It was when Delphine Constantin-Reznik took up the post as harpist in the Norrköping Symphony Orchestra that she first came across the name Anton Pratté, well-known in his lifetime as a harpist and composer. Her research into the music and activities of this forgotten master has now resulted in the very first recording of any of his numerous compositions for the harp. Anton Edvard Pratté was born in Bohemia into a family that ran a touring puppet theatre. He came to Sweden as an adolescent, and soon made a name for himself, performing music of his own as well as by others.

Pratté gave concerts across Sweden, as well as in Norway and Finland, and in the 1840s even went on an extensive tour of Europe, performing in Berlin (where members of the Prussian royal family were in the audience), Vienna and Prague. But much of his life was spent in the area around Norrköping where he taught the daughters of wealthy landowners and for a while conducted the local orchestra society – the forerunner of the Norrköping Symphony Orchestra heard in the Grand Concert which opens the present disc. This is followed by two works for solo harp, both making use of traditional tunes from Sweden and Norway respectively.

Celebrating the 130th anniversary of Sergei Prokofiev (1891 - 1953), the present box set brings together recordings of his seven symphonies made by Andrew Litton and the Bergen Philharmonic Orchestra between 2012 and 2017. Released on separate discs, the series has received acclaim from international reviewers, variously highlighting the orchestra ('Bergen Philharmonic plays gorgeously... ', ClassicsToday. Com), the conductor ('It is clear that Litton has a deep understanding of Prokofiev's complex, protean style... ', MusicWeb-International) and the recordings themselves ('BIS's blockbuster sound... ', Fanfare). The symphonies appear with their original couplings, including the popular suites from the film score to Lieutenant Kijé and the ballet The Love for Three Oranges. As an added bonus, the set includes the team's very first recording for BIS: an innovative and highly praised version of Prokofiev's three suites from Romeo and Juliet, with the 20 movements reordered to follow the ballet score.

Excerpts of reviews from previously released volumes included in this set:

Prokofiev: Symphonies Nos. 1-3

In sum these performances, engineered with warmth, clarity and impact, rank with best; and having all three symphonies on a single disc makes this release something of a bargain as well–even at full price.

– ClassicsToday.com (10/10; David Hurwitz)

This is a perfect disc; absolutely everything goes right. The revised, enlarged version of the Fourth Symphony can sound bloated and too long for its material. This performance, by contrast, has passion, color, and drive aplenty. Especially in the outer movements, you’d never know that the leaner, meaner first version exists, and no praise can be higher than that.

The Seventh has always been, for me at least, a better work than many commentators allow. It contains, for example, one of Prokofiev’s best lyrical melodies in its first movement and finale. The waltz-like scherzo is wholly delightful, the slow third movement touching. Prokofiev often indulges a deliberate simplicity, and Litton takes him at his word, never for a moment lapsing into artifice or affectation.

The finale, which we get to hear twice complete, once with each of its endings, is particularly breezy and exhilarating. Through it all the Bergen Philharmonic plays gorgeously, and the SACD sonics are state-of-the-art. A wonderful release.

– ClassicsToday.com (10/10; David Hurwitz)

Previous installments of the Beethoven sonata cycle from Frank Peter Zimmermann and Martin Helmchen have met with wide acclaim. Described as ‘conversations by a perfect instrumental pairing’ in BBC Music Magazine, the albums have received a Choc in Classica and the recommendation of German website klassik.com, respectively. This the third and final volume brings together Beethoven's last three works in the genre, composed between 1801 and 1812. The center-piece is the ninth sonata, the famed ‘Kreutzer Sonata’. 

