Saint-Saëns composed many original works for the violin. He also took the art of arrangement to new heights of refinement, believing his transcriptions were independent of their models, following the precedent of composers such as Liszt. This album presents early or alternative duo versions of some of Saint-Saëns’s most popular works, in which the declamatory style of the originals – such as the ever-popular Danse macabre or the habanera-infused Havanaise–is made more intimate and subtle. Composed for the exclusive use of Queen Elisabeth of Belgium in 1918, the Airde Dalila here receives its world premiere recording.

A delightfully colorful introduction to classical music, aimed to fire the imagination of young children aged 5-7 years! Readers are asked to think about the different places in which we might hear music, whether it is in a concert hall, or just on television. They are then introduced to a selection of famous composers including Mozart and Beethoven, and learn about each of the musical instrument families, from woodwind to percussion. Throughout the book children are referred to the accompanying CD so that they can hear examples as they read. Music on the CD includes The Magic Flute (Mozart), Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone (Williams), Carnival of the Animals (Saint-Saëns), The Planets (Holst), Petrushka (Stravinsky) and Peter and the Wolf (Prokofiev).

Awarded the title Young Steinway Artist in 2020, the Bulgarian pianist Marina Staneva received the 2019 Sam Hutchings Piano Prize and was a 2018 Britten-Pears Young Artist. She has been praised for her serious talent, outstanding musicianship, extraordinary instinctive artistry, and fine technical command. For this her début recording, she presents works by two contrasting Bulgarian composers.

Pancho Vladigerov was arguably the most influential Bulgarian composer of all time. He was one of the first successfully to combine idioms of Bulgarian folk music and classical music. He was also among the founding members of the Bulgarian Contemporary Music Society (1933), which later became the Union of Bulgarian Composers. The British-Bulgarian composer Dobrinka Tabakova studied composition under Simon Bainbridge, Diana Burrell, Robert Keeley, and Andrew Schultz. Her composition Praise was sung at St Paul's Cathedral to celebrate the Golden Jubilee of Queen Elizabeth II, and she has received commissions from the Royal Philharmonic Society, BBC Radio 3, Cheltenham Music Festival, Britten Sinfonia, Three Choirs Festival, Wigmore Hall, and, in 2014, the PRS Foundation's first UK New Music Biennial.

Similar to the outstanding recording of the Christmas Oratorio, this recording of the St. Matthew Passion, made in 1975, brings together a Who's Who of the Saxon music scene. In a unique collaboration of the Mauersberger brothers, who were at the same time the cantors of the Dresden Kreuzchor and the Thomanerchor Leipzig, they unite the two choirs rich in tradition with the great soloists of their time: from Adele Stolte and Annelies Burmeister to Theo Adam and Peter Schreier. Thomanerchor Leipzig boasts a tradition of more than 800 years in music and city history, a widely acknowledged contemporary reputation, and almost one hundred boys and young men with individual personalities and a common passion for music, framed by a unique future-oriented cultural and educational landscape. The Dresdner Kreuzchor is the boys' choir of the Kreuzkirche in Dresden, Germany. It has a seven-century history and a world-wide reputation. Today, the choir has about 150 members between the ages of 9 and 19, from Dresden and the surrounding region. The boys attend the Kreuzschule in Dresden. They are also called "Kruzianer".

Alberto Hemsi was born in 1898 in Turgutlu (also known as Cassaba), in Anatolia (present-day Turkey). Although there had been a Jewish presence in Anatolia for more than 2000 years, the population expanded considerably following the Alhambra Decree of 1492, with the arrival of Sephardim from Spain and Portugal. It then dwindled precipitously with the disintegration of the Ottoman Empire, the rise of Nazism, the creation of the state of Israel, and the escalation of anti-Semitism in the Arab world. Having completed his training at the conservatory in Milan, Hemsi returned to Anatolia determined to collect and notate as much traditional Sephardic music as he possibly could.

A fascination with national folk music had taken root throughout Europe – Bartók and Kodály in Hungary, Dvorák and Smetana in Bohemia, and Vaughan Williams and Gustav Holst in England being the most familiar examples. Because his research was not defined by political or geographical boundaries, Hemsi was compelled to survey the myriad communities spread throughout the vast Sephardic diaspora. He was as fascinated by this musical heritage as he was concerned about its survival but, like so many composers, he also understood how traditional melodies, together with the various performance styles and conventions that supported them, could provide inspiration and nourishment for his own music.

REVIEWS:

Despite Hemsi’s nomadic existence, the works on this disc reflect the composer’s lifelong fascination for Sephardic folk music which he assiduously collected and transcribed, as well as a keen absorption of other exotic idioms. The net result is a sequence of attractive and atmospheric works that cover similar ground.

