Anne Akiko Meyers has amassed a multitude of fans and admirers for her exquisitely curated recordings, often exploring her passion for new music, and old music in new guises. Her quest for creative collaborations has inspired countless commissions and world-premieres, with the results infusing Shining Night, an album that embraces themes of love, poetry, and nature.

Anne’s fruitful association with composer Morten Lauridsen led to the arrangement of his popular choral work Sure on this Shining Night, for violin and piano, lending its name to the album’s title. From there springs forth an album imbued with music of light and hope, spanning the history of music through Baroque, Romantic, Popular, and current genres. J.S.Bach’s beautiful Air in G and Corelli’s colorful La Folia – arranged for violin and guitar – rub shoulders with Latin-tinged Estrellita (Little Star) by Manuel Ponce, the Aria from Villa-Lobos’ Bachianas Brasileiras No. 5, and Piazzolla’s Histoire du Tango. Two of the 20th century’s most iconic songs appear in intimate and tender new arrangements: Duke Ellington’s (In My) Solitude, and Can’t Help Falling in Love, famously crooned by The King of Rock and Roll, Elvis Presley. Anne’s collaborators are eminent Italian pianist Fabio Bidini and Grammy Award-winning guitarist Jason Vieaux.

REVIEW:

Few violinists would have had the idea to ask the quintessential choral composer Morton Lauridsen, as Meyers did, to arrange two of his choral works for duo with violin. Fewer would have juxtaposed Lauridsen with Elvis Presley, and fewer still would have been able to make this marvelously varied program hang together. Meyers transforms the basic violin encore type of program into something new and fresh. She has made a specialty of bold, original, and immediate programming, but has outdone herself this time.

-- AllMusicGuide.com (James Manheim)

The profound and delightful Partitas, Bach’s Opus 1, sparkle in Eleonor Bindman’s brilliant performance. Her unhurried tempos bring out the twists, turns and quick modulations of the dance movements and preludes of this unparalleled set of six suites — famous in Bach’s day and today for their vitality and depth. Bindman’s spirited recording enriches the listener’s experience by revealing the power and emotional nuances of the suites. One of Bach’s favorite forms, the suite, or partita, incorporates lively, stately, graceful and stirring dances introduced by an opening movement — with a different title in each suite: Praeludium, Sinfonia, Toccata, Fantasia, Ouverture and Praeambulum. The scope of these works is vast — melody, harmony and counterpoint blending in sonorous combinations that surprise, fascinate and enchant. According to Bach’s first biographer, J.N. Forkel, “Such excellent compositions for the clavier [keyboard] had never been seen and heard before. Anyone who had learnt to perform well some pieces out of them could make his fortune in the world thereby.”

Past praise for Eleonor's Bindman's other recent Bach recording projects:

Bach: Cello Suites (transcribed for piano by E. Bindman):

Bindman takes him quite literally, transcribing in the register he wrote in, mostly, and clearly with enjoyment. Her tempos are sometimes faster than a cellist’s fingers might find practical, but her musical sense is excellent.

-- American Record Guide

The Brandenburg Duets (arr. for piano duet by E. Bindman):

These transcriptions are not easy to play, but Bindman and Lin are up to the task. Fast movements are played crisply, but not with brittleness, although the pianists play the opening movement of the Sixth Concerto in a more legato fashion, and use the sustaining pedal—a necessary choice, Bindman writes, given the concerto’s violin-less scoring. The slow movements are not Romanticized, but are duly lyrical. The two pianists equally divvy up the primo and secondo parts.

-- Fanfare

A 2023 GRAMMY Nominee for Best Chamber Performance!

Hailed by the magazine BBC Music for its ‘generous and warm-hearted, utterly beguiling playing’, the Neave Trio has emerged as one of the finest young ensembles of its generation. It has been praised by WQXR Radio in New York City for its ‘bright and radiant music making’, described by The Strad as having ‘elegant phrasing and deft control of textures’, and praised by The New York Times for its ‘excellent performances’. Here, the trio presents a program of music connected by the theme of Remembrance.

Rachmaninoff’s early first piano trio was inspired by Tchaikovsky’s trio in A minor, and shows illuminating glimpses of the mature composer to come. The elegiac mood of Rachmaninoff’s work is matched by that of Brahms’s first trio – again an early composition – which was inspired by the composer’s (unrequited) feelings for Clara Schumann.

Ravel’s only piano trio was composed in 1914, as France was being drawn into the horrors of the first world war. Ravel draws extensively on the rhythms and forms of his native Basque musical traditions, while the title of the second movement, ‘Pantoum’, refers to a form of traditional Malaysian poetry which typically deals with two separate themes in alternation, a feature to which Ravel responds with a series of contrasting themes and textures.

Sir Adrian Boult began his long association with the music of Vaughan Williams in 1918 when he conducted A London Symphony earning praise from the composer. Thereafter Boult gave many first performances of Vaughan Williams’s works including the 3rd, 4th and 6th symphonies and Job was dedicated to him. Boult also recorded all the symphonies extensively in the studio for Decca and EMI during the 1950s and late 1960s.

