Jazz
Andy Martin
96 products
Violette: Pistis Sophias - Flute Sonata - Trio for Horn, Ba
Dances To A Black Pipe / Martin Frost
COPLAND; BRAHMS; FROST; LUTOSLAWSKI; PIAZZOLLA; HILLBORG; HOGBERG AUSTRALIAN CHAMBER ORCHESTRA; FROST (CLAR.); TOGNETTI (DIR.) DANCES TO A BLACK PIPE- CONCERTO FOR CLARINET AND STRING ORCHESTRA WITH HARP AND PIANO; HUNGARIAN DANCES NOS 1, 12, 13 & 21; KLEZMER DANCES FOR CLARINET AND STRINGS; DANCE PRELUDES (2ND VERSION); OBLIVION FOR CLARINET, SOLO VIOLIN AND STRINGS; ETC.
Fröst & Friends: Martin Fröst Plays Encores
A calendar filled with orchestral concerts and chamber recitals in many of the world’s most prestigious venues has given the clarinettist Martin Fröst ample opportunity to develop a wide range of encores, for every occasion. Known for the imaginatively themed concert programmes he devises with various musician friends, he has also explored a number of musical genres. These aspects of his artistry are both demonstrated on this constantly engaging disc, which includes immortal gems such as Rachmaninov’s Vocalise and Kreisler’s Liebeslied as well as pieces rather less usual in a classical context: Charlie Chaplin’s Smile and the klezmer traditional Let’s Be Happy rubbing shoulders with an improvisation over the Nat King Cole standard Nature Boy. Throughout the programme Fröst receives the expert support of the pianist Roland Pöntinen, a chamber music partner of long standing who has also been involved in devising many of the imaginative arrangements, for instance of Vittorio Monti’s Csárdás. Three other musical companions of Fröst’s make cameo appearances, with mezzo-soprano Malena Ernman joining the clarinet in the head-long flight of not one, but two bumble-bees. Torleif Thedéen’s cello sings a heartfelt Ave Maria above the gyrating accompaniment of Fröst’s clarinet, while Svante Henryson, also a cellist, plays in his own duo piece Off Pist, in which the clarinet and cello chase each other up and down alpine slopes. Martin Fröst’s spectacular career on disc began in 1995, with one of his first CD reviews, in In Tune Magazine, describing him as ‘A Swedish Clarinet Star’, and continuing ‘Fröst has everything – including genius’. More than 10 discs later his recording of Bernard Crusell’s three clarinet concertos caused the reviewer in French Classica-Répertoire to remark that ‘in every movement his playing hits upon the appropriate elegance, the perfect phrasing, the true colour, the required virtuosity, the necessary playfulness ... as he pursues his musical intentions all the way’ – a description that could equally well be applied to the present disc!.
Nielsen, Aho: Clarinet Concertos / Frost, Vanska, Lahti SO

At last, a modern Nielsen to lead the field - and a future classic?
There are eight or so modern accounts of the Nielsen Clarinet Concerto in the catalogue, plus a few no less impressive that have come and gone. Most have fine qualities. Yet for sureness of idiomatic touch none dislodges Ib Erikson’s classic 1954 Danish accounts.
Closer to the mark than any modern rivals is this new issue from Martin Fröst, the clarinettist of the moment for all-round artistry allied to adventurous approach to repertoire. He seems to have Nielsen’s irascible masterpiece in his bloodstream, as surely as he has its technical contortions under his fingers. Vänskä ensures that the Lahti players are never fazed by the exposed edges in the accompaniment, and only the very drawn-out final bars come across as slightly self-conscious. Detail for detail, phrase for phrase, I would have to give this team the palm over the old Danish recording, even before considering BIS’s immeasurably superior sound quality. Even so, Erikson and Wöldike remain a benchmark for insight into the character of the piece.
Kalevi Aho’s Concerto starts arrestingly but without a trace of the attention-seeking that afflicts certain other clarinet concertos of recent times. There is something in Aho’s five continuous movements that recalls Nielsen’s directness and free-flowing succession of ideas, and the cadenza that forms the second movement even brings momentary echoes of Nielsen’s uncompromising skirls and flourishes. But the Finn’s sights are set more on the starkly elemental than on the quirkily personal. For Aho the Vivace con brio third movement is the “centre and culmination”, and it is certainly exuberant – dangerous, even – in its restless virtuosity, rather like Strauss’s Till Eulenspiegel driven mad by inner demons. After this a sad slow movement brings sober reflection, and an Epilogue concludes the work on a note of mystery.
Few would now question the status of the Nielsen as the finest clarinet concerto of the 20th century. Time will tell with Kalevi Aho’s concerto in the 21st. In the short term it will probably daunt as many prospective soloists and orchestras as Nielsen’s work did in its time. But there can have been few equally impressive head-on engagements with the concerto medium in recent years. In sum, a CD of rare distinction.
