Begun in 2012 with the release of Symphony No. 1, Thomas Dausgaard’s four-album traversal of the symphonies of Johannes Brahms is here brought to a close with the composer’s final work in the genre. The E minor Symphony is sometimes described as Brahms’ ‘elegiac symphony’, and has been called ‘one of the greatest orchestral works since Beethoven’. Typical for the composer is the striking degree of motivic relationships throughout the work. This includes the finale in which Brahms demonstrates his full mastery in a towering Passacaglia consisting of 30 variations and a coda. The smallish forces of the Swedish Chamber Orchestra contribute to a transparency and clarity which bring out the finer details of Brahms’ compositional web. As on previous installments, the symphony is coupled with other works by Brahms. Included on the present release is another late work, Tragic Overture, which concludes the programme. These two ‘serious’ works frame some of the most rousing and ebullient music Brahms ever wrote, namely his Hungarian Dances. Composed for piano four-hands, the 21 dances became immensely popular, and Brahms arranged three of them for orchestra himself. Having made his own orchestrations of the remaining 18 dances, Thomas Dausgaard has recorded the full set for his Brahms cycle, with the final nine dances included here.

The Norwegian Soloists’ Choir and Grete Pedersen have made acclaimed recordings of music spanning a millennium – from chants by Hildegard of Bingen (1098 – 1179) to the most recent compositions – and in styles ranging from folk songs to Bach motets and Berio’s Coro. On their new album, the focus is on contemporary Norwegian music, with three works which all originate in words and challenge the relation between language and music. For his Lament from 2015, Lars Petter Hagen has chosen to set a short text by E. E. Cummings, written when the poet was 6 years old. The words of the poem are split up and stretched out into pulsating waves of grief, at once mysterious, beautiful and painful. Awarded the Nordic Council Music Prize in 2018, Muohta (Snow) consists of 18 sections, each setting a single word in Sámi, the language of the indigenous people in the north of Norway. The words are all related to snow, and composer Nils Henrik Asheim has found inspiration in how indigenous peoples live with nature, as opposed to seeking to control it.

Theodor Leschetizky, born 1830, was a pianist and an internationally renowned and sought-after mentor to a large number of pianists. Although Leschetitzky was also active as a composer, his music is largely ignored nowadays, and in his liner notes Tobias Bigger relates how he came across it indirectly, through an interest in Ignaz Friedman, one of Leschetizky’s most famous students. Much of Leschetitzky’s production consists of character pieces for piano, and a closer study convinced Bigger of the particular qualities of many of them. He was particularly impressed by the fact that even though they convey Leschetitzky’s own joy in masterful piano playing and place considerable demands on the performer, there are no displays of empty keyboard acrobatics. For his first disc on BIS, Bigger has selected pieces from Leschetitzky’s later production, and primarily those that are not readily available in recorded form.

REVIEW:

All of these pieces are quite fetching, some are arrestingly beautiful, and it’s Tobias Bigger’s artistry that makes them so. There’s much to admire in Bigger’s playing of these Leschetizky pieces: pellucid tone, sure-fingered technique, and an obvious relish for music that not many others have found the taste or time for. Pianists, in particular, may take special interest in this release, but appreciating Leschetizky’s music is not contingent on your ability to play the piano. Bigger will do that for you, and he does it really well.

– Fanfare

Around 1800 Vienna was, alongside Paris, one of the European centers for guitar performance. The instrument was well suited for the idiom of Viennese classicism and ideal for domestic music-making and it was promoted by figures such as the virtuoso Mauro Giuliani and the composer/publisher Anton Diabelli. But Beethoven, the towering giant of musical Vienna, seems to have been unmoved by the charms of the guitar – while instead composing for its sibling, the mandolin. Duo Halász, the husband and wife team of Franz and Débora Halász have now rectified this, by appropriating Beethoven’s four extant pieces for mandolin and piano (WoO?43 and 44) as well as adapting some other early compositions, including the Serenade in D major for flute and piano and the Variations on Mozart’s ‘Se vuol ballare’ for violin and piano. In doing so they follow the example of an eminent guitarist and contemporary of Beethoven, namely Ferdinando Carulli, whose 1825 arrangement of the Variations on Mozart’s ‘Ein Mädchen oder Weibchen’ closes the programme. Franz and Débora Halász have made a number of recordings for BIS, together and separately, to critical acclaim, including a Latin Grammy Award for their disc Alma Brasileira with chamber works by Radamés Gnattali.

