016 is composed for guitar and electronics, but the sound world is strongly guitaristic, as the electronic part is modified from fragments played by Eskelinen on the guitar. Sometimes the use of electronics produces echo effects alongside the live guitar, and sometimes the sound image expands into that of a guitar trio. The very brief closing number is an arrangement, by Eskelinen himself, of Timo Alakotila’s calm and soothing Psalm.

The Beethoven year is about to begin and the first contributions by various artists to the anniversary are already being published The focus will be on the evergreens that will attract the attention of the public As a versatile and extremely productive artist, Beethoven has also created a number of works that are virtually unknown today This extensive 9 album edition is dedicated exactly to these works and its tracklisting reads like a sparkling treasure chest Rarely heard arias in various languages, Contredanses, minuets, Ländlers the Piano Concerto No 0 music for a knight's ballet, fun loving and sometimes not entirely youth free canons Over 10 ½ hours full of works by Ludwig van Beethoven, which were written throughout his life and cast a new, unusual glance on his musical oeuvre and his perhaps sometimes not so serious character.

Fikret Amirov is one of Azerbaijan’s best-known 20th-century composers in the classical tradition, and the inventor of the ‘symphonic mugam’ based on traditional folk melodies (as can be heard on Naxos 8.572170). Symphony ‘To the Memory of Nizami’ reflects the character of the celebrated and influential Muslim poet and philosopher Nizami, who was born in the ancient city of Ganga in Azerbaijan. Amirov’s skill in evoking fantastic worlds is heard in a suite derived from the ballet One Thousand and One Nights, in which this famous narrative about the seductive and perilous Orient resolves from a cinematic chase into a memorable love scene and final triumphant celebrations. GRAMMY Award-nominated cellist/conductor Dmitry Yablonsky has made numerous highly successful recordings for Naxos, and his connection with Azerbaijani music reinforced with releases such as Piano Concertos (8.572666) that are ‘Romantic treasures that reward repeated listening’. (MusicWeb International)

VIVALDI L’Incoronazione di Dario , RV 719: Sinfonia; Ferri, ceppi, sangue, morte; Sentiro fra ramo. Arsilda, RV 700: Io sento in questo seno. Motezuma, RV 723: Quel rossor, ch’in volto miri; In mezzo alla procella. Violin Concertos: in D, RV 208, “Grosso Mogul”; in B?, RV 367; in C, RV 191 • Adrian Chandler (vn, cond); Sally Bruce-Payne (mez); La Serenissima (period instruments) • AVIE 2287 (76:16 Text and Translation)


Avie’s release of a program of Vivaldi’s music bears the subtitle “A Tale of Two Seasons,” with the two seasons represented by concertos and arias from 1717 and 1733. Adrian Chandler’s thorough and perceptive booklet notes give an account of the music, the culture that gave rise to it, and the changes the intervening 16 years wrought on Vivaldi’s style in both opera and concerto.


The program opens with the brief Sinfonia from L’Incoronazione di Dario , with the first movement exuding the ensemble’s crisp energy, the second comprising a flowing Andante , and the third, Presto , exhibiting chunky élan in this reading (Chandler notes that the designation refers to the movement’s “verve” rather than its speed). For the program, Chandler and the ensemble have adopted A = 440, representing then Venice’s higher pitch.


Chandler notes that Vivaldi’s arias from the early years don’t usually last as long as those from his later periods. Accordingly, the three from the 1717 portion of the program occupy only about 12 minutes in total. Sally Bruce-Payne appears as the mellifluous but dramatic soloist in the two arias from L’Incoronazione di Dario , (the vigorous Ferri, ceppi, sangue, morte and Sentiro fra ramo , the latter featuring dialogues with a solo violin and with strings), sandwiching in between the alternately flowing (voice) and agitated (orchestra) aria Io sento in questo seno from Arsilda.


The first “season” closes with the familiar Concerto, “Grosso Mogul,” which Chandler suggests had been written for performance during an opera on the subject of India’s Mogul. Chandler, playing a violin made in 1981, “after Amati,” by Rowland Ross, brings a flash of virtuosity to the solo part—especially the stunning extended cadenzas of the first and third movements, which he adapted mostly from a German source—in his view the unadulterated form of the work—as well as from Vivaldi’s manuscript.


To open the second “season,” Chandler plays a Violin Concerto (RV 367) that he identifies as a theatrical work written in the 1730s (and gives his reasons for believing so, in view of the general difficulty of dating Vivaldi’s concertos). Chandler also notes that by the 1730s, Vivaldi gave greater prominence to the solos, reducing the length of the ritornellos. In the first movement of RV 367, Chandler takes advantage not only of the flowing melody of the tuttis, but also of some dialogue between the upper parts and the bass as well.


The arias—for this season, “Quel rossor, ch’in volto miri” and the exciting and considerably more agitated “In mezzo alla procella,” making reference to a storm at sea, with both calling forth thrillingly dramatic readings from Sally Bruce-Payne—come from Motezuma , written, according to Chandler, for Angiola Zanucchi in the role of Ramiro, brother of Fernando, general of the Spanish army.


