Bela Bartok, while most widely known for his orchestral works, was also an established composer of chamber music. His music for violin has become some of the most important in the instrument’s repertoire. The three works featured on this recording have been transcribed for viola by Vidor Nagy. Vidor Nagy, accompanied by Peter Nagy and Divertimento Budapest, brilliantly performs these technically challenging works.

Springtime in Amsterdam is a joyful feature film created by director Christof Loy, world renowned for his work in international opera houses. Meeting accidentally in Amsterdam, a group of four people experience a series of confusions that must be resolved in 48 hours. A richly varied musical score that includes Viennese operetta, Dutch and French chansons, and songs from the American song book, is performed by a renowned cast of singers and conducted by Marko Letonja, well versed in popular music. In a magical dream world, dilemmas are resolved in this enchanting fable.

REVIEWS:

It is enjoyable enough to watch, being well directed and slickly performed… All four are excellent: Annette Dasch, Theresa Kronthaler, Thomas Oliemans and Norman Reinhardt, plus Henk Poort for good luck as a series of characters. They emote as well as they warble.

-- Opera Now

Catalani’s masterpiece, first performed in 1892 at La Scala in Milan, is best known for its aria “Ebben? Ne andrò lontana”. With nuanced harmonies and colourful instrumentation, he pays great attention to the orchestra sound. He chose highly unusual material for his opera: the successful novel Die Geier-Wally by Wilhelmine von Hillern tells the story of a young woman who does not fit any of the gender clichés of the time. Unlike many earlier operatic heroines commanded to marry against their will, Wally does not look for a solution in society, but instead runs away to the mountains. Her husband must be her equal, someone unafraid to face both a bear and her father. “Izabela Matula - A Wagnerian hell of a woman with a great soprano.” (Kronenzeitung) / “Catalani’s highly dramatic music finds an intense advocate in Andrés Orozco-Estrada on the podium of the excellently disposed Wiener Symphoniker.” (Wiener Zeitung)

REVIEW

The career of the short-lived Catalani only really produced one opera of substance in the shape of his proto-verismo treatment of La Wally, based on a German play by Wilhelmine von Hillern...hailed by Toscanini as a work of genius[.] Competition with the slightly younger Puccini, no less than his early death, effectively condemned Catalani to near-eclipse outside his native Italy.

In the second Act, following the death of her father, Wally is able to let her real feelings show, only to find that she is treated as a figure of mockery not only by her supposed friends but also by the man she really loves, who only kisses her in order to win a bet with his mates. Her sudden transformation from suppressed romance to incandescent jealousy is superbly handled here, and the characterisation suddenly begins to assume a realism that one might have never expected from the more forthright interpretations featured on those old sound recordings. The working out of the jealousies over the next two Acts is sympathetically handled, until in the final scene the hero is overwhelmed and swept away by an avalanche (one of those operatic endings that will always assure La Wally a place in the more comic annals of theatrical history). The music here rises to real heights, with the extensive prelude to Act Four a magnificent evocation of the high peaks of the Alps and its cavernously wide-spaced woodwind octaves clearly providing a model for Prokofiev in the opening of his Alexander Nevsky over sixty years later.

As may be gathered from the foregoing, much of the responsibility for the impact of the opera lies with the singers; an insensitive performance can effectively reduce the music to simple ranting. And the cast here is very impressive indeed. In the title role Izabela Matula has the full Valkyrie metal for her big moments, but at the same time is able to fine down her voice to delicate half-tones which encompass much of the heroine’s more vulnerable emotions. Her singing of her big aria is steady as a rock, and she holds the audience in the palm of her hand to the extent that they do not ruin the transition into the closing scene of Act One by bursting in with unwanted applause. As her feckless lover (who cannot even be bothered to tell her that the woman of whom she is so jealous is actually his sister), Leonardo Capalbo looks every inch the charming playboy, and one can well believe both in his callous disregard for her feelings and then in his sudden realisation of love even when he is told that she planned to have him murdered. His singing is pretty special too, heartfelt and charming by turns.

Even better is Jacques Imbrailo as his rival, far from the cardboard villain that one finds in other performances, and singing in a manner that well suits his move into Italian repertory. He too finds plenty of dramatic meat in his part, and evokes pity as he degenerates into a shabby muddy wreck while still craving the affection that he understands he can never receive. Alastair Miles makes something sympathetic even of the blustering and bullying father, and Ilona Revolskaya is thoroughly believable as the scruffy boy who becomes the heroine’s only genuine friend. Sofia Vinnik makes much of little as Hagenbach’s misunderstood sister, and even Zoltán Nagy as the anonymous peasant creates a real character with sympathetic eyes staring out even through his alcoholic haze. The Arnold Schoenberg chorus assume their operatic roles with full-bodied and enthusiastic commitment, and they mix well and unobtrusively with the extras. And one must not overlook the contribution of Tiziano Mancini, who as always seems to appreciate when we need to see the singers in close-up and when it is best to draw back.