That Baïlèro, a shepherd’s song from the highlands of Auvergne sung in the Occitan dialect of the area, should become a favorite with singers ranging from Victoria de los Angeles to Sarah Brightman by way of Renée Fleming and Karita Mattila, is all because of Marie-Joseph Canteloube de Malaret. As a budding composer in Paris in the 1900s, Canteloube was unable to interest himself in the various musical cliques and currents. Instead he looked for inspiration in Auvergne in central France where he was born, starting to collect the songs of the farmers and shepherds that lived in the mountainous region. But he did so as a composer rather than a musicologist, and between 1923 and 1954 he published a total of thirty Chants d’Auvergne, arranged, harmonized and sumptuously orchestrated. The result is, one might say, idealized folk music: Canteloube largely respects the melodic line of the originals, but adds instrumental introductions, interludes and postludes, and gives an important role to the woodwind section. For the present disc, Carolyn Sampson and Pascal Rophé have selected 25 of the songs – ranging from love songs and lullabies to working songs and laments. They perform them together with Tapiola Sinfonietta, bringing sparkle to Canteloube's luxurious scores halfway between the impressionism of Debussy and the bucolic lyricism of d'Indy.

Following a visit to Wagner in Bayreuth in 1873, Anton Bruckner dedicated his most recent symphony, No.3 in D minor, to ‘the unattainable world-famous noble master of poetry and music’ and would later refer to the work as his ‘Wagner Symphony’. Among Bruckner’s symphonies, it is the one with the most complicated genesis: the first version was followed by substantial revisions and it exists in two more versions, from 1877/78 and 1888/89. The first version was never performed in Bruckner’s lifetime – in fact, more than a century passed before the work was heard in the form that Wagner first knew and called ‘a masterpiece’. This is the version that Thomas Dausgaard has chosen to perform, as he and the Bergen Philharmonic Orchestra follow up on their recording of the composer’s Sixth Symphony, praised in Fanfare for having ‘all of Bruckner’s splendor and tenderness without any excess baggage’. Dausgaard explains the reason for his choice as follows: ‘The original version stands as a monolith … what you go through is musically so strong, swinging between timelessness and drive, despair and ecstasy, divine light and hellish fire, that in the end I feel you have to let yourself go and be won over by it.’

REVIEW:

Dausgaard's Bruckner symphonies tend toward the quick side, but he has never been quite as relatively fast as he is here; his original Symphony No. 3 is more than 12 minutes faster than a version by Kent Nagano from the early 2000s, and his reading comes in even shorter than some of the recordings of Bruckner's abridged versions. This is all to the good, even for listeners who prefer heavier Bruckner to Dausgaard's rather lithe style. Dausgaard's quick tempos catch the kaleidoscope of moods, and with them, the febrile quality of Bruckner's imagination in this work, really his creative breakthrough. Dausgaard's management of his Bergen musicians is, as usual, exemplary as they skitter through the difficult passages that bedeviled the symphony's early interpreters. A high point in Dausgaard's Bruckner project.

– AllMusicGuide.com (James Manheim)

From the moment Karen Gomyo first heard Astor Piazzolla on album, at the age of fourteen, she was spellbound: ‘I had never heard such a combination of sensuality, fierceness, playfulness, sadness and nostalgia.’ As a violinist she found the role of the violin in Piazzolla’s music especially inspiring, and soon started playing it herself – first in various group combinations, and eventually together with Piazzolla’s longtime pianist Pablo Ziegler and his Tango Quartet. For the present disc she has chosen to record strings-only versions of three works originally for tango quintet (Seasons), guitar and flute (Histoire), and solo flute (Études). Piazzolla’s Cuatro Estaciones were initially conceived neither as a suite nor as a tribute to Vivaldi’s Four Seasons. Verano porteño (Summer) was composed first, as part of the incidental music for a play, with the other three following several years later. If the Seasons provide a soundtrack to the year as it unfolds in Buenos Aires, Histoire du Tango describes the development of the tango itself in four chapters – from the brothels around year 1900 to the concert halls where Piazzolla himself performed his tango nuevo. These two works frame three of Piazzolla’s Tango Études, which Karen Gomyo performs solo, while otherwise being partnered by the strings of the Orchestre National des Pays de la Loire (Seasons) and the guitarist Stephanie Jones (Histoire).