The Stockholm Syndrome Ensemble is – as the name implies – based in Stockholm, and consists of five of the city's leading musicians. Project-based and often inviting guest performers, the SSE is known for its imaginative programmes built around a particular event or concept and bringing together music from various genres and eras. For its first release on BIS the ensemble has taken Brett Dean’s Voices of Angels as their point of departure, a work scored for the same forces as Schubert’s ‘Trout quintet’ and inspired by Rainer Maria Rilke’s first two Duino Elegies: ‘Angels (it’s said) are often unable to tell whether they move amongst the living or the dead.’ Dean’s work from 1996 opens a programme which ranges from Bach to Sofia Gubaidulina, and includes various scorings for between two and six performers. The angels reappear in songs by Wagner and Gubaidulina performed by Christianne Stotijn, one of the ensemble’s guests on this disc – but it is also safe to assume that they are standing around the heavenly throne which Bach approaches in the chorale prelude ‘Vor Deinen Thron tret ich hiermit’ – here transcribed for strings. The same prelude is the subject of Gubaidulina’s Meditation, while the disc closes with a work by Gubaidulina’s friend Alfred Schnittke, namely his Hymn for cello and double bass.

The extant concertos by Johann Sebastian Bach for one harpsichord and strings were all composed before 1738, which makes them some of the first, if not the first keyboard concertos – a genre destined to become one of the most popular within classical music. In all likelihood Bach wrote them for his own use (or that of his talented sons) – probably to be performed with Leipzig’s Collegium Musicum of which he had taken over as director in 1729. The fresh and exuberant character one finds in the concertos seems to reflect how much Bach enjoyed the opportunity to engage with his fellow musicians. But much of the music itself was in fact not new – despite how idiomatic they may sound, many of Bach’s harpsichord concertos are almost certainly transcriptions of earlier works written for other instruments. Some of these original works are no longer extant, but it is nevertheless possible to trace the ancestry of BWV 1052 and the outer movements of BWV 1056 to lost violin concertos, while BWV 1053 is a reworking of three cantata movements which in turn probably hailed from a lost organ concerto.

A similar case is BWV 1059, which is known to us in a nine-bar fragment in Bach’s original score. But an earlier version of the piece – a concerto for organ – has survived in the form of three movements of Cantata No. 35, Geist und Seele wird verwirret, and these have served as basis for Masato Suzuki's reconstruction of the work included on the present album. It is also Masato Suzuki who performs the solo parts, while directing his colleagues in Bach Collegium Japan.

REVIEWS:

The idea of a dynasty is present in the history of the Bach family, so it is not inappropriate to mention the same idea in connection with the father-and-son combination of Masato and Masaaki Suzuki in terms of that remarkable enterprise, Bach Collegium Japan. Masato features here as keyboard virtuoso, directing the performances from the harpsichord. His remarkable virtuosity is beautifully projected by BIS’s excellent SACD recording. Every note is clear in a wonderfully ambient acoustic.

This generously compiled combination of masterworks, with its added bonus of a new rarity, will bring great enjoyment to the listener, in terms of both the excellent sound and the sparkling performances.

-- MusicWeb International

It was in the 1960s, with the opera Die Soldaten and his Requiem für einen jungen Dichter, that Bernd Alois Zimmermann became known as one of the leading composers of the German post-war generation. These and other works from the period were examples of what the composer himself called musical pluralism – a highly individual collage-like technique involving quotations and superimposed metres, rhythms and time levels. The works on the present disc – Zimmermann’s complete production for solo piano - predate this, however. Composed over a period of only 17 years, they trace a journey which begins in a neo-classicism à la Hindemith – as radical an idiom as a young student at the Cologne University for Music could adopt during the Nazi regime. After serving in the war, Zimmermann worked as a freelance composer for the radio, theatre and television, and this has left a trace in both Extemporale and Capriccio, which weaves together seven traditional children’s songs. In Enchiridion II we begin to clearly hear the influence of Schoenbergian twelve-tone technique, which a few years later, in Konfigurationen, has blossomed into serialism, with its subtle gradations of dynamics, articulation and rhythm. Commemorating the 50th anniversary of Bernd Alois Zimmermann’s death in 1970, the acclaimed Spanish pianist Eduardo Fernández makes his first appearance on BIS, showing us little known aspects of the composer.