[The] direction of the singers themselves is superbly well handled by Barbora Horáková Joly, who gets the best results from her performers. The reputation of La Wally as a precursor of the later verismo style is well deserved, and the fact that the action here is updated to the present day disturbs me not one whit. Indeed the costumes serve to emphasise the very real nature of the characters in terms of modern psychology, and the singers are not afraid to get themselves believably grubby, dirty and blood-stained. Even the only slightly incongruous element, that of the stern father dictating precisely who his daughter shall marry, is unfortunately still with us today, although one might hope that the heroine’s reaction would be more rebellious nowadays.

I can earnestly recommend this video as – finally – a substitute for the Decca audio set that has perforce served us for half a century, and the best available performance of an opera that really does not deserve its almost total neglect outside Italy.

--MusicWeb International (Paul Corfield Godfrey)

Germany’s oldest Mozart festival celebrates its 100th anniversary in 2021. The present jubilee boxed set presents previously unpublished treasures from the archive of the Bavarian Broadcasting. All live recordings from the Baroque Imperial Hall at Würzburg Residence are digital remasters.

Previous BIS releases of works by John Pickard have mainly featured instrumental compositions. This recording presents another facet of the British composer’s work, with compositions for choir under the expert direction of Martyn Brabbins as well as two instrumental pieces.

The five short Latin motets as well as Ozymandias, Pickard’s opus 1, can be described as ‘occasional pieces’ composed during the composer’s student years or for the choir he conducts at the University of Bristol. They display solid tonal grounding and mainly homophonic writing and provide a stepping-stone to some of the more dissonant style found in the latter works. Written for the BBC Singers, whose reputation is well established, the Mass in Troubled Times is an ambitious work bearing witness to a context of global uncertainty. The Mass is a collaboration with the writer Gavin D’Costa, who conceived a complex text based on multiple sources in five languages, combining Western and Middle Eastern religious texts with poetry evoking the plight of refugees. Orion for trumpet and organ, which is partly programmatic, evoking the most splendid constellation and allowing trumpeter Chloë Abbott to shine, and Tesserae for solo organ, with its dazzling virtuosity, played here by the work’s first performer, David Goode, complete this disc.

Find Grimaud's previous DVD release from the Elbphilharmonie on Arkiv as well!

Hélène Grimaud headlines a spectacular evening with the illustrious Camerata Salzburg, directed from the front desk by concertmaster Giovanni Guzzo, at one of the world's most famous contemporary concert halls, the Elbphilharmonie in Hamburg. She selected pieces that are all in minor keys, yet composed during intensely creative periods in both Mozart’s and Robert Schumann’s careers.

Mozart did not write many works in minor tonalities but Grimaud chose to emphasize the minor mode because it “provides a glimpse behind the mask of jollity that surrounds many of his famous works.“ As an encore: a work by a living Ukrainian composer whose music has accompanied Grimaud through much of her career, Valentin Silvestrov.

“Hélène Grimaud and the Salzburg Camerata hypnotise the audience in Hamburg’s Elbphilharmonie on this unforgettable evening, with piano concertos of the early Romantic era of Mozart and Schumann that are unique in sound.“ (operaversum.de)

In 1610, the lutenist Robert Dowland, who had just turned 19, published two anthologies in quick succession that are today considered vital for our understanding of both the lute and Elizabethan vocal music. The first, A Varietie of Lute Lessons, which as the title suggests features lessons but also a long essay on European lute production, contains important information on lute performance, in part originating from his esteemed father, John Dowland. It is not far-fetched to imagine that Robert’s father also had a part to play in the second book, A Musicall Banquet – John had returned from the Danish court some time previously and is represented by several pieces in the anthology. Adhering to the culinary metaphor of the collection’s title, this Banquet comprises ‘recipes’ from different countries with different levels of technical difficulty, and is made up of ‘dishes’ already taste-tested so as not to poison ‘diners’, in other words, established pieces that were nonetheless as yet unknown to the English public. Robert opens his anthology with a large selection of English songs, taken from what was by that point a well-established repertoire: at the time Banquet was published, an impressive 24 books of songs had already been printed, beginning with John Dowland’s First Booke of Songes or Ayres, published in 1797. The next group of pieces in the collection belong to a genre that could be considered the most similar to the English song, the French air de cour, in the sense that the latter, at least in its most ancient form, influenced the development of the former. The air de cour for voice and lute was enjoying enormous success thanks to the scores Robert Ballard began publishing in 1608. The selection of Italian pieces is the most significant part of the collection.

German composer Hans Werner Henze’s (1926–2012) admiration for the great masters of the Baroque and musical Classicism manifested in compositions born from a desire to transcribe, rework and transform 17th- and 18th-century masterpieces into new orchestral textures. The project Travestimenti (Disguises), managed by conductor Marco Angius and the Orchestra di Padova e del Veneto, from which this CD was created, makes reference to Henze’s ‘reinventions’ of masterpieces by Mozart, C.P.E. Bach and Vitali, clothed in new, modern fashion.

For the Drei Mozart’sche Orgelsonaten, Henze takes up three of Mozart’s one-movement Kirchensonaten (church sonatas or trio sonatas). Sonatas 17 and 15 are in an Allegro tempo, whereas the Sonata K.67 is marked Andantino, so Henze, in his transcription, places the latter between the two livelier tempos, thus reconstructing the tripartite structure of a classical three-movement sonata. Scored for an ensemble of 14 players that includes the less common, softer variants oboe d’amore and viola d’amore, it aims to underline the darker instrumental timbres, favouring the sombre sonorities of the alto flute in G, the bass flute in C, the bass clarinet and the bassoon. During the last year of his life, in 1787, Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach composed a Fantasia libera per tastiera sola (Free Fantasia for keyboard alone) which he expanded into the Clavier-Fantasie mit Begleitung einer Violine (Fantasy for harpsichord with violin accompaniment), one of his most personal and expressive works.

Henze transcribed it for solo flute, harp and strings, aiming to project the extremely interesting and expressive harmonic material of the composition into a larger instrumental apparatus, thus making its future-oriented harmonic structures more manifest and moulded. He proposed two options for division of the: string quartet + string quintet or string quartet + tutti (the latter version is recorded here).

Although it was probably composed in the early 18th century, Vitali’s Ciaccona ‘Il Vitalino’ – whose musical form is inspired by dance and consists of variations on a ground bass – was only rediscovered in 1867, published by the German virtuoso violinist Ferdinand David. Henze’s Il Vitalino raddoppiato – called “raddoppiato” (“doubled”) because of his extension of the composition by means of interpolated variations of each original section in the style of 18th-century doubles – retains Vitali’s bass almost throughout the entire composition. It alternates Vitali’s variations on his chaconne theme with Henze’s variations of Vitali’s variations, in an ever-changing dialogue between the 18th-century past and Henze’s present.

Promise of Peace is the audio recording of the full-length 2022 St. Olaf Christmas Festival, held in Minneapolis on December 2-3; 2022. Recorded live in Orchestra Hall, this album features performances from the St. Olaf Choir; St. Olaf Orchestra; St. Olaf Chapel Choir; St. Olaf Cantorei; Manitou Singers; and Viking Chorus.

Between 1851 and 1857, Peter Heise wrote six string quartets for the intimate musical soirées of Copenhagen’s refined middle class. Heise was a celebrated and cherished composer in his native Denmark, but his quartets sadly fell into obscurity and were stored away. The Nordic String Quartet is reviving these works with this first volume of their complete collection, featuring Quartets Nos. 1–3.

Known for its championship of neglected repertoire; the Kaleidoscope Chamber Collective presents a program of works by composers within and around the Second Viennese School, centered on Schoenberg’s Verklärte Nacht. Probably Schoenberg’s best-known piece – in either of its two orchestral versions or the original string sextet version heard here, Verklärte Nacht is certainly not neglected! The Collective has chosen to surround it, however, with works that are much less well known, producing a fascinating and rewarding program. Schoenberg composed the work in 1899; whilst on holiday with his friend and fellow composer Alexander Zemlinsky and Zemlinsky’s sister, Mathilde, whom Schoenberg would marry two years later.

Zemlinsky’s Maiblumen blühten überall for soprano and string sextet was never completed, intended originally to be a much larger work. Webern studied composition with both Zemlinsky and Schoenberg. His Piano Quintet may, like Zemlinsky’s composition, have been conceived a part of a larger work; but only this one movement was ever composed. Alma Schindler was another pupil of Zemlinsky; one with whom he developed a deep romantic infatuation. Their relationship ended when she herself fell in love with Gustav Mahler who, when they married, famously forbade her from pursuing her career as a composer. The four songs included here (arranged for soprano and string sextet by Tom Poster) are embedded in the soundworld of Zemlinsky and Schoenberg, and offer an intriguing glimpse of what she might have composed in other circumstances...

REVIEWS:

Francesca Chiejina’s lustrous soprano brings serious class to Zemlinsky's and Alma Mahler’s songs.

-- BBC Music Magazine

The youthful exuberance of the Kaleidoscope Collective evoke the appropriate exhilaration of Schoenberg’s response to Richard Dehmel’s poem via his Verklärte Nacht.

-- Gramophone

Three legendary performances from the Stuttgart Ballet in the choreography of John Cranko: Onegin, Romeo and Juliet and The Taming of the Shrew. Including bonus conversations on each ballet and three documentaries on the Stuttgart Ballet and its outstanding dancers Marcia Haydée and Friedemann Vogel. The 3 documentaries are for the first time available on DVD and Blu-ray! (Unitel)