The pastoral 5th symphony (1938-43) is considered a masterpiece based on Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress which some critics have suggested was a vision of peace for a war-weary nation, whereas the angry 6th symphony (1944-47) bears the marks of the war years in the opposite extreme, a portrait of a world laid to waste by a nuclear holocaust. Boult’s performances here, caught live at London’s Royal Albert Hall Promenade Concerts in 1972 and 1975, have even more adrenaline and excitement compared to their studio equivalents. Anthony Payne (Daily Telegraph) described the 1975 Prom performance of Symphony No.5: “one of the most taut and concentrated interpretations I have ever heard of the work”. When it comes to Symphony No.6, Martin Cotton, the music critic and writer wrote: “what Boult achieves in the four linked movements of Symphony No.6 is a sense of overall direction, and as he did in Symphony No.5, a strong feeling for the structure and emotional depth of the work’.

Bryce Morrison, the celebrated critic and authority on piano music, described the pre-eminent Hungarian pianist as follows: ‘Annie Fischer was among the greatest and most richly comprehensive of all pianists’. The distinguished Russian pianist Sviatoslav Richter, notoriously critical, described her as ‘an artist imbued with a spirit of greatness and with genuine profundity’.

Fischer was universally acclaimed in Mozart, Beethoven, Schumann, Schubert and Chopin as well as her own compatriots, Liszt, Bartók and Kodály. Despite her international reputation, however, in comparison with other pianists of her generation she is probably the least represented on disc. This was mainly due to a distaste for the recording process - she preferred the freedom and spontaneity of live performances. It is a well known that her studio recordings of the complete Beethoven Piano Sonatas were made over many years and with many different producers. She was never satisfied with the results, so in this BBC recital of selected Beethoven sonatas, Annie Fischer is heard as she would have wanted - live and caught on the wing, making this recording very valuable. Misha Donat, her producer for Sonata No.30, said: “she hated working in the studio so these are real performances; they were always done in a complete ‘take’, though sometimes she would play through a movement twice”.

Christophe Moyreau (1700-1774) was born and spent most of his life in Orléans. He became organist at Orléans Collégiale Saint-Aignan in February 1719 and at Orléans Cathedral in January 1738 and occupied this position until around 1772. In French music of his era (secular and also religious), an important place was reserved for the rhythms and structures of the dance. In 1753 Moyreau published his “Pièces de clavecin”, 124 pieces grouped in 6 books. The dances Allemande, Courante, Sarabande, Gigue, Rigaudon, Menuet are part of Suites, while these books also include concertos and sonatas. Some of the pieces bear titles (in the style of Couperin and Rameau) like La Flotante, Le Baccante, Le Jaloux, La Coquette, Le Preludant, L'Euridice, La Comique, L'Orphée and Le Caprice. Book 6, uniquely for French harpsichord music, consists of several three-movement keyboard simphonies written in Italian style.

Played by Fernando De Luca, one of Italy’s foremost harpsichord players, who recorded to great critical acclaim the complete keyboard works by Graupner, published by Brilliant Classics. The first-ever survey on record of the complete surviving output by a significant contemporary of Rameau: a missing piece in the jigsaw of the French Baroque.

Described by BBC Music Magazine as ‘Mozart music-making of altogether superior quality’, Jean-Efflam Bavouzet’s acclaimed Mozart Concertos series reaches Vol. 6. Along with Concerto No. 24, K. 491, the two concertos presented here were composed in Vienna in the winter of 1785 – 86, at a time when Mozart was working on Le nozze di Figaro. He was at the height of his fame as composer, virtuoso pianist, and teacher. These three concertos were all written for his own use in the concerts of that winter, and remained unpublished during his lifetime. Der Schauspieldirektor (The Impresario) was commissioned by Emperor Joseph II for an important state visit and performed at Schönbrunn palace on 7 February 1786. The Overture highlights Mozart’s innate ability as an orchestrator, and serves as a demonstration piece for Gábor Takács-Nagy and the wonderful musicians of Manchester Camerata.

REVIEWS:

Gábor Takács-Nagy elicits incisive yet vocally orientated phrasing from The Manchester Camerata, giving the impression that the marvellous string, wind and brass sections are reacting and responding to one another, while the timpani strokes make consistently palpable yet never overwhelming impact. The point and refinement of Bavouzet’s elegant phrasing exemplifies Mozart’s famous description of how certain passages should ‘flow like oil’… The engineering’s spacious yet clear concert-hall realism further factors into my enthusiastic recommendation.

-- Gramophone (Jed Distler)

Orchestral music played a key role in the output of César Franck throughout his career. He accorded an important and innovative place to the symphonic poem, a new genre of the Romantic era: Ce qu’on entend sur la montagne actually dates from 1846, two years before Franz Liszt’s composition of the same name! As a virtuoso pianist himself, Franck also produced a number of concertante works, from early pieces written for his own performance – a few brilliant sets of variations and a youthful concerto – to the famous Symphonic Variations (1885). The Symphony in D minor of 1887 was one of the cornerstones of the renewal of the genre in France, coming between Saint-Saëns’s Third Symphony (1886) and Chausson’s Symphony (1899). The Orchestre Philharmonique Royal de Liège presents here the first genuinely complete survey of this orchestral and concertante repertory, assembling recordings from recent years and some new productions.