For the past ten years Rick Stotijn has been making Stockholm his second home, finding musical inspiration as well as new friends there. The present disc is a reflection of this, with existing and new repertoire involving the double bass by composers who have all at some point lived and worked in the city. The oldest work, as well as the best known, is the Concerto for Double Bass by Eduard Tubin, composed in 1948. Stotijn performs it here with the support of his own orchestra, the Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra under James Gaffigan. The other concerto on the disc was composed especially for Stotijn and for the violinist Malin Broman by Britta Byström. Infinite Rooms (2016) is a double concerto – in which the violinist switches between violin and viola – with inspiration from the Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama. It was awarded the most important Swedish composition prize, Stora Christ Johnson-priset, in 2020, and comes with three ‘Walks’, potential encores which can also serve as bridges to the next work during the concert, be it by Schubert, Bruckner or Strauss. The orchestra heard in Infinite Rooms is the Västerås Sinfonietta, conducted by Simon Crawford-Phillips, who also appears on the disc in the role of pianist: Jesper Nordin’s Piano Trio, is an adaptation by the composer for these performers, of an earlier score for violin, cello and orchestra. Closing the disc is In memoriam by Carin Malmlöf-Forssling, a brief vocalise for soprano here transcribed for the double bass.

Kalevi Aho is one of today’s most prolific composers of large-scale orchestral scores, including 17 symphonies and 32 concertos to date. Less well-known is the fact that he has also written chamber music, as well as an ever-expanding series of solo pieces – starting with Solo I for violin from 1975, the most recent in the series, for clavichord, is the 17th. Some of these pieces has originated as part of Aho’s preparations when composing a concerto for the instrument in question, while others have been written for competitions, including Solo III for flute and Solo IV for cello on the present release. This first volume of Solos gathers seven pieces in all, four of which have previously appeared as part of separate discs. Aho’s Solos share the characteristic that they pose great technical, interpretative and often also physical challenges to the performer. Most of those heard here are performed by the musicians for whom they were written, including Hiyoli Togawa (Solo XII), Piet Van Bockstal (Solo IX), Simon Reitmaier (Solo XIV) and Marie-Luise Neunecker (Solo X).

For the fourth instalment in her acclaimed Satie cycle, Noriko Ogawa has gathered music written for the stage – from the pantomime Jack in the Box (1899) to the ballet Relâche (1924) – one of Satie’s last works. Several of the pieces exist in different scorings, but the piano versions heard here are all Satie’s own. Throughout the program, what comes across strongly is the influence of music hall and cabaret; composed in 1900, Prélude de “La mort de Monsieur Mouche” even offers a hint of the ragtime, one of the first appearances of the genre in European music. Stage projects are as a rule collaborative efforts, and among Satie’s collaborators were some of the leading names of the art world at the time, including Jean Cocteau, Picasso, the Dadaist poet and painter Francis Picabia, and film director René Clair. Satie’s score Cinéma has been called one of the first synchronized film scores.

The c/o chamber orchestra is a collective of thirty young musicians from a dozen different countries. Playing without a conductor, the orchestra is dedicated to that particular collaborative process which is the essence of chamber music. For their first album, the members have chosen to highlight a genre more difficult to pin-point than one might think. Its very name, divertimento, implies that it is simply a diversion, light music for entertainment – but many of the best-known examples of the form transcend that definition. And as many composers have learned, even light-hearted music should be taken seriously: humor requires a master’s touch. The four works recorded here offer different perspectives on the genre, starting with Ibert’s seven-movement suite in which the composer constantly plays with the listener’s expectations. Some forty years before Ibert, his compatriot Émile Bernard composed a very different Divertissement. It is scored for double wind quintet, reminiscent of Mozart’s divertimenti and serenades for winds. But even though the music is melodious and carefree, the debt owed by Bernard to the German romantic composers is never far from the surface. A very special case is Bartók’s Divertimento for strings, composed just before the outbreak of World War II. The closing work on the album reunites the winds and strings of the c/o orchestra in a work written especially for this project by the American composer Michael Ippolito, who in his Divertimento pays full tribute to the contrast-rich nature of the genre.