-- BBC Music Magazine

Hemsi is probably best known for his set of Coplas Seferdies, Sephardi songs published in numerous volumes, but his chamber music is well worth getting to know. The earliest piece in this disc is the innocuous-sounding Méditation for cello and piano (Tom Wiebe and Kevin Ahfat), written at some point before 1931, and couched in the ‘Armenian style’. Pianistically it evokes the cimbalom or, as the notes remind us, to be specific, the Greek santouri, a hammered dulcimer. The slow intense dialogue between the two instruments seems almost deliberately imitative of, or a shadowy second cousin of, Bruch’s Kol nidrei. In 1942 he wrote the Pilpúl Sonata for violin and piano (Emily Kruspe and Ahfat). It’s cast in a standard three-movement format and encodes plenty of Sephardic material, not least in the fleet and pithy first movement, and also in the call-and-response central one, a kind of cantorial recitative that takes the violin high in a way somewhat reminiscent of Bloch. There’s fine drama in the driving finale.

The following year – or thereabouts, as dating can’t be sure – Hemsi wrote an intriguing Quintet in G for Viola (Steven Dann) and string quartet. It signals a slight compositional shift in Hemsi’s thinking, being somewhat more conventional in structure and effect. His relish for insouciant dance patterns and folkloric inflections, though, is most obvious in the Burlesca second movement but the most paradoxical movement is the slow one, a Berceuse, that exudes flowing lyricism which, whilst hardly expressively deep, opens up a channel of lightly flecked impressionism: Hemsi looking backwards and sideways simultaneously. For the finale there’s a Greek dance, bright and brisk and over quickly and triumphantly.

Tre arie antiche (c.1945) are derived from the Coplas Seferdies and are brief three-minute (or so) studies. The first is fast, the central panel more gauzy and withdrawn, and the final piece extremely catchy. Which leaves the 1956 Danze nuziali greche, Op 37 rewritten from piano originals for cello and piano and dedicated in the piano original to Gina Bachauer. These three nuptial dances cover some expressive ground. The first is a fast and exciting panel honoring the mother-in-law, the second is the bride with her slow and expressively ‘sung’ lyricism, thoughtful, tactile and with Semitic cadences, and the final panel is the godfather – loquacious, big-boned, and excitable. It works beautifully for the cello, for which instrument Hemsi clearly had a real affinity.

There are comprehensive, astute notes and an excellently judged recording.

This is another fine reclamation from the ARC Ensemble, some of whose members I’ve mentioned by name but all of whom play with considerable enthusiasm and technical accomplishment.

-- MusicWeb International

Classical Music

Il trittico was premiered in New York on 14 December 1918, composed while the First World War was still raging in Europe. At first glance, the three one-act operas Gianni Schicchi, Il tabarro and Suor Angelica seem to have no connection with each other; their common denominator is solely the entanglement of man in a fateful destiny that only exceptionally, for a moment, seems to promise a happy outcome to the “adventure of life” - a set of themes that in its complexity seems to be in such good hands with few directors as with Christof Loy. The main female roles in the three opera acts are performed by the Lithuanian soprano Asmik Grigorian, a very rare and tremendous feat, but once again connects the works to each other.

Emilio de’ Cavalieri’s Rappresentatione di Anima et di Corpo was premiered in 1600 in Rome. It was conceived to be performed in costume, bringing text and music together in a dramatic form, and is accepted as the first surviving opera, pre-dating works by Peri and Monteverdi. Its theme is the dialogue of Soul and Body, a pivotal concept of the Italian Counter-Reformation, presented in allegorical form. This production by the acclaimed director Robert Carsen was hailed as ‘an unmitigated, tremendous success’ and its ‘musical production was extraordinary’ (bachtrack.com).

Hélène Clément, violist with the Doric String Quartet, is the current holder of the viola previously owned by both Bridge and Britten. Her ambition, quickly formed once she first played this instrument, has been to create a testament to both composers and the instrument that binds them all together. This recording, where Hélène is joined by pianist Alasdair Beatson and Dame Sarah Connolly, is the realization of that ambition. Hélène writes: ‘Frank Bridge owned and played the beautiful viola made by Francesco Giussani, in Italy, in 1843. Benjamin Britten was Frank Bridge’s most beloved pupil, and Bridge gave him the viola as a parting gift when Britten had to embark on a ship’s journey to the United States at the outbreak of the Second World War. The composers were never to see each other again. To record the viola repertoire of both composers, producing the very sound that they would have had in their ears, the sound that inspired their love for the instrument and its special language, became a priority for me.’

REVIEW:

The soul of this beautifully constructed recital is the luminous variety Hélène Clément extracts from the 1843 Giussani viola owned by Frank Bridge and passed on to his favorite pupil, Benjamin Britten. The anguished overlapping of mezzo and viola at the climax of ‘Where is it that our soul doth go?’ is one of many revelations on the disc.