REVIEW:

The year 2022 marked the 200th anniversary of the birth of César Franck. His orchestral music is not so often heard these days, so this comprehensive collection of performances from his home-town orchestra is quite timely. It would, however, have proved very welcome at any date for the Liège players not only play very well but also deliver the scores idiomatically and with real conviction. This box set usefully and enjoyably reminds us that there is plenty of pleasurable listening to be explored beyond the D minor symphony.

-- MusicWeb International

Reference Recordings is proud to present our fifth album with the prolific singer, songwriter, engaging storyteller, and masterful guitarist, Doug MacLeod. For "A Soul To Claim," Doug teamed up with legendary producer and engineer Jim Gaines. Through twelve new MacLeod originals, Doug and his trusty Waterloo guitar "P-nut" are joined by Memphis studio veterans Rick Steff/keyboards, Dave Smith/bass, and Steve Potts/drums. A perennial Blues Music Award nominee and multiple Blues Music Award winner including Acoustic Artist of The Year and Acoustic Album of the Year, "A Soul To Claim" is Doug’s 22nd album.

A 2023 GRAMMY nominee of historic stature, profiled in the New York Times!

In the midst of the COVID pandemic, the remarkably resourceful personnel and musicians of the New York Youth Symphony (NYYS), with Music Director Michael Repper, found a way to come together during a time of separation to make their debut recording. Featuring four works by three African American women composers – Florence Price, Valerie Coleman and Jessie Montgomery – the orchestra’s first studio recording includes several premieres. The release coincides with the 115th anniversary of Price’s birth. Two recordings of works by Florence Price are firsts. Ethiopia's Shadow in America is the first recording of the work by an American orchestra. Her Piano Concerto in One Movement, with soloist Michelle Cann, is the premiere recording of the composer’s newly-discovered original orchestration.

Price’s compositional voice blends the African American folk songs and dances of her heritage with the central European Romantic tradition in which she was trained. Her tone poem Ethiopia’s Shadow in America evokes the injustices experienced by people of African descent. Her Piano Concerto in One Movement features the exuberant soloist Michelle Cann, a champion of the composer’s music, who gave the New York and Philadelphia premieres of the work.

Umoja – meaning “unity” in Swahili – by Grammy-nominated flutist, entrepreneur, and composer Valerie Coleman originated as a simple song for women’s choir. Its transformation as a work for orchestra – given its first recording here – maintains its feel of a drum circle and sharing of history through a traditional “call and response” form. In her rich and colorful single-movement symphonic work Soul Force, NYYS alum Jessie Montgomery drew on Dr. Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech in which he states, “We must not allow our creative protest to degenerate into physical violence. Again and again, we must rise to the majestic heights of meeting physical force with soul force."

REVIEWS:

This has to be one of the most assured and exciting recording-debuts from a youth orchestra since the West-Eastern Divan and the Simon Bolivars hit the ground running: there's a wonderful sheen and polish to the sound, ensemble is nigh-on immaculate, and the young New Yorkers revel in Price's juba rhythms and inventive scoring in both the Piano Concerto (given for the first time in her original orchestration here) and Ethiopia's Shadow in America.

-- Presto Music

This particular album is yet another example of a project in a sense fortified by the Covid pandemic, and the fact that it features a youth orchestra – New York Youth Symphony – is a heartening indication of innocent ears opening to both the undiscovered and the entirely new. They give it their all. Price’s Ethiopia’s Shadow in America (recorded for the first time by an American ensemble) is a fitting foundation for the programme, its focus not so much on the indefensible reality and inhumanity of slavery as the enduring spirit to rise above it. For sure, its first pages are marked with a cry of anguish across the entire orchestra – but a nobility of utterance shines through them and it isn’t long before the emergence of a simple Spiritual (in the second section of the piece) finds solace in a solo cello and aspiration in its journey from solo oboe to balmy (and majestic) horns. And don’t for a moment think that a cakewalk is a somehow inappropriate conclusion to what has gone before, because this is the music that Price knew and found joy in. It was something to be celebrated.

-- Gramophone

Sandrine Piau and Véronique Gens have a longstanding rapport and dreamed of making a recording together. Here they pay tribute to two singers who, like them, were born within a year of each other, Mme Dugazon (1755-1821) and Mme Saint-Huberty (1756-1812): both enjoyed triumphant careers in Paris, inspiring numerous librettists and composers. Gluck even nicknamed Saint-Huberty ‘Madame-la-Ressource’, while ‘a Dugazon’ became a generic name for the roles of naïve girls in love, and later of comical mothers. Rivals? They very likely were, given the quarrelsome spirit of the operatic world of the time, even if they never crossed paths on stage. Intermingling airs and duets, Piau and Gens here play the heroines of Gluck, Grétry, Monsigny, J. C. Bach, Piccinni, Edelmann and Cherubini. Developed in collaboration with the Centre de musique baroque de Versailles, this program on the cusp between Classicism and pre-Romanticism is very much the heart of the repertory championed by Julien Chauvin’s Le Concert de la Loge.

REVIEW:

I don’t know about any rivalry here, but Gens and Piau, both of whom have complete mastery over this repertoire, function extremely well individually (as one might expect) and in duo. They are backed up by a fine and sensitive instrumental ensemble which outlines the highly dramatic content of these arias with a fine sense of the style and good sound that never overwhelms. To be sure, we can obtain the Gluck and Sacchini elsewhere, but the remainder consists of little-known but equally dramatic and well-composed music. Still, this glimpse into the repertoire of the Parisian opera world of the 18th century is well worth obtaining, not only for the premieres of pieces but the artistry of both sopranos as well.

