Classical Music

Classical Music

Mark Wigglesworth's cycle of the symphonies of Dmitri Shostakovich has been evolving gradually since its beginnings in 1997. First out was No. 7, the 'Leningrad Symphony', which Classic CD Magazine described as 'a magnificent release in all respects'. Since then, Wigglesworth has offered us a Ninth, Twelfth and Fourteenth all designated 'Benchmark Recordings' by BBC Music Magazine at the time of their respective releases, a 'Babi Yar' (No. 13) described as 'probably the most convincing Thirteenth to have appeared in the West' in International Record Review, an account of the Fourth in which the conductor, according to the DSCH Journal, proved himself to be 'unquestionably outstanding'... The list could go on, with the general verdict being that the cycle has offered constantly interesting and often thought-provoking interpretations and striking performances. Wigglesworth started his traversal with the BBC National Orchestra of Wales, recording Symphonies Nos 5, 6, 7, 10 and 14 with that orchestra, and in 2005 moved across the English Channel to continue the project with the Netherlands Radio Philharmonic Orchestra. It is the Dutch ensemble that on this last instalment of the series perform the First and the Fifteenth, the alpha and omega of a symphonic production that spans almost 50 years of the composer's life and more than perhaps any other body of musical works reflects world events - the Communist revolution, World War II, Stalinist oppression - and their creator's reactions to them.

Carolyn Sampson has enjoyed notable worldwide successes in repertoire ranging from early baroque to present day, in opera, in concert and on disc. Nevertheless, the present recording is, as she writes in her introduction in the CD booklet, something of a début – her first recital disc of songs with piano. When choosing repertoire, she collaborated closely with her pianist, Joseph Middleton and together they chose settings of poems on a floral theme in Russian, English, French and German. The selected songs represent a great diversity, through their different musical styles and affects.

Classical Music

In 1728, the recently appointed court Kapellmeister Johan Helmich Roman was approached by Count Golovin, the Russian ambassador in Stockholm. Golovin was organizing a celebration of the recent coronation in Moscow of Tsar Peter II, and naturally wanted music to add to the festivities. His six years in London – where he made the acquaintance of Handel among others – and subsequent experience as assistant court Kapellmeister, made Roman the obvious choice for the count. The result was Golovinmusiken (The Golovin Music), an autograph score consisting of 45 movements of varying lengths. These are the facts as we know them, and everything else is conjecture: Roman’s manuscript lacks vital instructions regarding instrumentation, dynamics or tempi, and although the first three movements are in four parts, the rest are in three parts or (in a few cases) two. When a performing edition was being prepared in the 1980s, the editors came to the conclusion that the material was in fact incomplete, and a second violin part was added. It was also deemed that the order of the movements was probably not the one in which they would have been performed. The edition in question formed the basis for a partial recording of the work, comprising 22 movements. 290 years after Count Golovin’s feast, as Dan Laurin and his colleagues in Höör Barock recorded the complete work, their approach was a different one. Making use of a total of 18 different instruments – from sopranino recorder and oboe da caccia to bassoon, strings and baroque guitar – and featuring highly imaginative continuo playing from Anna Paradiso at the harpsichord, their performance sounds as full and varied as one might wish for, without any added parts. Laurin’s performing version also follows the order of Roman’s score, creating a number of smaller suites out of this greater whole that a wider audience now can enjoy for the very first time.

Bach Collegium Japan and Masaaki Suzuki’s fifth volume in their commendable survey of Bach’s vocal music with a collection of his festive secular Birthday cantatas, composed to honor a broad array of personages and including pieces presented as musical dramas where the soloists embody characters from Greek mythology, here sung by Joanne Lunn, soprano; Robin Blaze, counter-tenor; Makoto Sakurada, tenor; Dominik Wörner, bass.

Classical Music

This is a hybrid Super Audio CD playable on both regular and Super Audio CD players.

REVIEW:

All of the discs in this set have been reviewed individually, and in detail. Still, it's worth pointing out that this is unquestionably one of the great Beethoven cycles, and on SACD there's certainly none better. Osmo Vänskä manages to have the best of both worlds--an interpretive perspective enhanced by the latest scholarship, as performed by a great orchestra on a mission. And this is exactly what Beethoven needs: a point of view, and total commitment. There are no weak performances here. In the "Eroica" I was just a touch disappointed in the first movement when Vänskä's pursuit of the barely audible pianissimo threatened to become a mannerism, but that is about the only criticism possible to level at this set.

His Fifth blazes; the Seventh offers the apotheosis of excitement that never spins out of control. The early symphonies have charm and humor in abundance. The Fourth and Eighth reveal Beethoven's masterly command of movement and proportion with effortless enthusiasm. In the Sixth we find a perfect balance between programmatic description and symphonic logic. It's all capped by one of the great Ninths, with a perfectly timed Adagio and a gloriously sung finale. If you haven't been purchasing these discs as they were released, then get the box. It's one of the few cycles that maintains the highest standards all the way through, and the sonics are uniformly stunning.