REVIEW:

This music is played to perfection by the superb prize-winning young Spanish pianist Euyardo Fernanez (his fellow countryman with the same name is a famous guitarist). This is a delightful release in every way, an important addition to the catalog.

– Classical CD Review

Internationally acclaimed for his music for orchestra (17 symphonies and 31 concertos to date), Kalevi Aho has also composed chamber and solo works. The present disc combines six such pieces, ranging across the composer’s career. The earliest work on the disc is the Bach-inspired Sonata for solo violin from 1973, reminding us that during his years at the Sibelius Aacademy (1968 – 71), Aho studied the violin as well as composition. Another early piece, Prelude, Toccata and Postlude, also started out as a solo work – this time for the cello – before developing into a duo. From the other end, chronologically speaking, is the ample Piano Sonata No. 2 from 2016, with a duration of some 25 minutes. This time it is Beethoven who has provided inspiration, and the composer describes the work as ‘a commentary on the Hammerklavier Sonata, in which Beethoven’s motifs are frequently “misquoted” and developed in a different direction.’ The sonata closes the programme but not before giving us an opportunity to hear three further works involving the violin – a second solo piece, In memoriam Pehr Henrik Nordgren, written in memory of Aho’s fellow composer and friend, Lamento for two violins and Halla (‘frost’) for violin and piano. Performing these works are four highly respected Finnish musicians, the violinists (and brothers) Jaakko and Pekka Kuusisto, Samuli Peltonen (cello) and Sonja Fräki, pianist and Aho specialist.

REVIEW:

The two pieces written to mourn fellow musicians are, in fact, the best. Lamento was created for the funeral of the violinist Sakari Laukola, who died young in 2001. Jaakko Kuusisto’s sincerity obvious and his tone particularly strong and beautiful high up.

– Gramophone

As Anna Paradiso writes in her liner notes to this disc ‘the history of music is full of fine composers who, for one reason or another, have been largely forgotten.’ In the case of Pietro Domenico Paradisi, it is only thanks to his Sonate di gravicembalo that he has escaped complete obscurity. Even his name is less than certain – is it Paradies or Paradisi? We know that he sometimes added the epithet ‘Napolitano’ to his signature, and it’s presumed that he was born in or around Naples c. 1706. He may have studied with Nicola Porpora, but otherwise little is known about him before his arrival in England in 1746. There he composed an opera, but was primarily recognized as a harpsichord teacher and performer. The collection of twelve sonatas was first published in London in 1754, and ten of them have been selected for this amply filled disc (almost 88 minutes of music!). The sonatas appeared at a time when the clavichord remained in use, the harpsichord enjoyed its glory days and the fortepiano was beginning to come into its own. Anna Paradiso has therefore chosen to play on all three instruments – with the clavichord and the fortepiano being historic examples from 1792 and 1802 respectively. Highly acclaimed for her recordings of solo works and chamber music by the Swedish composer Johan Helmich Roman, Anna Paradiso now lets us enjoy the playfulness and expressivity of Paradisi’s approach to keyboard playing.

Dividing his time between the United States and the United Kingdom, the composer Geoffrey Gordon writes music that has been described as ‘darkly seductive’ (New York Times), ‘richly satisfying’ (BBC Music Magazine) and ‘iridescent and fierce’ (The Chicago Tribune). The present album brings together three of his recent works, all composed between 2013 and 2018 for the soloist recording them here, the Danish cellist Toke Møldrup. In several of his works, Gordon takes his inspiration from other art forms – sculptures by Giacometti, a self portrait by Warhol, a children’s picture book by Maurice Sendak. The works gathered here are inspired by or reactions to three literary masterworks. The ‘creative blueprint’ for the opening work, the Cello Concerto, is the novel Doktor Faustus by Thomas Mann. Organized into a Prologue and Seven Episodes, the work traces the progress of Mann’s protagonist Adrian Leverkühn from innocence to madness, with the cello both embodying and (occasionally) commenting on the proceedings. For this recording, Møldrup receives the support of the Copenhagen Phil and conductor Lan Shui. In the score of Fathoms, Gordon’s sonata for cello and piano, each of the five movements is headed with a quotation from Shakespeare’s The Tempest which sets the scene for the musical impression that follows. Here Møldrup is joined by the American pianist Steven Beck. The amply-filled album closes with Ode to a Nightingale, with the words of John Keat’s immortal poem heard from the Mogens Dahl Chamber Choir, and given emphasis by Toke Møldrup’s obbligato cello.