-- Fanfare

As pianist Andrei Hoteev puts it, Vladimir Sofronitzki's interpretations included an "improvisatory style", which corresponds with what musicologist Sigfried Schibli has noted as a characteristic of Scriabin's own playing, going on to say Scriabin "developed his own style of playing the piano" with "alertly varied rhythms and dynamics...combined with a delicate touch and spontaneous agogics." Indeed, Sofronitzki's Scriabin performances have often been praised for their idiomatic, "poetic" rubato together with a flair for musical architecture and rhythmic precision. In his desire for fidelity to the original, Sofronitzki's highly sensitive use of the pedal reflects his striving to abide by the composer's expressive markings as closely as possible. His affinity with Scriabin's oeuvre may derive from the fact that both the composer and the pianist himself were influenced by the music of Frédéric Chopin. Having spent his childhood in Warsaw, where his family had settled when he was two years old, Sofronitzki came to be regarded as setting new standards for Chopin interpretation - an artistic focus that goes back to his first piano tuition in the Polish capital. In 1949, the centenary of Chopin's death, Sofronitzki performed all his piano works on five successive days at the great hall of the Tchaikovsky Conservatory in Moscow.

REVIEWS:

The flow of melody and the highest transparency of musical events were top priorities for Vladimir Sofronitzky, whom Emil Gilels called the greatest piano player in the world and of whom the famous Heinrich Neuhaus said, « He plays like a god and looks like a god. » Let’s look closely at these two statements: Gilels speaks of the piano player not of the pianist. Consciously or unconsciously? And Neuhaus speaks of the god. God, is that power? Mightiness? Because Sofronitzky’s playing is powerful. It is dramatic and sonorous. This is Sofronitzky’s individualism: his feelings are those of sovereignty, of control. Poetry and tenderness are not his thing. And so the recordings of this edition impress me more than they touch me.

However, those who are intoxicated by consummate piano technique will be happy with this. In addition to the Etudes, Mazurkas, Preludes, Impromptus, Nocturnes and Poèmes, this box includes the legendary near-complete recording of the piano sonatas with Vladimir Sofronitzky. Only the first three movements of the 1st Sonata and the 9th Sonata, which the pianist never recorded out of respect for Scriabin, are missing and replaced by recordings by other pianists. Sofronitzky’s interpretations are phenomenal: he literally chisels the music into sculptures, relentless, accented, yet often very restrained and labored for nuance. Nevertheless, it is the enormously powerful playing that dominates and captivates the listener[.]

-- Pizzicato

These are historical recordings from 1946 to 1962, played primarily by Sofronitski; all the others are listed as guests. Profil celebrates Scriabin’s 150th birthday with a nearly complete collection of his solo piano works. This remastered collection has cleaned things up to today’s standards.

"Historical Recordings 1946-1962" is correct for all the recordings here except Scriabin’s tracks. There is not a bad performance in this collection. A few choices were made that I didn’t agree with, but, by and large, this is spectacular Scriabin...I was amazed at the musical concentration Sofronitsky summoned to play such beautifully shaped phrases on such an instrument. Anyone who enjoys Scriabin’s piano music will find exceptional performances on each disc here.

-- American Record Guide

You might consider him one of the many Missing Links between Frédéric Chopin and Karol Szymanowski, who shaped Polish music between the second half of the 19th century and the dawn of modernism… but somehow never entered the repertoire. We are dealing with a composer of the high, late-romantic tradition – a style that Stojowski never found any reason to reject and with a strong gift for melody. His work proves the composer’s deft hand at colorful instrumentation, which suggests Russian and French influences. Entering the U.S. in 1905, he enjoyed a fine reputation as a composer, pianist, and increasingly pedagogue but his lack of presence on the continent meant that Stojowski faded into obscurity.

REVIEW:

There is so much music of genuine interest and reward in both works that their relative neglect is a surprise. Hopefully the excellence of this disc will encourage listeners and performers to seek out this music. Another disc of real interest and value from the ever-impressive Capriccio catalogue.

-- MusicWeb International

Dmitri Shostakovich was a versatile composer: popular and serious styles came to him with equal ease and are frequently found together in the same work. In his twenties, before the heavy hand of Soviet officialdom slapped him down in 1936, music of every kind poured out of him: symphonies, operas and full-length ballets but also a great amount of music for film and theatre. Here Andrew Litton leads the Singapore Symphony Orchestra in a program which explores this lighter side of a composer who is otherwise often regarded as unrelentingly serious.

The album opens with Suite for Jazz Orchestra No. 1, which Litton conducts from the piano. Consisting of three brief movements, it is the only truly original work on the disc, written in 1934 for a competition aimed at making ‘Soviet Jazz’ more respectable. The remaining suites are all reworkings of existing music, such as the ballets The Age of Gold – about the adventures of a Soviet football team visiting the decadent West – and The Limpid Stream, portraying a group of entertainers visiting an idyllic collective farm. The Suite for Variety Orchestra is a compilation that the composer made in the late 1950s from three film scores, a ballet movement and four piano pieces. Closing the album is Shostakovich’s 1927 orchestration of a Broadway classic, Vincent Youmans’ "Tea for Two," which had become a hit under the title "Tahiti Trot."