The Violin Concerto, RV 191, brings the program to a close. Similarities exist between this work and the Concerto, RV 367—a sort of melodiousness coupled with high-octane virtuosity, and Chandler effectively combines these manners. He notes that Vivaldi by this time had expanded his repertoire of bowings, and these surpass in their variety those found in more familiar works, like those in op. 8 from 1725. The Finale displays a wider range of rhythmic motives than many listeners may associate with Vivaldi, which also provides a strong contrast with his earlier works. Giuliano Carmignola and Andrea Marcon included this Concerto in a collection of Vivaldi’s late concertos with the Venice Baroque Orchestra (Sony 89362, Fanfare 25:2). Both ensembles play with electrifying crisp energy, but Chandler brings out the passagework’s lyricism; Carmignola, hissing and spitting, trains a laser to reflect its diamond-like brilliance.


La Serenissima gives in this program a fuller representation of Vivaldi as a musician and composer than could any that focused exclusively on his vocal or instrumental works. It should appeal to specialists and, because of its combination of breadth and focus, also to more general listeners. Very strongly recommended to all sorts of collectors.


FANFARE: Robert Maxham

The provocative and beguiling Left Coast Chamber Ensemble (LCCE) comprises the crème de la crème of the San Francisco Bay Area’s musicians. Their motto: nothing is out of bounds, and anything is possible. Presenters of all types of music including small ensemble, vocal, orchestral, multi-media and operatic, a select group comes together for this recording of Olivier Messiaen’s seminal chamber work, Quartet for the End of Time. Written during the composer’s confinement in World War II, he maintained hope, expressing, “The abyss is Time with its sadness, its weariness. The birds are the opposite … our desire for light, for stars, for rainbows, and for jubilant songs.” LCCE co-founder and prize-winning composer Kurt Rohde echoes this sentiment in his Messiaen-inspired one wing for violin and piano, heard here in its world-premiere recording.

REVIEW:

I’ve gone from having two or three recordings of this eerie but emotionally powerful work, one of them being Tashi’s, to just having one, and that is the EMI recording made under the composer’s own supervision and featuring his wife, Yvonne Loriod, as the pianist. (Interestingly, Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau’s son Manuel is the cellist in this performance.) But after listening to the Left Coast Ensemble’s new recording, I’m tempted to add it to my collection.

Their performance is a bit brisker and tauter than either Tashi’s or Messiaen’s but not lacking in emotional intensity. Although I felt that the Left Coast Ensemble’s more linear approach gave a more “streamlined” profile to the music, this is sometimes to its favor as it brings out the structure of the work better. And as I say, the individual members of this quartet clearly get the music’s message. Indeed, I found clarinetist Jerome Simas’ long solo in the third section (“The Abyss of the Birds”) to be as forlorn as that of Wolfgang Meyer on the Messiaen-Loriod recording, and better than that of Stoltzman with Tashi.

– Art Music Lounge

Christopher Tyler Nickel’s contemporary classical compositions pack a bracing and emotional punch. His award-winning works for the concert hall, stage and screen have been heard in over 160 countries by audiences in the tens of thousands. His experience as an oboist instills a confidence to compose with an exhilarating freedom to explore the vast expressive range of the instrument, from lyrical and plaintive to acerbic and brittle. The world-premiere recordings of these three concertos for oboe and its lower-pitched siblings the oboe d’amore and bass oboe receive dazzling performances by Mary Lynch, principal oboe of the Seattle Symphony, and Harrison Linsey, oboist with the Washington D.C.-based National Symphony Orchestra. Grammy Award-winning David Sabee, a tireless advocate of contemporary classical music, conducts the Seattle-based Northwest Sinfonia.

At first glance, the musical worlds of Frédéric Chopin and William Bolcom would seem strange bedfellows. But on his solo debut recording, Israeli American pianist Ran Dank makes a convincing case for pairing the two composers. The former, Poland’s national composer, is synonymous with pianistic panache. The latter, a leading American, possesses one of contemporary music’s most bold and inventive voices. Juxtaposing the works of these two pianist-composers reveals their common affinity for the keyboard and ear for sound and sense of structure. William Bolcom’s Twelve New Etudes won the Pulitzer Prize in 1988. Wonderfully eclectic, they move effortlessly between one musical idiom to another with endless ingenuity, exhibiting all the traits of Bolcom’s compositional craft. Chopin equally excelled with his Etudes, but Dank turns to his plentiful Polonaises, Mazurkas and Waltzes which range in style from heroic, to dark and brooding, haunting and beautiful. Ran Dank, a Van Cliburn International Competition finalist and winner of the New York-based Young Concert Artists auditions, has been significantly influenced by these two composers who have shaped his trajectory as a pianist and musician. As a child to two parents from Poland, Chopin played a meaningful part in his upbringing, and he became mesmerized by the composer’s music at an early age. Bolcom’s music was a much later discovery, but one that has become equally valuable and fitting, following Dank’s move to America.

Vast, deep and emotional are apt descriptions of the single-movement, 53-minute-long Symphony No. 2 by Christopher Tyler Nickel. The award-winning Canadian composer elaborates, “One can think of this music as consisting of mirrors between ideas that equally disturb yet entice. Each side of the reflection is in itself conceivably valid, but when facing each other friction and dissonance are created. The exquisitely alluring and the grotesque exist simultaneously. Perhaps another way to understand the symphony is as a meditation on the state of cognitive dissonance.” The entrepreneurial Clyde Mitchell conducts the Seattle-based Northwest Sinfonia on this world-premiere recording.

One of JS Bach’s most famous and loved masterpieces with the Portland Baroque Orchestra conducted by Monica Huggett. The double-CD package includes full texts and translations. (Avie)