--David Hurwitz, ClassicsToday.com

Classical Music

For those who have followed the career of Kalevi Aho (for instance through the more than 20 discs of his music released on BIS), it will be clear that he enjoys large-scale projects. One such project has been his 'oboe project', composing works in every genre for the instrument. These plans can be said to have begun soon after the Sonata for oboe and piano included here, composed in 1984-85 and thus possibly the first such work for this combination by a Finnish composer. The project received fresh impetus in 2002, when Aho encountered the eminent Belgian oboist Piet Van Bockstal. As a result he composed his Oboe Concerto, premièred by Bockstal in 2008, a work in which Aho wanted to explore fresh directions for tonality as well as creating orchestral music with a more powerful rhythmic pulse and a richer sound-world. As a result the Concerto employs scales from Arabic classical music as a melodic basis in some of its five movements, and also features the Arabic darabuka and African djembe (two types of goblet drum). Although there is no oboe included in the orchestral score, Aho also specifies the use of two of its rarely heard relatives: the oboe d'amore and the heckelphone (a baritone oboe). Three years after the Concerto, the composer returned to his oboe project, and completed it by writing a solo piece for the instrument. Dedicated to Piet Van Bockstal, the 10-minute Solo IX also forms part of another of Aho's projects - a series of large-scale, virtuosic solo works for various instruments. Together with a number of chamber works for different constellations, this disc sums up Kalevi Aho's oboe project, in expert performances by Piet Van Bockstal, supported by the pianist Yutaka Oya, and by Martyn Brabbins conducting the Lahti Symphony Orchestra, for which Aho has composed so much of his music.

PAUL HINDEMITH FRANK P. ZIMMERMANN, VIOLIN;*FRANKFURT RADIO SYM. ORCH./P.JARVIENRICO PACE, PIANO ** CTO. FOR VIOLIN & ORCH.(1939*)SONATA FOR SOLO VLN, OP.31 NO.2,"ES IST SO SCHONES WETTER DRAUBEN';SONATA IN E FLAT FOR VIOLIN& PIANO, OP.11 NO.1; SONATA IN E FOR VIOLIN & PNO. (1935)SONATA IN C FOR VIOLIN & PN. (1939)**

Classical Music

Import Hybrid-SACD pressing.

Classical Music

This lighthearted music is given wings by the flutist Mikael Helasvuo and guitarist Jukka Savijoki, both from Finland, in performances that were praised at the time of the original release – as three single discs – in for instance Classical Guitar, whose reviewer wrote, “Helasvuo and Savijoki achieve an ensemble that at times reaches near perfection … this is what good chamber music playing is all about.”

Composed over a period of 14 years, John Pickard's Gaia Symphony and Eden are scored for the standard ‘British’ brass band, with expanded percussion in the case of the 65 minute 'Gaia' symphony. Both works in different ways mirror concerns regarding the world and nature, and their relationship with the human species. Eikanger-Bjørsvik Musikklag from Norway, one of today’s leading brass bands and the first non-British band to claim the European brass band title, perform these two demanding scores.

Classical Music

This is a hybrid Super Audio CD playable on both regular and Super Audio CD players.



REVIEW:

Vanska's Sibelius is all about clarity - of rhythm, of texture, of intention. It is zealously unfussy and entirely without exaggeration. But it can stop you in your tracks. One just knows that the ear-pricking clarity throughout these performances is of Vanska's and not the balance engineer's making.

The suddenness of the hush Vanska manages as we enter the "no-man's-land a few pages into the Third changes the way the air moves in the Minnesota Hall. There really isn't much to say about this performance (of the Sixth), it just feels perfectly balanced - in music as in nature. And the work's evaporating final chord is startling. As for the eleventh-hour resolution into C Major in the Seventh, it is as emphatic as it is precipitous.

– Gramophone

Classical Music

As the hub of a fledgling British Empire, London around 1710 was burgeoning with new wealth and offered the perfect setting for operatic entrepreneurs eager to spread the latest Italian fashions. It was thus a city of opportunity for Handel, fresh from spending five years in Italy, but also for many other touring musicians including Arcangelo Corelli, Francesco Maria Veracini and Francesco Geminiani. This recording unveils a portrait of the chameleon Handel, emerging in the panache of his early Italian-styled Amadigi, reaching maturity in the 'English operatic' Hercules and arriving finally in the perennial melodic grace of Theodora, his penultimate oratorio. Extracts from these works, in which the young Norwegian mezzo-soprano Tuva Semmingsen displays both vocal agility and a wide-ranging emotional palette, are interspersed with instrumental works by Handel's Italian contemporaries. Corelli's Concerto grosso in D major, from the celebrated Opus 6, and Geminiani's 'La Follia' in D minor - incidentally a reworking of Corelli's famous violin sonata - both illustrate Italian instrumental music at its most sumptuous, in colourful and dynamic performances by the Norwegian period band Barokksolistene. For further variety, the leader and artistic director of the ensemble, Bjarte Eike, also performs a chamber work by Veracini, who visited London regularly during some three decades in the early 18th century. The Sonata in A major was published in England in 1744, and it would be quite tempting to interpret the use in it of a Scottish tune, Tweed's side, as merely a clever marketing device to charm a local audience, were it not that the tune, and the composition itself, was so attractive.