REVIEW:

Entitled Jazz & Variety, this album encompasses four of Shostakovich’s more popular-style suites, mainly drawn from his ballet and theatre scores. These range from the poker-faced, Kurt Weill-like stylization of 1920s dance music, complete with plunking banjo, in the Suite for Jazz Orchestra No. 1 (1934), via the Prokofiev-like burlesques of The Age of Gold – a 1930 ballet about the vicissitudes of a Soviet football team in the wicked West – to the more straightforwardly traditional ballet numbers of The Limpid Stream(1935/45) set on an idyllic collective farm, and the Suite for Variety Orchestra put together from various pieces from the 1950s.

One item, the Waltz from the Jazz Suite, recurs twice: more fully orchestrated in The Limpid Stream, and in yet a third arrangement with a different, more banal middle section, in the Variety Suite. The collection culminates in Shostakovich’s twinkling orchestration of a version of ‘Tea for Two’, entitled Tahiti Trot (1927). Yet, in the middle of all these frolics, the searing intensity of the extended Adagio from The Age of Gold reminds us of the other, tragic side of Shostakovich.

Andrew Litton and the Singapore Symphony Orchestra lavish more care and subtlety on these pieces than the quality of invention in some of the music maybe deserves, additionally flattered by BIS’s spacious recording – though the Jazz Suite might have more bite in a drier acoustic. Still, this is a superior collection for those who relish this lighter, sometimes naughtier side of Shostakovich.

-- BBC Music Magazine

In 2019, Alexandre and Jean-Jacques Kantorow’s recording of the last three piano concertos by Camille Saint-Saëns earned the highest praise around the world, including a Diapason d’or de l’année, Editor’s Choice in Gramophone and top marks and recommendations from the leading German web sites Klassik Heute and Klassik.com. The Kantorows’ orchestra of choice was the Finnish ensemble Tapiola Sinfonietta, and they have now returned to Helsinki to record not only Saint-Saëns’ first two concertos, but all of the remaining works for piano and orchestra.

Presented on this amply filled disc, the program spans 33 years, the earliest work being Concerto No. 1, regarded as the first significant French piano concerto and written by a 23-year old composer. Ten years later, in 1868, Saint-Saëns composed the Concerto in G minor, a work which at first met with consternation although Liszt – who was present at the first performance – thoroughly approved of it. The work, which begins with the soloist playing what resembles the improvisations of an organist, soon became popular however, and remains one of Saint-Saëns’ best-known works. The shorter pieces which make up the rest of the program were written between 1884 and 1891, and could be said to reveal different aspects of the composer: Wedding Cake was written as a wedding present to a close friend, in Rhapsodie d’Auvergne Saint-Saeëns explored French folk music, while Africa is a piece of pure Orientalism, reflecting his lasting affection for North Africa.

REVIEWS:

What amazed me about young Alexandre Kantorow’s performance was the intensity of the opening cadenza and the subsequent tutti passages where it’s hard to imagine that it’s a chamber orchestra we’re hearing! His treatment of the soloist’s role is always powerful but never lapses into brashness.

All the fill-ups are lovely, but for me the most gorgeous was the Wedding Cake Caprice. The performances have been brilliantly captured and are presented in SACD format.

-- Limelight

The prospect of a recording of any of Saint-Saëns’s works for piano and orchestra is always a delightful one. You know you are in for an hour or more of music that lifts the spirits with its joie de vivre and inexhaustible supply of memorable ideas. The prospect is enhanced, on this occasion, by the same soloist, orchestra and conductor who gave us Concertos Nos 3, 4 and 5 back in the long-ago pre-pandemic days...

There is a palpable exuberance and joy in the way these works come across, none more so in the four concertante works for piano and orchestra, the effervescent Wedding Cake caprice, Rhapsodie d’Auvergne (an early use of French folk song, years ahead of d’Indy and Canteloube), Allegro appassionato (not the better-known work for cello with the same title) and Africa (who else was using North African folk music at this time?).

The album also includes the woefully neglected Piano Concerto No 1, with its opening horn call reminding us of the end of Chopin’s Second Piano Concerto. If the rousing finale doesn’t hook you, then try the haunting slow movement with its prescient passages not only of its successor but of the kind of impressionistic writing that anticipates Ravel by half a century.

It’s a terrific programme – unique for a single disc, so far as I know – clocking in at 85 minutes, and another feather in the cap of the gifted soloist and his partners. The recording offers an exemplary balance between piano and orchestra in a realistic acoustic[.]

-- Gramophone

Yolanda Kondonassis writes: FIVE MINUTES for Earth is a project that both celebrates our planet and illuminates our challenge to preserve it. In 2020, I asked each of the composers featured in this collection if they would consider contributing a work for solo harp of approximately five minutes in length that expresses a powerful experience inspired by Earth in one of its many conditions or atmospheres. I was overwhelmed by the generosity of immediate responses and set about assembling this labor-of-love project. The endeavor quickly expanded to include a live, multi-media concert, fifteen unique videos for each track, a separate published collection of Earth-inspired solos for younger harpists, and most importantly, the opportunity for harpists all over the world to perform these innovative, Earth-inspired works for solo harp by some of today’s most lauded composers; in doing so, every verified performance of any of the works from the FIVE MINUTES for Earth collection, anywhere in the world, will result in a monetary contribution to a recognized earth conservation organization, sponsored by my non-profit organization, Earth at Heart. FIVE MINUTES for Earth is also a metaphor for the urgent and compressed timeframe that remains for our global community to embrace and implement solutions to our fast-growing environmental crisis.” 