For his new recital disc, the acclaimed Finnish guitarist Ismo Eskelinen had the aim of creating a programme that works like a story: ‘a modern guitar album that lends itself to continuous listening from beginning to end’. The pieces that he has selected are united by the fact that, with the exception of Tan Dun, Eskelinen has collaborated closely with all the composers. In the liner notes to the album he expresses his admiration for how intuitively they all understood the essence of the guitar, even though none of them is a guitarist. ‘Everyone has found a unique way to bring his own musical style to the guitar, and each of the composers is clearly recognizable.’ Opening the album are Kromos by Sebastian Fagerlund and Solo XI by Kalevi Aho, two pieces that in technical terms come close to the limits of what is possible on the guitar, but with a completely convincing musical logic. Olli Mustonen’s Sonata No. 2 contains drama but also lyricism, qualities which are emphasized in Tan Dun’s multi-movement collage Seven Desires with inspiration from the different traditions and characteristics of Spain’s flamenco guitar and China’s pipa (lute). Jukka Tiensuu is among the pioneers of modern Finnish guitar music and wrote his first work for the instrument as early as 1974. His Daydreams from 2016 is composed for guitar and electronics, but the sound world is strongly guitaristic, as the electronic part is modified from fragments played by Eskelinen on the guitar. Sometimes the use of electronics produces echo effects alongside the live guitar, and sometimes the sound image expands into that of a guitar trio. The very brief closing number is an arrangement, by Eskelinen himself, of Timo Alakotila’s calm and soothing Psalm.

Very little is known about the origin of J. S. Bach’s seven Toccatas (BWV?910–916) or of their use. They are believed to have been written before 1717 or the end of Bach’s Weimar period – but it is quite possible that at least some of them were drafted before he arrived there in 1707, at the age of 22. The Toccatas are usually performed on harpsichord or piano – but even though they are ‘manualiter’ (intended to be played by the hands only) and do not call for pedal parts, they are also occasionally heard on the organ. In terms of style they are examples of the so-called stylus phantasticus – ‘the most free and unfettered method of composition’ – and belong to the North German organ tradition of the late 17th century. Each piece consists of several distinct and contrasting sections, interweaving strict counterpoint and fugal passages with freely rhapsodic material, and as such the toccatas differ from the two-movement prelude-and-fugue format which Bach later would put his own, indelible stamp on. With this disc, Masaaki Suzuki takes on some of the earliest of Bach’s extant harpsichord compositions, after having released acclaimed recordings of a wide range of later works, from the two-part Inventions to the two books of the Well-Tempered Clavier. However, he also brings his experience in performing the music of Bach’s North German predecessors to bear, for instance Buxtehude (BIS-1809) and Nicolaus Bruhns.

REVIEW:

Since completing his Bach cantata cycle, conductor and keyboardist Masaaki Suzuki has turned to Bach's keyboard music. The results have been consistently satisfying, as one would expect from this great contemporary Bach interpreter, but even Suzuki fans might have wondered what he would do with these six rarely played toccatas. There are more purely dramatic readings of these works, mostly played on piano, but Suzuki is attuned to this music, and his performances are not in the least colorless. Bach's intense Adagios, like that of the Toccata in E minor, BWV 914, and the irregular structures of the music have snap and surprise. Suzuki's 1982 harpsichord, based on an enlarged Ruckers instrument, is an excellent choice for the music, and anyone whose Bach collection is missing these remarkable works can do well with this choice.