This is a hybrid Super Audio CD playable on both regular and Super Audio CD players.

The two works on this disc perfectly illustrate a particular type of secular cantata, the so-called ‘dramma per musica’. In such works the libretto is constructed dramatically, and the singers embody various roles, such as gods and other characters from antiquity, and allegorical figures. The parallel with opera is apparent, although the ‘drammi per musica’ do without any scenic element. Bach primarily used the form in works intended for princely tributes or academic festivities: educated audiences could be expected to recognize the characters and literary traditions involved. Both cantatas recorded here are ‘academic’ cantatas, composed in honour of eminent members of the faculty at the University of Leipzig. BWV 205 celebrates the name day of Dr August Friedrich Müller (3rd August 1725), and takes us to Aeolia, where Aeolus, the King of the Winds, holds the mighty autumn storms captive until it is time to let them loose on the world. To prevent any disruption of the celebrations for Dr Müller, the goddess Pallas, among others, entreats Aeolus to keep the storms in check for a while longer. Grudgingly he concedes to her wish, but only after singing an aria full of splendid bluster (Wie will ich lustig lachen…). One year later, Bach composed the cantata BWV 207 for the appointment of Dr Gottlieb Kortte as ‘professor extraordinarius’. The young jurist enjoyed particular popularity among the young academics, who probably were the commissioners of the cantata. In this work it is virtues such as Diligence and Honour which take musical shape, singing the praise of the eminent academic. The cantata closes with a chorus, Kortte lebe, Kortte blühe!, wishing the new professor a long and flourishing life – unfortunately to little avail, as Dr Kortte died only five years later, at the age of 33.

Conceived thirty years apart, both works on the present disc came into being at difficult times in the life of Arnold Schoenberg. Emotional stress caused by a marital crisis around 1907-1908 is often claimed to have contributed to the break with tonality that the Second String Quartet represents – in the course of the work Schoenberg moves from the post-Wagnerian chromaticism of Late Romanticism to atonality, with the final movement lacking a key signature altogether. Another unusual feature is the inclusion of a soprano in the two last movements. Schoenberg himself later wrote: 'I was inspired by poems of Stefan George, the German poet ... and, surprisingly, without any expectation on my part, these songs showed a style quite different from everything I had written before.'

Almost thirty years later, in 1936, the String Quartet No. 4 was one of the first works that Schoenberg composed in the U.S.A. after having been forced into exile by the threat of the Nazi regime in Germany. He had left Europe in 1933, but the first years in his new home country had been taxing, with health problems and a difficult work schedule involving teaching in both Boston and New York. If the second quartet is a key work of musical modernism, pointing towards an as yet unknown future, String Quartet No. 4 rests securely on the principles of twelve-tone composition that Schoenberg had developed during the intervening years – but makes use of these principles in a somewhat freer, more relaxed manner than his previous twelve-tone works. The two works are given full-blooded performances by the Gringolts Quartet, joined by the Swedish soprano Malin Hartelius in the Second String Quartet.

Classical Music

One of Sweden’s leading composers, Rolf Martinsson had an international breakthrough with the trumpet concerto Bridge, composed for Håkan Hardenberger who has also recorded it (BIS-1208). Martinsson has since gone on to compose solo works for performers including Martin Fröst, Anne Sofie von Otter and Christian Lindberg, and enjoys a particularly close collaboration with the soprano Lisa Larsson. The two started working together in 2011, devising a soprano version of Orchestral Songs on Poems by Emily Dickinson, and Lisa Larsson has since performed Martinsson’s music at more than a hundred concerts to date. A number of leading orchestras have commissioned works from Rolf Martinsson, including the Royal Stockholm Philharmonic Orchestra for which he composed his Concerto for Orchestra. In descriptions of Martinsson’s music, words such as ‘lush’, ‘colorful’ and ‘cinematic’ are often used – qualities which have proved attractive to a large audience, as well as to a number of eminent conductors. Sakari Oramo and Andrew Manze, also heard on this release, are among those who have championed works by Rolf Martinsson, in Sweden as well as internationally.