-- BBC Music Magazine

Allan Pettersson’s Symphony No. 15 is characterized by a high degree of tension right from the striking opening: brief, emphatic chords from horns and trombones above the tremolo of a side drum. Soon an expressive melodic subject is heard from the first violins, followed by contrasting rapid scales – at which point Pettersson has presented the greater part of the symphony’s building blocks. Like so many of the composer’s symphonies, the 15th is in one movement, but with clearly defined sections. It was completed in 1978, two years before Pettersson’s death, and was followed in 1979, by the sixteenth symphony, the last work that the composer submitted for performance. Only later did it become known that Pettersson had also been working on a Viola Concerto – a work that, if not fully completed, was so far advanced that it has been accepted as part of his œuvre. It is presented here by the Swedish violist Ellen Nisbeth, who also performs one of Pettersson’s very earliest compositions – a Fantaisie pour alto seul, dated June 1936, when the composer himself was about to embark on a career as violist. On this the tenth disc in their acclaimed Pettersson cycle, the Norrköping Symphony Orchestra and Christian Lindberg bring their combined expertise to bear on the orchestral scores.

A MusicWeb International Recording of the Month

The Schola cantorum is a chamber choir – on this evidence an elite chamber choir - founded in 1996 by Hörður Áskelsson, who is a leading figure in Icelandic choral music. It numbers 19 singers (5/4/5/5). The program selected for this disc reflects the memorial music that is customarily sung in Iceland on the first Sunday in November; in Iceland the feasts of All Saints and All Souls have become merged and are celebrated jointly on that day.

As befits the nature of the program, there are no less than three settings, all in Latin, of the Nunc dimittis. The best-known is the setting by Arvo Pärt. His music always requires exemplary control on the part of the singers and that’s much in evidence here. There’s no hiding place in Pärt’s spare texture but the singers of Schola cantorum display great precision – a precision, I might add, that’s entirely at the service of the music and not just attained for its own sake. The other two settings of the canticle are fully worthy to stand besides Pärt’s celebrated version. Both are by members of the Schola – by coincidence both are members of its bass section. The music of Sigurður Sævarsson’s setting has a fragile beauty. The setting is very restrained, even eschewing the almost traditional climax at the words ‘lumen ad revelationem gentium’. The setting by Sævarsson’s colleague, Hreiðar Ingi is rather darker-hued, at least initially, though the music becomes louder and more radiant at ‘lumen ad revelationem gentium’. In the doxology the voices constantly overlap, creating an impression of urgency though it may be – I haven’t seen a score – that the pulse remains unchanged.

There are two settings of the poem Hvíld (Repose) by the Icelandic poet, Snorri Hjartarson (1906-86). One is by the Schola’s conductor, Hörður Áskelsson. His is an intriguing piece, containing probably the most harmonically adventurous music on the program. Earlier the choir sings another response to the same text, this time by Hugi Guðmundsson. This rapt composition is simple, sincere and disarmingly lovely.

Jón Leifs' Requiem is one of four works written in response to the tragically early death of his daughter in 1947 – she drowned at the age of just 17. Leifs’ Requiem is patently sincere – one would expect nothing less in the circumstances – and in this piece he bears his evident grief with dignity. On the surface the music seems simple but harmonically it’s sophisticated. I admired this piece very much.

There are two examples of the music of Þorkell Sigurbjörnsson. Nú hverfur sól í haf (The sun is sinking now) is a hymn – Sigurbjörnsson was closely involved in the music of the Church of Iceland. The tune is most attractive and it’s beautifully harmonised by Sigurbjörnsson. Heyr himna smiður (Hear, Heaven’s creator) is another hymn-like piece. In his invaluable notes Halldór Hauksson describes the piece as ‘exquisite and timeless’; I can understand why. I must not neglect to mention Anna Þorvaldsdóttir’s Heyr þú oss himnum á (Hear us in the heavens). The piece is based on an old Icelandic tune; it’s slow and prayerful.

The remainder of the program is devoted to composers and music that will be much more familiar to the general listener. I must confess that when I first played MacMillan’s A Child’s Prayer I thought the sound a bit too ‘present’, especially the quiet murmurs of the word “welcome” by the choir. However, I think that’s a function of the piece being placed first on the disc. When I went back to it my ears had adjusted and I was untroubled. In any event, it’s an extremely fine performance. Tavener’s The Lamb receives a marvellously accomplished performance, the chording precise and the dynamics expertly calibrated. Speaking of dynamics, the notes contain a quote from Eric Whitacre in which he says of his Lux aurumque ‘if the tight harmonies are carefully tuned and balanced they will shimmer and glow’. That’s just what happens here.

For me the standout performance on this superb disc is the Schola’s account of Eriks Ešenvalds’ wonderful, radiant composition O salutaris hostia. The present, luminous performance is as good as any I’ve heard, with two fabulous soprano soloists caroling above the rest of the choir.