REVIEW:

In 2020 harpist Yolanda Kondonassis asked each of the composers featured in this collection to consider writing a short solo harp piece that expresses “a powerful experience inspired by Earth in one of its many conditions or atmospheres.” Needless to say, the musical results prove as diverse as the planet’s ecosystems.

Takuma Itoh’s new-agey Kohola Sings shows how one can imitate a humpback whale song on a harp. For Hear the Dust Blow, Michael Daugherty checks his customary dazzle at the door and channels Roy Harris in slow motion. On Hearing Nightbirds at Dusk showcases Aaron Jay Kernis’ textural sensitivity and harmonic refinement at their best.

Chen Yi’s Dark Mountains offers wild contrasts in texture and touch. Reena Esmail’s Inconvenient Wounds utilizes a wide array of evocative scraping effects, while the subtle microtonal writing throughout Keith Fitch’s “as Earth dreams” mesmerizes. Sparsely deployed melodies and murmuring repeated notes hold attention throughout Zhou Long’s Green.

Perhaps Stephen Hartke’s Fault Line is the collection’s most probing, dramatic, discreetly resourceful, and least formulaic work: a substantial conclusion to a beautifully engineered contemporary harp collection that offers something for every musical taste. Well worth hearing.

-- ClassicsToday.com

Abundant though it is, César Franck’s vocal music (operas, sacred music, oratorios, mélodies) does not occupy a prominent place in the current repertory. His instrumental compositions – headed by the Violin Sonata in A major and followed by the organ works – represent virtually all that today’s audiences and musicians know of his output. Yet the mélodies and vocal duets, neglected by performers and publishers alike, deserve to be plucked from oblivion, both for their own sake and for their place in the history of French music. The alluring voices of Tassis Christoyannis and Véronique Gens immerse the listener in the atmosphere of the nineteenth-century Parisian salons and the mélodies performed there. The composer and organist César Franck, famed for his instrumental music, proves himself equally skilled in setting poems by Musset, Hugo, Chateaubriand, Daudet and Dumas. This first complete recording of his works for voice and piano ranges over his entire creative life.

REVIEWS:

Of Franck’s overlooked works, probably none are more so than his mélodies (songs). Now, with this new release, Bru Zane provide what is described as the first complete recording of Franck’s works for voice and piano. This collection of 22 mélodies and 6 duos range throughout most of Franck’s compositional life, commencing in 1843 when he was just out of his teens with Robin Gray and Le Sylphe through to 1889 with Les Cloches du soir and La Procession written close to the end of his life. For his melodies, Franck elected to set French texts headed by Victor Hugo with six and also François-René de Chateaubriand, Alphonse Daudet, Alexandre Dumas, Joseph Méry and others.

Bru Zane has entrusted this Franck collection to Greek baritone Tassis Christoyannis and American pianist Jeff Cohen...Christoyannis shines throughout for his reliably warm and appealing tone coupled with the responsive accompaniment from Cohen.

In the set of 6 Duos Christoyannis is partnered by renowned French soprano Véronique Gens who also sings a single mélodie...Her voice remains in outstanding condition and dependably attractive, displaying a special gift for expression. Written in 1888 the 6 Duos, settings of text by five different writers, best evokes the atmosphere of the Parisian salon in the Belle Époque. Christoyannis [has] ease of delivery and Gens[,] engaging charm... 

Sound engineer Matteo Costa has achieved splendid clarity and balance between singers and piano. It’s hard to fault the presentation of Bru Zane releases and this album is no exception. In the accompanying booklet there are a pair of essays Another side to César Franck by Alexandre Dratwicki and The Songs and Duets of César Franck by Jean-Philippe Navarre. There is also detailed and helpful information given for each of the twenty-eight songs/duets together with several reproductions of artworks and documents of the period. The French texts provided with English translations alongside are invaluable.

Beautifully performed, recorded and presented, this album of the complete Songs and Duets of César Franck is an appealing addition to the catalogue.

--MusicWeb International (Michael Cookson)

Following his ‘glorious’ Shostakovich concertos recording which was named a BBC Music Magazine Concerto Choice, Simon Trpčeski releases his first solo piano album for Linn. Hailed for his powerful virtuosity, deeply expressive approach and charismatic stage presence, the pianist has recorded five sets of variations by Mozart, Brahms, and Beethoven. In addition to Mozart’s simple, elegant Variations on Salve tu Domine, and his practically unknown Variations on Come un agnello, the recital includes Brahms’s multi-layered, highly romantic Variations on a Theme by Robert Schumann, Op. 9, plus Beethoven’s Variations on the Russian Dance, whose classical style belies the composer’s quintessential fierceness. Beethoven’s substantial Variations on an Original Theme in C minor, whose eight-measure theme based on a descending chromatic bass sets off a whirlwind of uninterrupted variations, draws the recital to a close. The wide range of emotions expressed in these variations showcase Trpčeski’s own extraordinary range.