Mark Wigglesworth recorded his cycle of Shostakovich’s symphonies between 1996 and 2010, collaborating with two different orchestras, the Netherlands Radio Philharmonic Orchestra and BBC National Orchestra of Wales. In spite of the long gestation and the change of orchestra midway, the cycle was described as one never ‘compromising its particular characteristics of high seriousness, fine detailing and a certain fierceness of articulation’ (Gramophone). Already the first instalment – Symphony No. 7, ‘Leningrad’ – raised expectations, for instance with the reviewer in The Sunday Telegraph: ‘There is plenty of competition among Shostakovich cycles, but this one will deserve serious consideration.’ And 17 years later, on the release of the final album, The Guardian could report that ‘Wigglesworth's cycle emerges as one of the finest of recent time’. What particularly impressed reviewers was Mark Wigglesworth’s faithfulness to the score and sharp ear for detail, and the structural clarity he achieved even with the most complex works – without sacrificing any of their impact and emotional power.

Excerpts from reviews ofpreviously released volumes included in this set:

Shostakovich: Symphony No. 13, "Babi Yar"

This is outstanding in every way. You only have to hear the violins’ slashing accents at figure 4 in the first movement, where the soloist sings “and fine ladies with their lacey frills shriek and poke their parasols in my face,” to know that Wigglesworth & Co. are fully attuned to the music’s expressive world. The menacing second subject, with its description of a pogrom, erupts with an impressive sense of menace, while the big climaxes in the first, third, and fourth movements are as powerful and intense as anyone could ask. Bass soloist Jan-Hendrik Rootering has the range for the part and an evenness of tone unmatched by most Russian singers, while the men of the Netherlands Radio Chorus sing as though their lives depended on it, with a genuine understanding of the words.

– ClassicsToday.com (10/10; David Hurw1tz)

Shostakovich: Symphony No. 11

Shostakovich’s Eleventh Symphony has fared well on disc, even on SACD. It doesn’t ask for much more than great playing and sound, and an interpretation that keeps the music flowing and lets the climaxes achieve the necessary intensity. Mark Wigglesworth certainly delivers in this respect. If you’ve been collecting this series, which has developed handsomely over the years, you can purchase this release with complete confidence.

– ClassicsToday.com (David Hurwitz)

Shostakovich: Symphonies Nos. 1 & 15

The performance of the First Symphony gets better as it goes. The first movement, crisp and clear though it undoubtedly is, lacks that element of exaggerated humor that it ideally needs—it’s a function perhaps of less than characterful woodwind solos combined with a slightly low-level recording. The scherzo, swift and pointed, also could do with more devilry, but the Lento movement and finale remain impressive on re-hearing.

The Fifteenth Symphony features an interesting interpretation, deliberate and deadly serious even in the lighter moments, rather like Sanderling’s for those of you who know it. The performance makes an imposing conclusion to a cycle that, quietly and without much fanfare, ranks among the best.

– ClassicsToday.com (David Hurwitz)

This album features solo keyboard arrangements of works by Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach originally scored for other instruments. In the second half of the eighteenth century the demand for keyboard music increased rapidly, as musical skills became a social requisite for young ladies of the upper classes. To provide compositions for these new keyboard players was financially profitable, but Bach also had another reason for welcoming arrangements: the keyboard instruments were his favorite medium, and he devoted himself to making them into solo instruments as important as the violin and other melody instruments. The eighteen short pieces on this well-filled disc all exist in versions for various small groups of instruments or, in some cases, for mechanical instruments such as the barrel organ. Miklós Spányi has grouped them around three larger-scaled works, of which two are arrangements of symphonies while the Concerto in F major for solo keyboard may in fact be an original composition: a version for keyboard and orchestra exists, but is possibly a later development. In the case of several of the arrangements it is uncertain who made them – some of them only survive in the hand of one of Bach’s admirers. In his liner notes to the disc, Spányi proposes that they could in fact be the original versions, however, as he sees a striking similarity to Bach’s other, indisputably genuine small keyboard pieces.