This is truly an outstanding disc. The choir is superb. Their tuning, balance and blend is flawless and the sound that they make gives great pleasure. Yet while the singing may be expert there’s no sense of studied perfection; these expert singers and their conductor produce performances of genuine feeling that draw the listener in. In short, this is one of the most accomplished choral discs that I’ve heard in a long time. I loved their program in which familiar and unfamiliar music is blended in an ideal proportion.

The production values are up to the usual very high BIS standards. Halldór Hauksson’s notes are excellent, not least in introducing us to the Icelandic pieces, which will be unfamiliar to most people. I’ve drawn on his notes in writing of the Icelandic music. The recording itself is immaculate. The choir is presented in a clear, natural and present sound that shows off their singing to best advantage.

On all counts this disc is a winner.

– MusicWeb International (John Quinn)

This is a Christmas album that has a sense of place; clearly identifying the Chorale as both American and from a border state with Mexico; and something for everyone whether they prefer serious or light festive fare. There is Mexican influence in the repertoire choices; which include Catalan folksongs as well as Hispanic Renaissance music. It includes a commission by Cecilia McDowall; written for Christmas 2021; new arrangements of all tracks and also some contemporary Christmas favourites such as Sleigh Ride and Jingle Bells.

This marks the Chorale’s return to recording following an 8-year hiatus; and their first album with Signum Records. “Festive repertoire plays an important role in the performance cycle of every choir; and it felt fitting to begin our journey with a Christmas recording that established a sense of place for the ensemble: we chose to record repertoire that is all American or Hispanic in origin; save for the newly-commissioned piece by Cecilia McDowall that was written to mark the centenary of our home in Phoenix; Trinity Cathedral. Our aim is to translate the warmth of Arizona into our sound; to convey the rhetoric of every text; and celebrate the good health of the American Choral Tradition.” - Christopher Gabbitas

Before a phrase from the Gran vals by Francisco Tárrega unexpectedly shot to international fame as the Nokia ringtone, his most celebrated pieces included the Capricho árabe, composed in 1892. The piece is inspired by the mixture of Muslim Castilian and Christian cultures which had always been a feature of the Valencia region where Tárrega grew up.

Tárrega’s friend and near-contemporary Isaac Albéniz was a virtuoso pianist who also played the guitar. Even though he evoked the guitar brilliantly on the piano, he never composed any music for the instrument. ‘Malagueña’ was first published in the collection España. Published in 1892 as ‘Prélude’, the piece widely known as ‘Asturias’ is also imbued with the spirit of southern Spain.

Federico Mompou’s Suite compostelana was commissioned by Andrés Segovia and was published in 1964, the same year as Segovia’s first recording of the piece.

The Italian guitarist and composer Carlo Domeniconi has drawn on several national traditions for his works, but has a particular interest in Turkish music which he has studied in depth. The Variationen über ein anatolisches Volkslied (Variations on an Anatolian Folksong) were composed in 1982 and are based on the song (türkü) ‘Uzun ince bir yoldayim’. Koyunbaba is a four-movement suite for guitar which started as an improvisation, and was then notated soon afterwards. The composer describes the score as ‘no more than a sketch’ and insists that players improvise in their performance – which Krzysztof Meisinger does to great effect with his additional ‘Invocazione’ at the start of the work.

REVIEW:

It’s a pity Mompou didn’t write more for the guitar. His only work for that instrument, the Suite compostelana, is a minor masterpiece, profound in its simplicity. It takes a player of Meisinger’s stature to pull off a successful performance, and here the Preludio, Cuna and Canción are especially well rendered.

-- Gramophone

There is an evaporating quality to the music of Icelandic composer and conductor Daníel Bjarnason, with sounds that can start softly or loudly, serenely or fiercely, but ultimately dissipate into intangible air. This album, conducted by the composer himself, showcases this characteristic in three captivating works in all-new versions. In Bow to String, the three movements undergo a mesmerizing transformation from a pounding passacaglia to an exhale of frozen breath. In Over Light Earth, the sounds tremble before dispersing to the far edges of the orchestra. And in the Larkin Songs, Bjarnason reflects on fleeting companionship and love.

Following her critically acclaimed recording of Mozart Concertos with Sir Roger Norrington and the RSNO, Francesca Dego turns to a selection of his Sonatas with her long-term recital partner Francesca Leonardi. Dego commented ‘Francesca and I have been playing together for seventeen years, more than half my life and the totality of my career. To work as a duo on a regular basis means reaching common interpretative solutions, ones that sum up each player’s qualities, and creates a great sense of mutual responsibility. What you do together somehow feels naturally complete. We decided to build this album around our very favorite Sonata, KV 454 in B flat major, which we had been performing for many years and in which Mozart’s simplicity and flamboyance coexist in perfect harmony.’

REVIEWS: