David John Pike, one of Canada's leading baritone singers, and the great English organist David Briggs present Mahler: Orchestral Songs - The Organ Transcriptions, an astounding new album offering renditions of three cycles of lieder by Gustav Mahler. The recording of these opulent scores on the phenomenal new Eule organ at the Konstantin-Basilika in Germany, has an immediate appeal. The organ's atonal spectrum and the wondrous acoustic of the basilica give a unique and thrilling dimension to the music. About this recording, Briggs wrote: "I was delighted with David Pike asked me to work with him to record these three wonderful Mahler song cycles. There are many pre-existing recordings with piano accompaniment, but the opportunity to register these opulent scores on the phenomenal new Eule organ at the Konstantin-Basilika, taking the music back to it's very core and recasting it anew, was something that had an immediate appeal..."
These five works, from three different stages of Hans Gál's long life (1890-1987), all show his consummate craftsmanship but are otherwise quite different in character. The passionate Piano Quartet (1914), downstream from Brahms and Dvorák, brings the grand gestures of Romanticism into the early twentieth century. The 1935 Sonatina in F major for violin and piano, recently rediscovered, and the three Sonatinas from 1956 put a premium on textural clarity and lyrical approachability; here the contrapuntal ingenuity, ceaseless thematic development, harmonic freedom and rhythmic unpredictability of Gál's language animate the music from within. Newcastle-born pianist Sarah Beth Briggs was a finalist in the BBC Young Musician competition at the age of eleven and studied with Denis Matthews and Edith Fischer. Katalin Kertesz is the leader of the Kertesz Quartet, with which she recently recorded the four string quartets by the nineteenth century Czech composer heinrich Wenzel Veit. Nichola Blakey, viola, enjoys a busy freelance career, giving performances across the UK. Cressida Nash, cello, is a founding member of Musicians South West.
Amériques" - a symbol of renewal, adventure, and discovery - is a symphonic eruption that earned a place in the twentieth century's list of scandals at it's premiere. The version on this CD for two pianos, eight hands introduces the musical world to a work of extreme pianistic virtuosity, both delicate and ecstatic, a work whose wild activity could not be more different from the almost motionless introspection of the Feldman pieces. As Feldman said: "Instead of inventing a system like Schoenberg, Varèse invented a music that speaks to us with it's incredible tenacity rather than it's methodology. When listening to Varèse, we ask ourselves, 'How did he do it?' and not 'How was it done?'