Shortlisted for the Gramophone Awards!

Following her triumphs on the stages of the Salzburg and Bayreuth festivals and at Covent Garden, Asmik Grigorian now belongs to the world’s vocal elite. She joins Alpha Classics for several projects and presents here her very first recital, devoted to one of her favorite composers, Sergei Rachmaninov. This album, titled Dissonance, assembles vocal works carefully chosen by the soprano for the contrasts they generate when grouped together: ‘Most of Rachmaninov’s songs really call for operatic power. In fact, he wrote mini-operas lasting a few minutes.’ While this album is called Dissonance, in reference to the ‘internal conflicts’ that punctuate these songs, the duo formed by the Lithuanian singer and her pianist compatriot Lukas Geniušas is one of total consonance!

"[Grigorian's] powers of expression are as fierce in front of the microphone as they are on the stage...Her tone at its fullest, all velvet-wrapped steel, gleams with enough edge to cut through anything a full-throttle Rachmaninov piano part can throw at it, and Geniušas does not give the impression of holding back[.] As a duet partner, he’s just soloistic enough, with an attentive ear for the detail of what Grigorian wants to achieve with the shape of a phrase.

"The program, in a sequence chosen by the performers, ranges from some of the Op. 4 songs Rachmaninov wrote as a student to his Op. 34. Some last barely 90 seconds, but here they still seem like a scene rather than merely a song – a panoramic view, not a snapshot. Grigorian and Genušias will make you wonder why you don’t hear them more often." -The Guardian

"There’s a palpable energy between the [performers] on this recording. [Grigorian] unfurls her otherworldly quality—what Barrie Kosky once called 'Planet Grigorian'—like a banner; [Geniušas] provides the breeze to hold it aloft. By no means are the songs on Dissonance calm or gentle, but Grigorian and Geniušas handle them lovingly." -Van Magazine

Written almost 100 years ago, The Thief of Bagdad is one of the greatest ever film scores and incredibly, has never been recorded untill l now - FHR are honored to be able to release the first recording of this wonderful score. Recorded in 2019, this recording features one of greatest European orchestras, the Frankfurt Radio Symphony, along with conductor Mark Fitz-Gerald who has an unparalleled reputation for performing the very specialized task of accompanying silent films live with orchestra. The score was written by the American composer Mortimer Wilson at the specific request of the film's main star actor Douglas Fairbanks. The Thief of Bagdad is now widely considered one of the great silent films and Fairbanks's greatest work. For the first time, Fairbanks recognized the composer as a creative collaborator from the start in the overall composition of his film (Wilson spent many hours in the projection room working out precise timings for every scene). Wilson was essentially a classical composer. Indeed, you can hear influences of Puccini's aria Vissi d'arte from Tosca, hints of Wagner's Valkyrie, along with moments of Alban Berg, Reger and Tchaikovsky. Fairbanks biographer Jeffrey Vance writes, "An epic romantic fantasy-adventure inspired by several of the Arabian Nights tales, The Thief of Bagdad is the greatest artistic triumph of Fairbanks's career. The superb visual design, spectacle, imaginative splendor, and visual effects, along with his bravura performance (leading a cast of literally thousands), all contribute to making this his masterpiece."

This album celebrates dance music, from waltz to tango, from slow foxtrot to quickstep, from samba to jive. Seventy years of music rooted in the 1920s, assembled by the enthusiastic musicians of the Ludwig Orchestra, who have taken to playing them at festivals, alongside their usual programs devoted to Stravinsky or Schoenberg, to get the audience dancing – a phenomenal success story that now becomes an album, Dance with me!

For this project, the Ludwig musicians naturally turned to a partner dear to their hearts, Barbara Hannigan, with whom they recorded Crazy Girl Crazy (Alpha 293), which received a Grammy Award in 2018, in collaboration with composer-arranger Bill Elliott. The trio has reformed here: ‘I was thrilled to go back to this aspect of my musical roots, to reawaken special memories of singing and playing keyboards with a dance band in Nova Scotia’, says Barbara Hannigan. ‘Couples were smiling and dancing to tunes like Moonlight Serenade and In the Mood with a few polkas thrown in towards the end of the evening.’ The Canadian soprano performs four songs, including "I could have danced all night," "Moonlight Serenade," and Kurt Weill’s famous and moving "Youkali."

More musicians round out the guest-list for the party – the trumpeter Lucienne Renaudin-Vary and the Berlage Saxophone Quartet. Dance with me: an invitation to feel happy and light-hearted, quite an achievement these days . . .

REVIEW:

The tautness of the Ludwig Orchestra’s playing – augmented in four dances by the Berlage Saxophone Quartet – echoes that of the best bands of the big band era, and the arrangements are not only effective but cleverly detailed.