-- David Fanning, Gramophone [5/2007]
Handel: Twelve Grand Concertos - Concerti Grossi / Gester, Arte Dei Suonatori
This is a hybrid Super Audio CD playable on both regular and Super Audio CD players.
Robert Schumann: Works For Clarinet & Piano
Music From The Time Of Tillman Riemenschneider
Includes work(s) by various composers. Ensemble: Hedos Ensemble. Conductor: Bernhard Böhm.
Dvorak: Rusalka / Hickox, Barker, Owens, Martin, Et Al

Mackerras unseated? This magical version from Australia comes close
Chandos certainly has guts, going toe-to-toe with Mackerras’s Gramophone Award-winning set. Hickox’s Australian forces need not fear the comparison. Cheryl Barker may not have the refulgent tones of Renée Fleming on Decca (who has?) but she is even more moving in conveying Rusalka’s desperation. Mackerras is still my must-own, but this runs it close.
-- Gramophone [3/2008]
CHRISTMAS PIANO
Merk: 20 Etudes for cello solo, Op. 11 (ed. M. Rummel)
Nielsen, Ibert & Arnold: Flute Concertos / Andrada, Martin, Frankfurt Radio Symphony
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REVIEW:
Competition abounds in Nielsen’s Flute Concerto of 1926 but Andrada is totally inside the unsettled, quixotic nature of the music and communicates lyrical passages with ardent conviction. Jaime Martín, himself a distinguished flautist, provides lithe and vibrant accompaniment in both the Nielsen and Ibert concertos, while Andrada herself directs the strings with impressive authority in the Arnold concerto. The quality of the recording in all three works is as bright and vivid as the performances.
– Gramophone
Godin: La Fresque
Voces Sacrae: Even Such is Time (Recent British Choral Music
Mozart Contemporaries: 18th Century Music For Bassoon / Carmen Mainer Martin
The starting-point for this unique recital is a true Mozart rarity, the Sonata for bassoon and cello K292 which Mozart wrote in 1775, pairing the bass members of string and wind families not to comic effect but rather demonstrating their expressive versatility and contrasting tone-colors, in the hands of sufficiently practiced performers; the Sonata is accessible by only the most skilled amateur performers such as its original dedicatee, the nobleman, pianist and occasional bassoonist Thaddaus Wolfgang von Dürnitz. The count’s considerable musical gifts may be judged from the teenaged Mozart’s dedication of the Piano Sonata K284 in the same year: one of the composer’s first works of absolute genius, notably in the extraordinary landscape of its long theme-and-variation finale. The bassoon-and-cello sonata may not rival K284 for lightly worn profundity, but in its Andante we may still hear the teenaged composer attaining an idiom of sublime gravity which anticipates masterpieces such as the Sinfonia Concertante K364. Rarer still on album is the creative output of Dürnitz himself, represented here by four sonatas for bassoon and keyboard from a collection of six. He evidently cultivated a particular facility at the top of the intrument’s range, notably in the elegiac introduction to Sonata No.3. Dürnitz was no dilettante musician, to judge from his ready assimilation of Classical-era convention and the kind of virtuoso writing in the quick movements that challenges conceptions of the bassoon as a sturdy accompaniment to more agile musical companions. Between these two composers in the register of fame falls the French composer Francois Devienne, four years younger than Mozart and author of six Duos Concertants Op.3 for two bassoons in around 1782; Carmen Mainer Martin presents two of them here, with the second part arranged for cello in the same disposition as Mozart’s sonata.
P'ra Voce / Lojendio, Martin
“I compose music because I love it. I love melodies, I love singing. And I have found out with pleasure that there is a public out there who is very interested in my music whenever I publish it. That’s fantastic! I refuse to just compose music designed to be discovered and understood by future generations.” With these words Carlos Guastavino (Santa Fe, 1912 - Buenos Aires, 2000) expressed himself, aware that his art belonged to those who wanted to hear and sing it, reneging on the customary exercise of the composer who seeks to be recognized by the umpteenth harmonic discovery never before tried out. Guastavino enriched the young voice of the Argentine people with his music, giving it a unique and identifiable tone, supporting the tip of his feet in a folklore to which he gave wings to surpass himself. “Cinco canciones argentinas” (Five Argentinean songs), Op. 10. This work exemplarily shows the most characteristic features of what has come to be known as Ginastera’s period of objective nationalism. Namely, the use of folkloric elements and tonal techniques together with other techniques which are typical of atonalism, especially in piano accompaniment.
FLUR
STROME
GRETRY: RAOUL BARBE-BLEUE
STROME
FLUR
JOHANN NEPOMUK HUMMEL 1778-1837 'COLLECTION'
ETOILEE
VIRTUOSO TRUMPET
WHEN I WAS LONG AGO