-- ALlMusic.com (James Manheim)

With the three piano trios Op. 1 Ludwig van Beethoven took a genre still largely associated with entertaining salon music, and raised it up to rival the string quartet. The works are innovative in form as well as in content – especially so in the case of the Trio No. 3 in C minor, Beethoven’s trademark key. It is therefore fitting that the Sitkovetsky Trio has chosen this work to open their cycle of the composer’s piano trios. That the C minor trio was pioneering is illustrated by the fact that Haydn, who at the time was Beethoven’s teacher, advised against its publication. He feared that it would not ‘be understood so quickly and easily’ – but the world as Haydn knew it was clearly changing and the trios became a commercial success as well as harbingers of a new musical aesthetic. Some twenty years later, in 1813 when E. T.A. Hoffmann reviewed the two Op. 70 trios, the new era was firmly established, and to Hoffmann the works confirmed ‘how Beethoven carries the Romantic spirit of music deep within his soul’. Between the two complete trios recorded here, the Sitkovetskys include Beethoven’s last contribution to the piano trio genre, the little Allegretto in B flat major, WoO 39. It was composed in June 1812 for Maximiliane Brentano, the ten-year-old daughter of Franz and Antonie Brentano – or, as it says on the title page of the autograph manuscript, ‘for my little friend Maxe Brentano, to encourage her piano playing’.

Luciano Berio’s Coro has been described as the work that ‘exemplifies all the qualities that made him one of the leading composers of our time’. The work’s full title is ‘Coro for voices and instruments’, and the 40 voices and 44 instrumentalists do indeed make up a single choir – instrumentalists and singers sit together, with each singer paired with a particular player, and used both as soloists and combined in mass effects. Composed in 1976, Coro is also a strikingly ‘global’ work: Berio’s use of texts (mainly translations of folk poetry) attributed to peoples – ‘Peruvian’, ‘Croatian’, ‘Sioux’ – turns the work into a chorus of cultures. The texts are laid out in 31 separate sections of varying length, but the overall effect is cumulative, not episodic. The only named author is the Chilean poet Pablo Neruda, who became a powerful posthumous voice following his death in 1973 in the wake of General Pinochet’s military coup. Along with other text fragments, his words ‘Come and see the blood in the streets’ keep returning during the course of the work, and the sense emerges of human individuals needing to be alerted to social and political developments demanding a collective response. Under its artistic director Grete Pedersen the Norwegian Soloists’ Choir has made acclaimed recordings of music ranging from Norwegian folk songs and Hildegard of Bingen to Bach, Brahms and Xenakis. Joined by the Norwegian Radio Orchestra it now takes on one of the major choral works of the past 50 years. The album closes with Berio’s smaller scale Cries of London, performed by members of the choir.

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REVIEW:

Luciano Berio is quite rightly viewed as one of the most interesting and adventurous composers of his time. More so than many of his works from the 1960s, Coro struck me as being closer in style and spirit to some of the work of György Ligeti, particularly Ligeti at his best. It is the massed choral sound — and the astonishingly brash, almost metallic sound of the instrumental ensemble — that strikes one the most and stays in the mind. Needless to say, this is exactly the sort of work for which Bis’s SACD sonics are ideal.

– Art Music Lounge (Lynn René Bayley)

At the age of 21, Leonard Bernstein wrote what he described as a ‘Hebrew song’ using a text from the Lamentations of Jeremiah. Three years later the song became the final movement of his Symphony No. 1 and in January 1944 Bernstein himself conducted the première of the work. What is being lamented is the destruction of Jerusalem in 586 BC, but according to the composer, he primarily wanted to convey the text’s ‘emotional quality’. The first movement thus aims to parallel in feeling the intensity of the prophet’s pleas while the scherzo gives a general sense of the destruction and chaos. Being a setting of the biblical text, the third movement is naturally more literary: the cry of Jeremiah, as he mourns his beloved Jerusalem. During the next few years, Bernstein’s career as a conductor took flight, while the musical On the Town made his name on Broadway. Towards the end of the 1940s he returned to the symphonic genre, however – once more with an extra-musical inspiration. W.H. Auden’s poem The Age of Anxiety is set during the recently concluded war, and falls – like the symphony – into six sections during which four characters express their anxieties, hopes and the quest for meaning and identity. Bernstein chose to portray all four characters via a single instrument, the piano, but he did not want to label the work a piano concerto. The instrument does however come to the fore at various points and in one of the final sections Bernstein supplies what is arguably the most exuberant and rhythmically dazzling display of piano writing in the symphonic literature. For this Christian Lindberg and the Arctic Philharmonic have enlisted the aid of Roland Pöntinen, while Anna Larsson is the soloist in Jeremiah.