-- Gramophone

After the album Bach, Little Books, harpsichordist Francesco Corti continues his collaboration with Arcana with a 2-album recording entirely dedicated to George Frideric Handel. At the center of the project are the eight “Great” suites. These masterpieces were the composer’s first published set, and are a clear testimony to his virtuosity at the keyboard. Their characteristically diversified styles reflect not only the mélange of national traditions assimilated by the young composer, but also his phenomenal improvisatory talent. Moreover, the attraction of these pieces lies in their melodic and rhythmic affinity to the world of singing and orchestral writing, Händel’s strongest interests. Arrangements of Handel’s operatic overtures and arias started circulating early in his career in England, and in his later years he was known to perform his overtures on the keyboard himself. Corti designs a program showcasing the composer’s brilliant treatment of the instrument, choosing to complement the “Great” Suites with a selection of transcriptions from Händel’s own hand and from his close musical circle.

REVIEWS:

It’s possible that Francesco Corti’s distinction as a conductor and a collaborative keyboard artist overshadows his considerable gifts as a harpsichord soloist. For example, whoever hears about his 2010 Bach Partitas released by Berlin Classics, a terrific “sleeper” edition if there ever was one? All this is to say that collectors looking for a reference-worthy harpsichord version of Handel’s eight “great” Suites should consider Corti. Although some listeners may take issue with the slightly distant and diffuse engineering, I find the sound quality attractively rounded, resonant, and warm, as if you’re hearing Corti’s 1738 Christian Vater model instrument in an intimate concert venue.

Certainly the sonics enhance Corti’s wonderfully freewheeling way with Suite No. 1’s improvisatory Prelude and excitingly boisterous Gigue. Suite No. 2’s opening Adagio and Suite No. 3’s concluding Air amount to a masterclass in how to organically integrate ornaments. Suite No. 4’s fugal opening Allegro attains bracing clarity due to Corti’s subtle agogic phrasings, while the ubiquitous Suite No. 5 “Harmonious Blacksmith” variations are more about cumulative build than facile virtuosity.

Despite Corti’s headlong pace for Suite No. 6’s Gigue finale, the rapid phrases have plenty of breathing room. And Suite No. 7 ‘s familiar Passacaille manages to convey both pomp and vulnerability at the same time.

Equally inspired performances of overture transcriptions flesh out this release. I especially love the imaginative registration shifts in Teseo’s Allegro section, plus Corti’s varied approaches to arpeggiating chords in Il pastor fido’s adagio opening section. For all of the thought and scholarship informing Corti’s interpretations, they consistently convey vitality, spontaneity, and forward sweep, without the least hint of self-awareness or pedanticism. Without a doubt, the title “Winged Hands” befits this fabulous release.

-- ClassicsToday.com (Jed Distler)

Claudio Santoro was one of Brazil’s most eminent and influential composers. Over a 50-year period, he wrote a cycle of 14 symphonies that is widely acclaimed as the most significant cycle of its kind ever written in Brazil. The two selected works in this inaugural volume of the first complete recording of his symphonies focus on the 1950s, a period when Santoro sought a more direct and communicative idiom using Brazilian elements. His use of folk-based material is nonetheless highly creative, sometimes indeed abstract, as in key moments of Symphony No. 5. The Symphony No. 7 is one of his most complex and intense works, a celebration of his country’s new capital Brasília in music of striking modernity.

REVIEWS:

Claudio Santoro (1919-89) composed fourteen symphonies over the course of about fifty years, making him one of the most noteworthy twentieth-century Brazilian composers in large forms. On evidence here, they are uneven in quality, with the problems occurring when you might expect – in the larger, more complex outer movements. I’m thinking especially of the Fifth Symphony, whose opening Andante mosso–Allegro moderato consists of a series of crescendos leading, essentially, nowhere. The thematic material isn’t too memorable either. The situation improves in the central scherzo and slow movement (a set of variations), but the same “sound and fury signifying nothing” returns in the finale. Santoro’s style incorporates obvious Brazilian elements without ever turning blatantly “folksy.” Clearly the idiom is his own.

This is even more evident in the Seventh Symphony, subtitled “Brasilia,” and designed for the dedication of the country’s new capital city. A more ambitious and successful work than the Fifth, this time with the scherzo played third rather than second, the music evolves from the relative harmonic simplicity of its opening to a more challenging language in the finale–from rural to urban, you might say. Whether this was Santoro’s intention I have no idea, but I like the result. There’s a good bit of stomping and pounding in this symphony–indeed in both works–with some enthusiastic use of the bass drum, but it all seems to be part and parcel of the music’s boldness and energy, and its confrontational gestural language never sounds merely gratuitous.

Certainly the Goiás Philharmonic under Neil Thomson has every reason to be proud of its achievement here. This is not easy music to play. Santoro’s writing for the violins, in particular, sounds positively wicked, with lots of passage-work at high speed, often reaching upwards into the nether regions of the instrument. The scherzos too offer plenty of rhythmic kinks to keep everyone alert, and the crispness of the orchestra’s response can only provoke admiration.

-- ClassicsToday.com (David Hurwitz)

Neil Thomson conducts strongly committed readings of these fine works, and Goiás Philharmonic Orchestra play with confidence. The recording is very fine and the notes are exemplary. This first instalment of the Naxos cycle of Santoro’s symphonies augurs well indeed.

-- MusicWeb International

The journey is navigated with aplomb by Neil Thomson and the Goias Philarmonic Orchestra. Deftly woven counterpoint is contrasted with off-beat rhythms and expansive melodies that showcase each section of the orchestra to effect.

-- BBC Music Magazine